I don’t know if you could have guessed it from someone named for a decommissioned space telescope, but I’m incredibly fond of Jon Bois’ multimedia web novel 17776. Trying to explain 17776, however, has been my personal Sisyphusian boulder. Introduced to it by a dear online friend in roughly 2021? It has persisted in my consciousness since. Articulating the name is hard enough. Personally I have referred to it as “seventeen-seven-seventy-six” while trying to advertise it to peers, friends, even my dad and little sister. My dad didn’t make it past the initial portion. My little sister got far enough in to report that she thought JUICE should be named Jim, and then stopped.
Did you know I wanted to be an Aerospace Engineer for a bit? I was never built for it. The only class I ever failed in high school was Trigonometry. I eked by in Physics and Chemistry. My final science class of senior year, I picked a class on scientific ethics that was notorious for being the least science-y science class offered. And now, in college, I'm the kind of person who has, like, three essays due every week. It's for the best.
But there is a persistent love for space in my heart. Science fiction is my choice of genre in all mediums. My grandmother worked for NASA, and there is still a box of pins from missions that happened while she was employed there. As I write this, the Artemis II is heading towards the moon, and Christina Koch has officially gone farther from that pale blue dot than any other woman, ever. I watch her mission with interest. 17776 did not awaken anything in that department, but it did reorient my interest in it.
I had been attached to the World Wide Web prior to reading 17776, of course. I will probably write a thousand more words one day about how growing up alongside people I only knew online irrevocably dented my social skills, or whatever. But what you have to understand is that, ultimately, it wasn’t the football (obviously), or the satellites, or the fantasy of a gentle, immortal future, though all those things. What really struck a chord in me was the nature of those friendships we see. Between the satellites and each other, the satellites and the games they watch. Humanity’s scouts, sending messages around faster than lightspeed.
To a sad high schooler, living in a box during the pandemic, it spoke to something fundamentally real and true. The calendar portion of 17776 is known as a kind of bottleneck, perturbing people with its gradual disintegration to a black screen, followed by an introduction difficult to understand and long to scroll through. But rereading it, five years later, it makes sense why it clicked.
An internet friend introduced me to those satellites. A dear friend, an untouchable number of miles away. I was, maybe, fourteen? Going through freshman year through a screen. The idea of ever meeting anyone I met online would have been treated like a sheer hallucination. And it felt infinitely far away that life would or could return to normal. People were publishing about just how this situation would damage those still developing, the potential psychological impact of quarantine, the physical impact of coronavirus. And in spite of it, I was just… discussing entertainment with people infinitely far away. Even after the end of the world, there was still football. And “football” didn’t have to be football– it could be participating in sports, or watching sports, or drawing or getting really into reupholstery or making webpages. There would still be something to be here for.
Of course I don’t only like 17776 because I was immediately like “ah yes! This is so analogous to my current situation!” It’s equally because Jon Bois is a phenomenal writer. I’m excited for the book he’s writing, which seems like it’s going to heavily draw upon 17776. And, of course, I still hold out hope for 20021, like any well-deluded fan. I’m not even the perfect fan. I didn’t know that it existed in 2017, when it first came out. I wasn’t there for the publication of 20020, anyways. But still, maybe someone is learning about 17776 for the first time ever, today.
