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The Future of Football #1
17776: What football will look like in the future
17776, also known as What Football Will Look Like in the Future, is a serialized speculative fiction multimedia narrative by Jon Bois published online through SB Nation. Set in the distant future, the series follows three space probes that have gained sentience and watch humanity play an evolved form of American football, in which games can be played for millennia over distances of thousands of miles. The series debuted on July 5, 2017, and new chapters were published daily until the series concluded ten days later with its twenty-fifth chapter on July 15. The work incorporates text, animated GIF and still images, and videos hosted on YouTube.
First published July 15, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 398 reviews
October 15, 2018
dont worry guys i'll stop him because my uh
fuckin uh, my hands are big forks
fuckin uh, my hands are big forks
August 20, 2018
Great for people who want to throw the old pigskin around, terrific for people who fear death but also crave it.
November 15, 2018
Here's the deal: I have no interest in football and I found this fascinating. This has shades of the whole hypertext movement in contemporary fiction and the idea of using the web and media to tell stories in new, multi-faceted ways. This made me go and check out Jon Bois' other output for SBNation, for which I am infinitely thankful.
March 11, 2019
Man I sure do love football and feeling insignificant!
March 22, 2023
this odd internet story took me by surprise. my brother sent it to me, and i wasn't expecting a novella-length story of a future in which humans have stopped aging, remaining our current selves for 15,000 years, all unable to die or be physically harmed. we have reached our final form, and lonely satellites watch us and our antics.
fantastic speculative fiction, because it is the type that truly makes you speculate. what would you do, if faced with endless immortality? how would our culture shift? how would our use of language shift? what would our purpose become? what would we care about? what would we lose? would we lose the memory of feeling loss? is this a dystopia or a utopia? so many questions in this bittersweet thought experiment.
it's creative on so many levels. the premise and story itself are unique and fascinating, and the visual storytelling is wonderful. sometime the reader is held captive by the format, much like a viewer.
and the story is full of painful ironies, bittersweetness, small surprises. it's really made up of people telling each other stories. and that's something that humans will always do, right?
first it was longer than i expected, and then it was over far more quickly than i wanted. i wish there was more. it feels like a balm for loneliness.
you can read it here.
fantastic speculative fiction, because it is the type that truly makes you speculate. what would you do, if faced with endless immortality? how would our culture shift? how would our use of language shift? what would our purpose become? what would we care about? what would we lose? would we lose the memory of feeling loss? is this a dystopia or a utopia? so many questions in this bittersweet thought experiment.
it's creative on so many levels. the premise and story itself are unique and fascinating, and the visual storytelling is wonderful. sometime the reader is held captive by the format, much like a viewer.
and the story is full of painful ironies, bittersweetness, small surprises. it's really made up of people telling each other stories. and that's something that humans will always do, right?
first it was longer than i expected, and then it was over far more quickly than i wanted. i wish there was more. it feels like a balm for loneliness.
you can read it here.
September 1, 2018
Holy cow.
This is it. This is the kind of work, with the kind of thought, weight, and impact, I can only hope to someday be on the creating end of.
This is one of those really condensed, beautiful reads that enrich you with SO MUCH while being so accessible. So many ideas. So many beautiful theories and things that came together and made sense. What a wonderful world. What a beautiful story. I loved every minute I spent in the world of 17776.
Tempted to take off a star for the ending. This is a work that drops you in without pre-explanation and takes you out without a climax or epilogue. It's an exploration more than a story. You're discovering together with 9, and, once you're done for the day, that's it. It's over. And it leaves you wanting so much.
Now, I'm usually a person who's fine with this. I adore dot-dot-dot endings, ambiguity, and letting the reader explore. And I understand the constraints of serialized online fiction- you just can't cover everything. You have to stick to a schedule and keep people coming back. I'm fine with experiencing a beautiful moment without a story arc, and I understand the pain and difficulty of ending online multimedia projects through my own experience. However, this ending felt cheap, rushed, and confusing. There was a touching meaningful emotional climax of sorts as we see the inevitable conclusions of the effects of immortality on humanity, but the story is abruptly cut off with a laundry list of plot hole fillers, a frustratingly vague and cryptic set of ending lines, and nothing else. It's unexpected and it threw me off. Or maybe I'm just sad that there isn't more.
A brilliant read. The sort of thing I want to send to every person I know because when you experience something this beautiful and enriching we all just want to share.
Oh, and since I couldn't find any helpful length parameters on the internet, you should be able to read this start to finish in 2-3 hours.
This is it. This is the kind of work, with the kind of thought, weight, and impact, I can only hope to someday be on the creating end of.
This is one of those really condensed, beautiful reads that enrich you with SO MUCH while being so accessible. So many ideas. So many beautiful theories and things that came together and made sense. What a wonderful world. What a beautiful story. I loved every minute I spent in the world of 17776.
Tempted to take off a star for the ending. This is a work that drops you in without pre-explanation and takes you out without a climax or epilogue. It's an exploration more than a story. You're discovering together with 9, and, once you're done for the day, that's it. It's over. And it leaves you wanting so much.
Now, I'm usually a person who's fine with this. I adore dot-dot-dot endings, ambiguity, and letting the reader explore. And I understand the constraints of serialized online fiction- you just can't cover everything. You have to stick to a schedule and keep people coming back. I'm fine with experiencing a beautiful moment without a story arc, and I understand the pain and difficulty of ending online multimedia projects through my own experience. However, this ending felt cheap, rushed, and confusing. There was a touching meaningful emotional climax of sorts as we see the inevitable conclusions of the effects of immortality on humanity, but the story is abruptly cut off with a laundry list of plot hole fillers, a frustratingly vague and cryptic set of ending lines, and nothing else. It's unexpected and it threw me off. Or maybe I'm just sad that there isn't more.
A brilliant read. The sort of thing I want to send to every person I know because when you experience something this beautiful and enriching we all just want to share.
Oh, and since I couldn't find any helpful length parameters on the internet, you should be able to read this start to finish in 2-3 hours.
February 14, 2019
I had no idea what I was getting into when I clicked the online sports article that led me to this, but what an adventure!
December 13, 2018
The space probes are all still out here. We're still out here, ready to tell Ground Control if we see something. That is a fantasy, because we won't. And if we do, it will be on a scale of time so impossibly vast that it may as well be never.
People had a choice. They could continue wandering through the endless darkness, an absence of everything they loved, an endless void of disappointment and loneliness...
...or they could look down, and embrace what they always had and loved.
I think about the Voyagers a lot. Decades after they taught us so much about our little neighborhood in space, they're all alone out there, hurtling through interstellar space, two of only five objects we've sent that actually left the solar system. I think about how, barring damage from dust and radiation, they'll be out there, sailing through the stars, long after I'm gone. All alone. Honestly, I think at least a little about all these craft, these little communications, packets of ourselves that we've sent up into the stars to hear and see the vastness and the nothing. It's just part of who I am.
So it's possible that I got more out of this little story because of that. (This is not about the Voyagers, but about the Pioneers. And football. Well, no, not really football. But football. And immortality. And purpose. And games.) But even if I did, I think this is worth the couple hours or so of your time that it will take to click on the link and experience this bit of ephemera. It's not a masterpiece (mainly because it ends before it can really do a deep dive into its chosen subjects of permanence and impermanence and community and purpose, but also because the fantastic premise it operates on requires A LOT of suspension of disbelief and isn't really fleshed out quite enough), but it is a lovely meditation on life and living. Nothing else you were going to spend your time clicking on will scratch quite the same itch. (It's one of the better things I've experienced in 2018, but you know that's a really low bar right now, so take it for what it's worth.)
Click and enjoy.
Reviewed December 13, 2018
Crossposted to Dreamwidth.
Read
May 16, 2021Oh hey look, this creation is actually on here. Well, LET ME SHARE MY FEELINGS AGAIN, then (which is to say, this will mainly, but not entirely, duplicate my recent blog post).
I'm not giving it a star rating. On the one hand, I really didn't like huge aspects of it. On the other hand, it was an interesting and ambitious storytelling project, and it covered interesting questions, and I appreciated that. You can't really sum that up in a star rating.
Maybe some of you read this closer to the time it came out, which was 2017. I only discovered it when my daughter brought it to my attention. It's a hypertext meditation on an end state for human beings that involves them being eternally at play, and what, the story asks rhetorically, is a better game to play than American football?
Presentation-wise, the story is super cool--I enjoyed that aspect of it. But the scenario it sketches out--that people stopped aging and dying and reproducing abruptly in 2026, solved all their problems and have settled on entertaining themselves (in America, at least) with giant state-spanning games of wild-ass-rules football--just puts me in a state of profound existential anxiety. It's literally being trapped for eternity in a do-not-want situation.
I get that okay, this merely means that I'm not liking the example of play that the story is celebrating. The creator picked something particular that *he* liked--but you could do essentially the same story and have it be that everyone spends their days in fantastical treasure hunts or choreographing fantastical dances or whatever. (You'd miss out on the admittedly fun sports commentary if you chose those things, though.)
But I think that even if the story was told using a different form of play, I'd still want to run and hide in a closet far, far away.
There's an insistent, tyrannical complacency in the story. "Oh you think you'd like to spend eternity exploring, questing, learning, but no: you'd finish with all that and settle back for just playing. You think there might be new types of buildings, new art, new ANYTHING, but nope, after 15,000 years, it turns out that people like the look and feel of the year they attained immortality better than anything else." DEPRESSING.
I think also I'm bothered by an eternity in which no new people ever are born, where humanity is forevermore denied the experience of bringing up the next generation. I understand that if you're going to posit a world in which people live forever, you'd have severe logistical and resource problems if you don't also posit that they stop having kids, but that's why I don't like stories about material immortality. So long as we're dealing with the material world, I'm fine with death, thank you very much. Give me that sweet, sweet mortality and let me see the next generation go from tiny little buds to angular adolescents to ever deepening adults.
The story does have some touching moments in it. There's a point where a woman has been riding a tornado and she gets set down in Bee, Nebraska, and discovers the States Ballroom . She says,
That's beautiful ... if just a teeny-tiny bit self-congratulatory about America. Yes, it's true here, but it really is true everywhere, and okay, the guy is focused on here, not another place, but when you put it his way, it's like you're suggesting that maybe it's not true elsewhere. ... But that's too negative a note to end on with this great quote, whose overall idea I love. Yes stories! Yes, everywhere!
I'm not giving it a star rating. On the one hand, I really didn't like huge aspects of it. On the other hand, it was an interesting and ambitious storytelling project, and it covered interesting questions, and I appreciated that. You can't really sum that up in a star rating.
Maybe some of you read this closer to the time it came out, which was 2017. I only discovered it when my daughter brought it to my attention. It's a hypertext meditation on an end state for human beings that involves them being eternally at play, and what, the story asks rhetorically, is a better game to play than American football?
Presentation-wise, the story is super cool--I enjoyed that aspect of it. But the scenario it sketches out--that people stopped aging and dying and reproducing abruptly in 2026, solved all their problems and have settled on entertaining themselves (in America, at least) with giant state-spanning games of wild-ass-rules football--just puts me in a state of profound existential anxiety. It's literally being trapped for eternity in a do-not-want situation.
I get that okay, this merely means that I'm not liking the example of play that the story is celebrating. The creator picked something particular that *he* liked--but you could do essentially the same story and have it be that everyone spends their days in fantastical treasure hunts or choreographing fantastical dances or whatever. (You'd miss out on the admittedly fun sports commentary if you chose those things, though.)
But I think that even if the story was told using a different form of play, I'd still want to run and hide in a closet far, far away.
There's an insistent, tyrannical complacency in the story. "Oh you think you'd like to spend eternity exploring, questing, learning, but no: you'd finish with all that and settle back for just playing. You think there might be new types of buildings, new art, new ANYTHING, but nope, after 15,000 years, it turns out that people like the look and feel of the year they attained immortality better than anything else." DEPRESSING.
I think also I'm bothered by an eternity in which no new people ever are born, where humanity is forevermore denied the experience of bringing up the next generation. I understand that if you're going to posit a world in which people live forever, you'd have severe logistical and resource problems if you don't also posit that they stop having kids, but that's why I don't like stories about material immortality. So long as we're dealing with the material world, I'm fine with death, thank you very much. Give me that sweet, sweet mortality and let me see the next generation go from tiny little buds to angular adolescents to ever deepening adults.
The story does have some touching moments in it. There's a point where a woman has been riding a tornado and she gets set down in Bee, Nebraska, and discovers the States Ballroom . She says,
I had the funniest thought up in that twister. I was thinking, "I have no idea where this thing is gonna throw me, but I know I'm gonna land on top of a story."
I wonder if there's a single place in the whole world that's never had a story. I bet not. I just about guarantee you there's no places like that in America. Every little square of it, every place you stomp your foot, that's where something happened. Something wild, maybe something nobody knows about, but something. You can fall out of the sky and right into some forgotten storybook.
That's beautiful ... if just a teeny-tiny bit self-congratulatory about America. Yes, it's true here, but it really is true everywhere, and okay, the guy is focused on here, not another place, but when you put it his way, it's like you're suggesting that maybe it's not true elsewhere. ... But that's too negative a note to end on with this great quote, whose overall idea I love. Yes stories! Yes, everywhere!
January 21, 2021
Strange and wonderful and fun to read -- if “read” is the right word.
Three sentient space probes watch humanity, now immortal, pass the time by playing games that somewhat resemble football. In the process, the story considers the meaning of immortality, the effect of rules, and the creation of purpose in life, among other things -- explored through multimedia that sometimes feels like found artifacts.
For the most part, this piece consists of world-building. And what a world! Football games that last millennia. Self-expression via buildings. The importance of minute exploration and observation. It’s told through revealing vignettes and occasional astonishing narratives. The tale about the lightbulb broke my heart. (No spoilers.) I understand sentient machines better now because of that story; they have their heros.
Juice, the rude and excitable space probe, showed an obvious but overlooked aspect of artificial intelligence: some of it might be much too human-like. I loved Juice anyway.
In many ways, 17776 was a daring experiment. It worked. You don’t need to like football to like it.
I think I’ll read it again.
Three sentient space probes watch humanity, now immortal, pass the time by playing games that somewhat resemble football. In the process, the story considers the meaning of immortality, the effect of rules, and the creation of purpose in life, among other things -- explored through multimedia that sometimes feels like found artifacts.
For the most part, this piece consists of world-building. And what a world! Football games that last millennia. Self-expression via buildings. The importance of minute exploration and observation. It’s told through revealing vignettes and occasional astonishing narratives. The tale about the lightbulb broke my heart. (No spoilers.) I understand sentient machines better now because of that story; they have their heros.
Juice, the rude and excitable space probe, showed an obvious but overlooked aspect of artificial intelligence: some of it might be much too human-like. I loved Juice anyway.
In many ways, 17776 was a daring experiment. It worked. You don’t need to like football to like it.
I think I’ll read it again.
November 7, 2020
Available online only.
This is a weird and wonderful thing. I don't care for football even a tiny bit, but don't let the title mislead you. As a work of storytelling it is brilliant. In 2018, the story won a National Magazine Award for Digital Innovation and was longlisted for both the Hugo Awards for Best Novella and Best Graphic Story. But don't go looking it up: I think it's probably much more intriguing if you come at it cold.
Enjoy.
This is a weird and wonderful thing. I don't care for football even a tiny bit, but don't let the title mislead you. As a work of storytelling it is brilliant. In 2018, the story won a National Magazine Award for Digital Innovation and was longlisted for both the Hugo Awards for Best Novella and Best Graphic Story. But don't go looking it up: I think it's probably much more intriguing if you come at it cold.
Enjoy.
October 20, 2023
“man they drowned the east coast and killed google reader, fuck em”
September 21, 2020
17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future is easily one of the best pieces of fiction I have ever read; I rarely ever sit down and start and finish anything longer than the average short story in one sitting, the internet and social media having long-since fried the patience receptors I had as a child. But I did for this. And it became one of the most moving reading experiences I’ve had in recent memory. It even reduced me to tears a few times. I don’t often cry at books, I can’t tell you why — I cry at music and especially films fairly often, I sometimes randomly cry while looking at flowers in my backyard; what I am saying is it is incredibly easy to have tears involuntarily drip down my face. But for fiction of the written word variety? My favorite of all forms of art? Oh, that rarely happens — it takes something truly special for that to happen. At least that is what I tell myself. The last time I cried at a book was when I finished David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King, a novel which I would not be surprised to hear that Jon Bois has read. The kind of metaphysical, mathematical, quasi-religious, what-have-you beauty Wallace found in tennis in Infinite Jest, Bois finds in football. And the same treatises on boredom and the need for humanity to care and connect to each other in ways that defy self-conscious fatigue that are present in The Pale King are equally present throughout the entirety of 17776. It is utterly beautiful. There is hope for our species, humanity, at a base level, can be and is a force of good. Even if it just boils down to playing country-wide football matches or talking to a man in a cave about God. Anything that brings us together helps reveal the light.
Bois' writing rings true like a gong, it clicks on a primordial level. It is emotional, beautiful, and as profound as it is comedic. His goal on the surface was to "give the reader a good time" and he succeeds by leaps and bounds. The imagination at play here is staggering and awe-inspiring. I'll be thinking about lines in this far more and for far longer than lines in books by reputable authors who do much less in "professionally" published pieces.
Hypertext fiction and its offspring, the “alt-lit” movement, has never been something I have gotten too invested in. A lot of their appeal lies in postmodern tricks, and often the ethos behind them is one of titty-pinching. It is not designed to move, it is designed to irritate. Only garnering praise through the novelty of being based on the internet and progressed not by page but by the click of your index finger. Bois completely rejects this postmodern navel-gazing and instead fully creates his fiction as a beckon of sincere communication, something which I believe the purpose of the internet (and art in general) should be.
Through the lens of three space probes who at the time the story takes place have been hurtling through space for at least 15,808 years, Bois shows us what it means to be human. Something which art has mostly forgotten how to do for decades as it continues to writhe around in deconstruction and misery. This is fulfilling literature at its finest. 17776 is a work that will hopefully inspire anyone who ever decides to learn HTML or coding in general, something that usually comes off as clinical and lifeless, to look for possibilities to breathe life and creativity into these 1s and 0s and make rich, beautiful, and life-affirming creations from them.
Bois' writing rings true like a gong, it clicks on a primordial level. It is emotional, beautiful, and as profound as it is comedic. His goal on the surface was to "give the reader a good time" and he succeeds by leaps and bounds. The imagination at play here is staggering and awe-inspiring. I'll be thinking about lines in this far more and for far longer than lines in books by reputable authors who do much less in "professionally" published pieces.
Hypertext fiction and its offspring, the “alt-lit” movement, has never been something I have gotten too invested in. A lot of their appeal lies in postmodern tricks, and often the ethos behind them is one of titty-pinching. It is not designed to move, it is designed to irritate. Only garnering praise through the novelty of being based on the internet and progressed not by page but by the click of your index finger. Bois completely rejects this postmodern navel-gazing and instead fully creates his fiction as a beckon of sincere communication, something which I believe the purpose of the internet (and art in general) should be.
Through the lens of three space probes who at the time the story takes place have been hurtling through space for at least 15,808 years, Bois shows us what it means to be human. Something which art has mostly forgotten how to do for decades as it continues to writhe around in deconstruction and misery. This is fulfilling literature at its finest. 17776 is a work that will hopefully inspire anyone who ever decides to learn HTML or coding in general, something that usually comes off as clinical and lifeless, to look for possibilities to breathe life and creativity into these 1s and 0s and make rich, beautiful, and life-affirming creations from them.
January 1, 2020
2019 POPSUGAR Reading Challenge
39. A book revolving around a puzzle or game
I clicked on the link for this with no more context than the title and someone saying something to the effect of "this isn't what you think, you really need to read it."
And then I read it in one sitting after work that day and did nothing else.
39. A book revolving around a puzzle or game
I clicked on the link for this with no more context than the title and someone saying something to the effect of "this isn't what you think, you really need to read it."
And then I read it in one sitting after work that day and did nothing else.
June 6, 2018
Man, this was great. I heard about this... story (I can't call it a book, because it's not) in a Brandon Sanderson interview. He recommended it to some fan. He barely spoke on what it's about, and for the same reasons that I'm sure he held back on doing so, I'll also not give anything away. It's too fun to go in blind. 17776 is a.. I don't know; I guess I'll call it a 'mixed media' story about, not football, but people. I mean, I guess it is about football. But not really. Not in a way that matters. It's about humanity. 17776 is unlike anything I've ever read (I almost created its own shelf on Goodreads called 'other'), and I applaud Jon Bois. It is filled with some truly profound and poignant moments, and I urge you to read it.
If you'd like to take my (and more importantly Mr. Sanderson's) advice and check it out, follow this link and enjoy: https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-foot...
I wonder if there's a single place in the whole world that's never had a story. I bet not. I just about guarantee you there's no places like that in America. Every little square of it, every place you stomp your foot, that's where something happened. Something wild, maybe something nobody knows about, but something. You can fall out of the sky and right into some forgotten storybook.
You run and run and run and you keep turning pages and none of them are empty. They're all full of stories. There's nowhere left to write.
I think I'm just a bookmark.
If you'd like to take my (and more importantly Mr. Sanderson's) advice and check it out, follow this link and enjoy: https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-foot...
I wonder if there's a single place in the whole world that's never had a story. I bet not. I just about guarantee you there's no places like that in America. Every little square of it, every place you stomp your foot, that's where something happened. Something wild, maybe something nobody knows about, but something. You can fall out of the sky and right into some forgotten storybook.
You run and run and run and you keep turning pages and none of them are empty. They're all full of stories. There's nowhere left to write.
I think I'm just a bookmark.
November 9, 2020
Interesting and fascinating because of the multimedia storytelling.
But clearly written by someone with a lot of privilege who thinks the only problems in the world are disease, war and death.
What about inequality, climate change, racism, homophobia, bigotry etc etc etc.
This story makes me angry.
Ok, I like the space probes, I like that they are the protagonists.
But clearly written by someone with a lot of privilege who thinks the only problems in the world are disease, war and death.
What about inequality, climate change, racism, homophobia, bigotry etc etc etc.
This story makes me angry.
Ok, I like the space probes, I like that they are the protagonists.
May 17, 2023
Edit: I still love this dearly
Omg why didn't I know about this before? Jon Bois, normally known for making sports videos that are clusters of charts and stories not many other people are bothering about, here takes on the future. Specifically, what do people do with their time in the future? And why the hell shouldn't they play crazy football variants? This sounds like it would just be goofy and futuristic at first, but Jon Bois makes it thoughtful, hilarious and truly moving.
Omg why didn't I know about this before? Jon Bois, normally known for making sports videos that are clusters of charts and stories not many other people are bothering about, here takes on the future. Specifically, what do people do with their time in the future? And why the hell shouldn't they play crazy football variants? This sounds like it would just be goofy and futuristic at first, but Jon Bois makes it thoughtful, hilarious and truly moving.
February 8, 2021
“it's like they're not used to saying goodbye to anything.”
“No, none of us are. Best problem to have, I suppose.”
I don’t like football or know much about it at all. It didn’t prevent this story from making me think, feel, and really consider my mortality. It didn’t hold it back at all.
Also, it was a riot, and JUICE is a memelord. This one is short and it’s poignant and I love it
“No, none of us are. Best problem to have, I suppose.”
I don’t like football or know much about it at all. It didn’t prevent this story from making me think, feel, and really consider my mortality. It didn’t hold it back at all.
Also, it was a riot, and JUICE is a memelord. This one is short and it’s poignant and I love it
April 24, 2022
Why am I crying?
Also shout-out to my buddy Juice, I would kill for you!
Also shout-out to my buddy Juice, I would kill for you!
December 21, 2023
some of my favorite writing of all time about humanity and mortality and consciousness is in this and the sequel. it's so interesting. and it's about football which i don't know anything about but it doesn't keep me from loving this so much
May 14, 2021
This is an incredible use of multimedia formats to accomplish different narrative techniques! It is instantly gripping and enchanting. Bois' exploration of leisure, the sense of play, grief, and goal-orientation is powerful. It feels two steps away from a critical analysis on capitalism, but he never makes that jump. Similarly, one character mentions connection to and appreciation for the land, which felt like it was building to commentary on colonialism and indigenous issues which never materialized. This is a disappointment, especially in the context of the racist history of American football! And within this universe, it certainly would've been considered once within those 15,000+ years. That also got me thinking about human exceptionalism; what happened to the animals on Earth? Did they also stop aging or is this somehow simply a human phenomenon? Bois brings up interesting results of climate change but too cleanly assures us all climate refugees were safely relocated and their cultures preserved. Suspension of disbelief needed here.
Also I rolled my eyes at "we figured out how to keep the sun going." This just felt like lazy writing and again, very colonial-capitalist human exceptionalism!!
I wish Nine was non-binary! There is the briefest, most dismissive mention of the gender binary but it felt performative to include that while still gendering literal non-human machinery!!
Regardless, this is an exciting and enchanting read. Bois' technique is effective, more so at the beginning than the end where things are quickly, neatly, and lazily tied up.
Also I rolled my eyes at "we figured out how to keep the sun going." This just felt like lazy writing and again, very colonial-capitalist human exceptionalism!!
I wish Nine was non-binary! There is the briefest, most dismissive mention of the gender binary but it felt performative to include that while still gendering literal non-human machinery!!
Regardless, this is an exciting and enchanting read. Bois' technique is effective, more so at the beginning than the end where things are quickly, neatly, and lazily tied up.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
March 2, 2019
this is actually the first thing i've read in years where when i got the end i was like 'WHAT THE FUCK. I WANT MORE. WHY IS IT ENDING' like usually im so tired im like NOPE but holy shit give. me fuckin more its so good
good stuff
- really cool interesting use of multimedia (photos, youtube videos, gifs, etc)
- text messages/logs that read smoothly with clear unique interesting voices and arent awkwardly inserted
- JUICE. juice is so fuckign relatable. how did this author make fucking SPACE PROBES so damn relatable and funny and compelling to listen to
- am always here for satire shading american football (ik thats an oversimplification)
- oh mannn the worldbuilding and concepts and all the ideas- just WOW
also i am obsessed with the idea of this but football replaced by quizbowl because holy shit
good stuff
- really cool interesting use of multimedia (photos, youtube videos, gifs, etc)
- text messages/logs that read smoothly with clear unique interesting voices and arent awkwardly inserted
- JUICE. juice is so fuckign relatable. how did this author make fucking SPACE PROBES so damn relatable and funny and compelling to listen to
- am always here for satire shading american football (ik thats an oversimplification)
- oh mannn the worldbuilding and concepts and all the ideas- just WOW
also i am obsessed with the idea of this but football replaced by quizbowl because holy shit
February 19, 2023
Feb 19, 2023: Oh man, I love these funky little space probes.
Reread this so I can finally get to the sequel, 20020: An American football story.
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Jan 24, 2019: Ok listen. I wrote and then removed like 10 mean things about American football in this review.
Most of 17776 was really very good, and some parts were profound. Plus I developed feelings for space probes so what can I say. I wasn't excited about all of it, but it is absolutely a fascinating piece of media. And I didn't hate American football in this.
Reread this so I can finally get to the sequel, 20020: An American football story.
--
Jan 24, 2019: Ok listen. I wrote and then removed like 10 mean things about American football in this review.
Most of 17776 was really very good, and some parts were profound. Plus I developed feelings for space probes so what can I say. I wasn't excited about all of it, but it is absolutely a fascinating piece of media. And I didn't hate American football in this.
July 4, 2021
Maybe I am in Heaven, and Heaven is scary.
This webcomic-ish thing about space probes and their football obsession is the best sci-fi I have read in a very long time. Weird, thoughtful, haunting, and tense, it provides a truly unique reading experience. It's funny and mostly unpretentious characters deliver surprising depth in a very short amount of time and under (seemingly) extremely silly circumstances. I cannot possible recommend it enough.
June 9, 2021
inexplicable. football, satellites, and immortality. made me cry multiple times. existentialist. ??? read/watch it!
October 18, 2019
In July of 2017, Jon Bois- the associate editor of the sports blogging website SB Nation- published a new article, titled “What football will look like in the future”. The page opened to an initially inconspicuous article, with a generic header and layout. However –
– something begins to change. The text suddenly zooms in, with the repeating words “Something is terribly wrong”, and then the screen goes completely black, with an image reading, “Good morning. The time is: 2:17 A.M. The date is: 3-27-43.” And then it redirects to the first chapter of 17776.
17776, simply put, is exactly what the title says: a look at (American) football, 15,757 years into the future. More broadly? It’s about immortality, the legacy and culture of one sport, the relationships we make, and what the world looks like when everyone stops dying and being born, shown primarily by three space probes. It sounds like a lot- and honestly? it is- but it’s also, to this day, one of the most interesting pieces of literature I have ever read, both in story and format. It’s a study of humanity and relationships and interests, and it does this while blending together text, gifs from Google Earth, old newspaper clips, and videos.
Stories about what happens after- after the apocalypse, after a massive change to society, after something has been altered at the core of the way we operate- are quickly becoming one of my favorite genres. My summer reading book last year for AP Language was Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, a beautiful novel about relationships and society after civilization collapses. I devoured the book, and still find it to be one of my favorites. In Station Eleven, society collapses after a virus takes out over half of the population. Some twenty years later, Kirsten, a young woman born a few years before the virus, travels around North America with the Traveling Symphony, an orchestra-and-theatre-troupe that performs Shakespeare for whoever’s left. This is the part that’s so important to me; the fact that Emily St. John Mandel took an apocalyptic scenario and, in deciding to write about what happens next, wrote about humans surviving and living. It’s a beautiful and comforting thing to imagine, I think, that, years after the apocalypse, we’ll still find ways to make art.
While Station Eleven deals with the majority of the world dying, 17776 takes the opposite approach: people stop dying (and being born). How do people learn to keep living when the one thing they had connecting them was death? For Jon Bois, the answer is football. It’s an incredibly basic (and silly) thing to base a story that has to deal with an eternal future around, but it’s also strangely comforting, to think about humanity saying that, with all this time and opportunity to do so much harm and damage, they will instead play a game, and keep playing it and changing it as something to hold on to and still be able to enjoy. It’s what Shakespeare is to the remaining citizens of Station Eleven, but with rules that make border-long playing fields and never-ending games.
Kristen O’Neal discusses the beauty of this story a lot more eloquently than I ever could in this article, but one of my favorite points that she makes is how love and appreciation for everything on the planet is the framework of the story. Humanity has been given the ability to create new technology in abundance until the end of time, and yet they choose to keep what they have. They choose to try to interact with each other as much as possible, and appreciate what others have to say, and to keep life- including all of the seemingly-meaningless, occasionally frustrating parts- beautiful. Speed limits and drive-thrus still exist, and when a lightbulb burning for thousands of years (the real Centennial Light Bulb is still burning today!) is snuffed out, the world holds a funeral. The people 17776 have to hold these bits of humanity close for their own sanity- boredom, as Ian Crouch writes, is their only enemy- but they also hold these bits close out of love and appreciation. At the end of the story, just before Nine goes offline to recharge and rest, JUICE begins a long, winding speech that explains everything that happened on Earth as a sort of reassurance. The best part of that speech to me, as the reader, is this, when JUICE says, “…these people are the people of the 20th and 21st centuries, and they like the world they built, and they keep these seemingly redundant roles intact because they are who they are.”
Rather than growing tired of a perfect world, humanity chooses to wholeheartedly love an imperfect one and create what they can with the space they are given. I think that’s rather beautiful.
It’s clear that the sport of football needs to change. And the $64,000 question, my friends, is simple: “how?” Something is terribly wrong. The writing’s on the wall: youth participation in the sport is down, thanks in large part to their parents’ concern for their health.
In recent years, the NFL has something is terribly wrong. In response to numerous clinical studies regarding something is terribly wrong, the league has taken action — and something is terribly wrong. Oh no. Something is terribly wrong.
Do you hear that? Do not be afraid, but something is terribly wrong. (via SB Nation)
– something begins to change. The text suddenly zooms in, with the repeating words “Something is terribly wrong”, and then the screen goes completely black, with an image reading, “Good morning. The time is: 2:17 A.M. The date is: 3-27-43.” And then it redirects to the first chapter of 17776.
17776, simply put, is exactly what the title says: a look at (American) football, 15,757 years into the future. More broadly? It’s about immortality, the legacy and culture of one sport, the relationships we make, and what the world looks like when everyone stops dying and being born, shown primarily by three space probes. It sounds like a lot- and honestly? it is- but it’s also, to this day, one of the most interesting pieces of literature I have ever read, both in story and format. It’s a study of humanity and relationships and interests, and it does this while blending together text, gifs from Google Earth, old newspaper clips, and videos.
Stories about what happens after- after the apocalypse, after a massive change to society, after something has been altered at the core of the way we operate- are quickly becoming one of my favorite genres. My summer reading book last year for AP Language was Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, a beautiful novel about relationships and society after civilization collapses. I devoured the book, and still find it to be one of my favorites. In Station Eleven, society collapses after a virus takes out over half of the population. Some twenty years later, Kirsten, a young woman born a few years before the virus, travels around North America with the Traveling Symphony, an orchestra-and-theatre-troupe that performs Shakespeare for whoever’s left. This is the part that’s so important to me; the fact that Emily St. John Mandel took an apocalyptic scenario and, in deciding to write about what happens next, wrote about humans surviving and living. It’s a beautiful and comforting thing to imagine, I think, that, years after the apocalypse, we’ll still find ways to make art.
While Station Eleven deals with the majority of the world dying, 17776 takes the opposite approach: people stop dying (and being born). How do people learn to keep living when the one thing they had connecting them was death? For Jon Bois, the answer is football. It’s an incredibly basic (and silly) thing to base a story that has to deal with an eternal future around, but it’s also strangely comforting, to think about humanity saying that, with all this time and opportunity to do so much harm and damage, they will instead play a game, and keep playing it and changing it as something to hold on to and still be able to enjoy. It’s what Shakespeare is to the remaining citizens of Station Eleven, but with rules that make border-long playing fields and never-ending games.
Kristen O’Neal discusses the beauty of this story a lot more eloquently than I ever could in this article, but one of my favorite points that she makes is how love and appreciation for everything on the planet is the framework of the story. Humanity has been given the ability to create new technology in abundance until the end of time, and yet they choose to keep what they have. They choose to try to interact with each other as much as possible, and appreciate what others have to say, and to keep life- including all of the seemingly-meaningless, occasionally frustrating parts- beautiful. Speed limits and drive-thrus still exist, and when a lightbulb burning for thousands of years (the real Centennial Light Bulb is still burning today!) is snuffed out, the world holds a funeral. The people 17776 have to hold these bits of humanity close for their own sanity- boredom, as Ian Crouch writes, is their only enemy- but they also hold these bits close out of love and appreciation. At the end of the story, just before Nine goes offline to recharge and rest, JUICE begins a long, winding speech that explains everything that happened on Earth as a sort of reassurance. The best part of that speech to me, as the reader, is this, when JUICE says, “…these people are the people of the 20th and 21st centuries, and they like the world they built, and they keep these seemingly redundant roles intact because they are who they are.”
Rather than growing tired of a perfect world, humanity chooses to wholeheartedly love an imperfect one and create what they can with the space they are given. I think that’s rather beautiful.
March 15, 2021
This is a charming, clever story of the future (year 17776) when life's major problems (war, poverty, disease) have been obliterated and humans don't die. What new challenges and goals do they create? Not the same old ones...
Told mostly by three space probes discussing life on earth. Humorous and philosophical.
P.S. It's not in book format...you have to read on a computer, since it's interactive.
Told mostly by three space probes discussing life on earth. Humorous and philosophical.
P.S. It's not in book format...you have to read on a computer, since it's interactive.
October 5, 2020
I cannot express in words how deeply this affected me. Yes. It’s about football. But also... it is not. If I could give it more than five stars, I would. Something like this is a gem.
August 16, 2021
Funny, incredibly inventive, and surprisingly poignant.
January 20, 2024
A CLASSIC!!! Existentialism... and sports! When you think about multimedia this is what should come to mind. A very unique story, one of my favourite sci-fi pieces ❤️
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