Goodreads review: "17776: What football will look like in the future"

[mount_oregano]

17776: What football will look like in the future by Jon Bois

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


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.




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Comments

[catmancer]

I love 17776! Glad to hear you had a positive experience with it. And I agree wholeheartedly with your review, haha. Especially the last part - it's not even that I don't like football, I know so little that I can't have an opinion (soccer and rugby are probably the biggest sports here, they're similar enough but American football isn't really in the cultural sphere at all). I'm sure knowing more about the game would have let me appreciate how it's evolved and I'm sure I missed some of the finer details in the story, but even with the most base level of knowledge I found the story moving and entertaining in equal measure :)

[mount_oregano]

I'm a football fan (Go Packers! They play the Buccaneers tomorrow, and the winner goes to the SUPERBOWL!) and I think that if you know the basics of soccer (Go Real Madrid!) or especially rugby, you probably understood the story just fine. The only running joke (no pun intended) that you might have missed is that American Football has a lot of rules. The rulebook is more than 200 pages, and even seasoned announcers sometimes can't explain what infraction was just called by the referee on the field. So for there to be all sorts of arcane rules in the future is very funny.