How long does it take to read Hamlet on the Holodeck?
Janet Horowitz Murray
Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet Horowitz Murray takes about 5 hours 56 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 5 hours 56 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1997. 324 pages, about 89,100 words.
12 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 9 hours 54 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 5 hours 56 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 3 hours 43 minutes |
The page count is the median across 5 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
Can we imagine a world in which Homer's lyre and Gutenberg's press have given way to virtual reality environments like the Star Trek holodeck? Murray sees the harbingers of such a world in the fiction of Borges and Calvino, movies like Groundhog Day, and the videogames and Web sites of the 1990s. Where is our map for this new frontier, and what can we hope to find in it? What will it be like to step into our own stories for the first time, to change our vantage point at will, to construct our own worlds or change the outcome of a compelling adventure, be it a murder mystery or a torrid romance? Taking up where Marshall McLuhan left off, Murray offers profound and provocative answers to these and other questions. She discusses the unique properties and pleasures of digital environments and connects them with the traditional satisfactions of narrative. She analyzes the state of "immersion," of participating in a text to such an extent that you literally get lost in a story and obliterate the outside world from your awareness. She dissects the titillating effect of cyber-narratives in which stories never climax and never end, because everything is morphable, and there are always infinite possibilities for the next scene. And she introduces us to enchanted landscapes populated by witty automated characters and inventive, role-playing interactors, who together make up a new kind of commedia dell'arte.
Subjects: Cyberspace, Interactive multimedia, Narration (Rhetoric), Virtual reality, History and criticism, Literature, history and criticism
