How long does it take to read Ilium?
Ilium by Dan Simmons takes about 10 hours 51 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 10 hours 51 minutes
A week or two of reading
First published 2003. 592 pages, about 162,800 words.
22 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 18 hours 5 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 10 hours 51 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 6 hours 47 minutes |
The page count is the median across 22 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
From the author of the Hyperion Cantos -- one of the most acclaimed popular series in contemporary science fiction -- comes a powerful epic of high-tech gods, human heroes, total war, and the extraordinary transcendence of ordinary beings. The first book in a two-part epic. "I am in awe of Dan Simmons." -- Stephen King. From the towering heights of Olympos Mons on Mars, the mighty Zeus and his immortal family of gods, goddesses, and demigods look down upon a momentous battle, observing -- and often influencing -- the legendary exploits of Paris, Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, and the clashing armies of Greece and Troy. Thomas Hockenberry, former twenty-first-century professor and Iliad scholar, watches as well. It is Hockenberry's duty to observe and report on the Trojan War's progress to the so-called deities who saw fit to return him from the dead. But the muse he serves has a new assignment for the wary scholic, one dictated by Aphrodite herself. With the help of fortieth-century technology, Hockenberry is to infiltrate Olympos, spy on its divine inhabitants ... and ultimately destroy Aphrodite's sister and rival, the goddess Pallas Athena. On an Earth profoundly changed since the departure of the Post-Humans centuries earlier, the great events on the bloody plains of Ilium serve as mere entertainment. Its scenes of unrivaled heroics and unequaled carnage add excitement to human lives devoid of courage, strife, labor, and purpose. But this eloi-like existence is not enough for Harman, a man in the last year of his last Twenty. That rarest of post-postmodern men -- an "adventurer" -- he intends to explore far beyond the boundaries of his world before his allotted time expires, in search of a lost past, a devastating truth, and an escape from his own inevitable "final fax." Meanwhile, from the radiation-swept reaches of Jovian space, four sentient machines race to investigate -- and, perhaps, terminate -- the potentially catastrophic emissions of unexplained…
Subjects: Gods, Greek, Greek Mythology, Greek Gods, Fiction, Science Fiction, Imaginary wars and battles
