The year is 17776, and Americans are still obsessed with football.That’s the simplest explanation of a multimedia fiction project written by Jon Bois that is currently being published in daily installments by the sportssite SB Nation, where Bois is the creative director. The site began posting chapters of the story—which combinestext, YouTube videos, tacky Muzak, eerie maps and graphics, and foundarchival documents—earlier this month, and the series is slated to wrapup later this week. According to Vox Media, SB Nation’s parent company, thestory has received, as of Wednesday, more than 2.9 million page views.
I hesitate to give much more of a description of this odd, captivatingstory, because the first chapter, titled “Please answer me,” puts thereader into a dizzying state of incomprehension. It presents a dialoguebetween three space probes that have long outlived their originalmissions, and which have, in the intervening years, become sentient asthey drift farther and farther away from Earth. Two of the probes areknowledgeable of the universe as it is fifteen thousand years from now;the other, Pioneer 9, which was launched from Cape Canaveral, in 1968,is just waking up to that world—and the reader, after a lot ofscrolling, learns the details along with it.
In 2026, back on Earth, people stopped dying or being born, meaning thatthe future world is populated by eight billion or so adults who havebeen left to confront the blessings and curses of immortality. To passall that time, many Americans have turned to football, contorting it ina variety of strange ways to suit their new reality. People playthousands of simultaneous games, most of which take place over manyyears and cover extreme long distances—say, from Washington State to theMexican border. In one of the story’s funniest sequences, two teams arestuck against the walls of a narrow canyon, both unable to move the ballbut neither willing to stop playing. The great joke of the story, atonce darkly comic and hopeful, is that men and women, faced witheternity and all its possibilities, have decided simply to fall back onthe familiar comforts of the country’s favorite sport. Like the spaceprobes processing the information sent out from the people back onEarth, they have nothing left to do but, as Pioneer 9 puts it,“perpetually hang out.” And so, everywhere and for all time, it’sfootball night in America.
Over the past several years, Bois has been doing all kinds of weirdthings that transport the world of sports to the uncanny fringes of thehuman psyche. In 2014, he published a speculative fan-fiction seriescalled “The Tim Tebow C.F.L. Chronicles,” imagining the life of the devout quarterback if he had played professional football in Canada.Bois’s best work to date was a series called “Breaking Madden,” in whichhe messed around with the possibilities of customization in the JohnMadden football video game to create unusual and absurd situations thatbecame, themselves, works of minor art. The first season of the projectculminated in a Super Bowl contest between the Seattle Seahawks and the Denver Broncos (which were playing each other in real life that year), inwhich he created an entire roster of Seahawks at the greatest possiblesize, skill, and intelligence—each seven feet tall and weighing fourhundred pounds—and had them square off against a team of maximallysmall, slow, and dumb Broncos. The result was a terrifying and rivetingstory of cruelty and futility—tiny men being chased down and crushed bygiants. I was rapt—and I haven’t played a video game since the latenineties. Bois had broken football.
With “17776,” Bois has broken it once again, using a deranged version ofthe sport as a way of making sense of the nearly unimaginable passage ofthousands of years. Along the way, he offers commentary on everythingfrom the ever-expanding N.F.L. rule book to the logical ends ofcapitalism to the grim tragedy of life without death. “We’re justordinary and forever, I think,” one character says. The story hasgenerated breathless enthusiasm from fans online—many of whom point outthat they hate football—and has drawn comparison to the novels of ThomasPynchon, Andrew Hussie’s Web-comic opus “Homestuck,” and a Reddit threadhijacked by robot trolls. To me, there is, among a mishmash ofinfluences, a tonal echo of Don DeLillo’s novel “End Zone,” from 1972,which was concerned with, in equal parts, college football and thethreat of nuclear annihilation—and with the way that the order and logicof football might act as a counterbalance to the chaos of the realworld.
For Bois, there is, among the darkly funny gloom, room for hope insports. As one of the probes says of the doomed people of this Americanfuture, “Boredom is their only enemy. And they get up in the morning andfight it every day of their eternal lives. Recreation and play sustainsthem. Football sustains them.” In what might be the most strikingchapter so far, called “An answered prayer,” a video pans over thecurvature of the Earth while playing audio of the announcer VerneLundquist calling the famous final sequence of a game between theUniversities of Alabama and Auburn in 2013. This glimmer of a moment hasbeen transmitted out into the universe, to float on forever. It is,despite its seemingly meagre parts, a thing of startling beauty.
