I enjoyed Latours strange genre-busting technological detective story. Many of the dialogues with government officials are some of the funniest things I have read. If only most philosophy books could be written in such an interesting way.
I hated this book for all the same reasons that the previous reviewer loved it. Latours voice changes add some depth to the story, but are done in a manner so convoluted that much of the substance is lost. Using Aramis itself as the voice of martyred technology just becomes increasingly absurd throughout the book. There are much better books than this out there about mans relationship with technology, do yourself a favor and find one of them.
This is a very disturbing but at the same time very thought-provoking book on the adoption of a hypermodern new means of public transportation. Aramis was a small car version of the driverless subway which is now commonly known because of applications in Lille (France) and Orlando (USA) Latour disguises as a student of engineering sciences and writes a kind of whodunnit on the final question: who killed Aramis"? Because he lends his voice to the engineer, to his professor of Sociology, to the Aramis system itself and to himself as an author, the book shows different views on the same reality. Highly documented with texts that would be dynamite if they had been published during the development of the Aramis train system itself. Latour shows why Conservative governments never would adopt really revolutionary developments in public transportation. At times a difficult book, but hilarious too, and a reader for every technology-minded post-structuralist and post-marxist thinker... Stefaan Van Ryssen
