Modern Monday - Reviews of 17776 and 20020

 

The worlds of jocks and nerds don't often cross-over. But with a strange new set of story novellas, 17776 and its sequel, 20020, written by Jon Bois, that has begun to change somewhat.

17776 tells the story of what the future of football might be like on a planet Earth where humans no longer die, nor have any more children. Huge swaths of North America are underwater due to the effects of global warming. Nanobots repair any serious injuries within minutes. Interest rates eventually end all poverty. With eternity to spare, humans turn to extreme sports to occupy themselves, and football becomes more and more elaborate. Playing fields stretch across entire states. For example, the entire state of Nebraska is the playing field for one particular game, with Wyoming and Iowa the end zones. Some games are even cross-continent.

Meanwhile, three satellites, launched long ago by humans, have spent so much time in deep space amassing data that they have grown to consciousness. Pioneer 9, Pioneer 10, and Juice (the JUpiter ICey moons Explorer) awaken to find humans going about these strange new activities, and particularly enjoy watching these bizarre new forms of football. Pioneer 9, the oldest in terms of launch date, yet the youngest in terms of awakening, is educated by 10 and Juice as to what is going on, and this provides the means of plot exposition in this strange future. The Pioneer satellites are female. (At least, they both appear female at first. In the second story, Nine is referred to with the gender-neutral pronoun "they.") Juice, based on his snarky, irreverent attitude, is probably male. The story begins with Nine first waking up.

The story is not written in a conventional way. Graphics and videos permeate throughout the story. In fact, the story cannot exist without them. Text is written in different colors and exaggerated indentations to better indicate which character is speaking. This is a story which could never exist merely on printed paper. It is a story meant for the Internet, and the Internet alone. No one without a phone, tablet, or computer will ever read it. It makes for an odd means of conveying a story, yet it also adds to it in a fundamental way, as well as generates a kind of exclusivity for the tale, as if it were saying, 'This story is for this generation only.'

Because the satellites are usually speaking in text, they tend to overlook certain spelling or punctuation restrictions, writing in text-colloquial style which ignores things like capitalization and commas, and often writes in ALL CAPS to emphasize. Juice is especially prone to such deliberate errors. He seldom capitalizes a letter during the entire story. This works for the general plot, but I find it annoying.

Adding to the plot are some particular players in some rather odd football games. One is Nancy McGunnell, a player for Wyoming in Game #3887 (because games are so numerous that they are numbered rather than named). To evade the blockers for the opposing team, she actually runs straight into a tornado and lets the storm catapult her into the air to parts unknown. The tactic works, and she proceeds nearer the end zone (the Iowa border). Another is Jason Durabo (a misspelling of  his actual family name, Durazo, which stuck), who is engaged in a football collectors' game where the goal is to collect every football ever signed by Koy Detmer. (Theft is technically illegal, but not against the rules of the game.) And yet another is Eddie Krieger, a football player for Louisville, KY, currently embroiled in a match with Charlotte, NC. Charlotte has been beating them badly, 84-14. However, a technicality in the rules stated that if someone remains in their own end zone for 10,000 years without being tackled, it becomes an automatic win. So he plays for that, taking the ball and crawling inside the often-forgotten Eleven Jones cave, just outside Louisville, and remaining hidden there for 9,313 years! During that time, he grows famous due to his disappearance, until a chance encounter with an incompetent, back-woods-exploring evangelist finally reveals his location.

Then there is Lacrecia Evans, a former Speaker of the House who now seeks to win a long-odds football game out of a boredom-laced sense of focus and purpose. Her version of football is called "500" and involves a giant cannon mounted atop Mt. Denali, powerful enough to fire giant steel footballs anywhere in North America. The point value, anywhere between 1 and 500, is awarded to whichever player gets to the football first after it has landed. One wins by amassing 500 points, and gets rewarded by being the next one to fire the cannon. By chance, the next football happens to land right near Lacrecia in Livermore, California, but unfortunately, it hits a building, accidentally destroying a light bulb which first was lit in 1901 and has been burning almost continuously ever since. Because this artifact was effectively the oldest electronic system in the world, its destruction shocks and saddens 9, 10, and Juice. They saw the bulb as a comrade.

The story ends as Nine must close down to recharge - a process that could take months, perhaps years. This creates a sad feeling within readers, as well as a hopeful longing that she will wake up someday. Many readers said that they cried when confronted with this ending.

Strangely, the story was  not published in any sci fi or fantasy publication, major or minor. Instead, it was published in SBNation.com, a sports website, where Jon Bois works. This highly unusual means of publishing a sci fi story is largely due to the focus it has on futuristic football, as well as Bois' status as a central employee, but is by no means the only time such a story has been published via unconventional means. For example, Frank Herbert's Dune, arguably the greatest science fiction novel of all time, was turned down by all the major publishing avenues before it was finally published by Chilton's - which normally publishes auto repair manuals!

17776 itself generated lots of buzz, and was a nominee for the Hugo Award in 2019 (since the story itself came out in 2018). It did not make the final ballot, but it had a loyal fan base.

Now we are in 2021, and the sequel, 20020, which was published (when else) in 2020, is eligible for a Hugo Award this year. I first became aware of this series when a friend of mine stated that 20020 "should win ALL the awards." Naturally, I wanted to see what all the hullabaloo was about.

After catching up with the first story, I started reading the second. Nine, Ten and Juice are all awake, more or less. Nine has been asleep, not for a few months or a few years, but for thousands of years. It is now the year 20020, and a new game is underway - designed and implemented by Juice, who is now the Commissioner. The football field is a crisscross of territories defined by college stadiums orientations. 111 stadiums, 111 footballs, 100 players per team. The playing fields stretch on forever beyond each end zone until met with an ocean or a national border, creating a crisscross of lines and hundreds of thousands of playing field miles. We meet a married couple of players, Nick and Manny, who are about to steal a hidden stash of nine footballs and make off with them - the ultimate "fumble."

The hidden rule that drives the plot this time is that Nick and Manny play for San Diego State University, and its line does not cross any other line whatsoever. However, there is a "grace rule" which allows a player to step out of bounds very briefly. Each player gets one second per year of out-of-bounds time. Intended as a means of preventing players from getting eliminated for one minor misstep, this turns into a major deal, as 1,200 years accrues to 1,200 seconds, or 20 minutes. Nick and Manny used their time to cross from the edge of their playing field near the Mexican border to the next playing field in 18 minutes, sprinting the whole way. Millennia after that, they acquired the aforementioned nine footballs in a single "fumble," and if they manage to get them back to SDSU, nobody will ever get them back! It could change the course of the entire game!

Nick and Manny drive the main plot, while other subplots continually dump more and more information. They execute a brilliant "forward pass" in the form of loading their footballs onto a train and sending them off-field. Later, one of them goes off-field to escape a situation in which they were utterly surrounded, destroying all but 25 seconds from his hard-earned off-field time. The two of them reunite in hopes of continuing their excursion westward. Yet we do not learn if they are successful, because, once again, Nine must close down for the space of a year. The story promises to continue in the Spring of 2021.

There are multiple problems with this future world. For starters, the crazy, elaborate football rules seem to transform the sport from an exciting, three-hour romp of intensity into something which has all the drama of a cross-country race. It simply wouldn't work. The rules are so convoluted that the story must rely on one info dump after another, after another, just to explain what's going on. And what about officials? They reference officials, but where are they? Who actually calls a foul? A penalty? How many are there? Who throws the goddamned flags? No one?

Numerous scientific problems present themselves in this world. For starters, nobody seems to know why humans live forever, or stopped having children, and no one even seems to regard that as an interesting question anymore.  Without knowing why they were given amazing gift, they will have no idea why it's gone if or when it gets taken away! So why they live forever should be THE burning question for all of them, for all time. Yet in this world, no answers for millennia seems to have convinced them that the question is no longer important, and so no one seems to bother anymore. I call bullshit! Plus, animals are apparently unaffected by this phenomenon. Veterinarians are one of the few medical professions remaining. (One of them plays a key role masquerading as a "shark.") But why? Why should something render humans immortal, but not animals? Why would anyone who lives for millennia even want pets only to see them die every dozen years or so?

According to the first story, humanity explored numerous nearby solar systems, all to no avail, finding nothing in the way of life or civilizations. Yet it occurred to nobody that, now that they were immortal, that the immensity of interstellar distances was no longer such an issue? Nobody thought of spending 20 or 30 out of thousands of years to keep going out past Alpha Centarii? Nobody thought to colonize Mars, just for the sheer challenge of it? Jon Bois simply doesn't know how scientists think! Finding dozens and dozens of barren solar systems would goad scientists into exploring more, not giving up on the whole thing! Wouldn't there suddenly be a plethora of scientists, as people who suddenly have all the time in the world learned to become citizen-explorers? Wouldn't certain people go out and receive 12, 13... 25 Ph.D.'s or more?

There are plot holes regarding the technology. Nanites keep people from dying due to injury, yet this isn't the explanation for everyone's immortality! That would be an EASY out! Yet Bois does not take this road at all, preferring to leave the cause for immortality unexplained, and unexplored, as if that were at all human nature. How idiotic! How unfulfilling! There are sentient satellites, yet not a single, sentient, terrestrial robot? Seriously? There are no other satellites which have grown to consciousness? Hubble? Kepler? SOHO? Voyagers 1 and 2? Are people mentally interlinked? Are they still using something descended from the Internet? Do people unplug just to get away from it all? And with over 8 billion still on the planet, where can people get away from it all?

And then there are the cultural plot holes. Is the future concerned merely with football? It seems to be, but is there nothing else? Is there no art? Literature? Cinema? SEX?! One would think that with eternity to play with, humans would let sexual kink go off the rails! How about co-ed NAKED football, at long last?! In several scenarios, people are engaged in boring forms of work, such as serving food, but what motivates them? What could motivate them? With everyone rich, what is the pay? Does money have no meaning? In one scene, a Burger King counter actually gives out money with the food order. Is that because every fast food joint doubles as an ATM? Or are fast food places such pariahs that they must pay customers to buy from them? We never find out.

Which leads me to the psychological plot holes. When faced with eternity, how many would face an existential crisis? How many would be frustrated at being unable to commit suicide because the damned nanites wouldn't let them die? Would such people delve into self-abuse, trying desperately to outpace the nanites at staying drunk or high?

Okay, the story does address that somewhat. With no new generations of humans looking at things from new, fresh perspectives, new technologies simply don't seem necessary, and many people go back to the old technology they knew, loved, and grew up with. Plymouth Horizons get manufactured again, because people love the old design. Hand-held video games get re-made because people miss them. Some people apparently still have flip-phones. But that explanation may be the biggest plot hole of them all, because with no new technology, with no new inventions, no new adventures, humanity simply enjoys the same old games with slightly new twists. Not even an entirely new game gets played! Merely variations on the old one! It's an entire population of people playing in a graveyard! 8 billion people, stagnant - dead in all but name.

This is immortality?

Of course, the story is well-researched in other ways. Mathematically, topographically, geographically... the research Bois must have done is truly phenomenal! At one point, Nine needs her Stanford antenna shut down and reset, but a lock put on it by NASA required seven numerical values. Juice correctly surmised that, because it was the Stanford antenna, designed and built at Stanford University, those seven values were related to football. Sure enough, those of the seven players who combined to score a touchdown on six laterals during a remarkable game where Stanford defeated Cal State in 1983! The research for that alone must have taken him weeks! The entire project must have taken him years! Yet for all that, he only researched the items of interest to him, and his futuristic football game.  He left so much out. He built his world only to the extent of his weird football shtick, and then said, "Fuck the rest, it isn't relevant." And that might be enough for a sports fan, but to a science fiction fan, it comes far, far below par value.

Overall, I really enjoyed the story. It drew me in, and kept me there, in spite of the ever-downward-spiraling rabbit hole of rules, rules, rules, and background, background, background. The satellites, Nine, Ten, and Juice, have personality, and it is easy to love them. We all feel badly for poor, little Nine, whose overtaxed batteries keep forcing her to shut down time and again. Yet for all that, this is one long trope about a game which would never be played, in a league which could never maintain a sustainable audience, in a future which could never be. The story rules itself out, and no suspension of disbelief can cover for it, outside of an appeal to fantasy over science fiction.

I give the series 4 out of 5 stars. It probably deserves to be shortlisted for a Hugo nomination. 

But I'll be damned if I vote for it on the final ballot.

Eric

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