I’d been following Jon Bois on Twitter for quite a while before the publication of 17776, and I’d greatly enjoyed the first few chapters before beginning to suspect that it was too long to finish in a single sitting. I set it down and forgot about it for years. But when a Not a Book square appeared in this year’s fantasy Bingo, I had the perfect opportunity to pick it back up. And I liked it enough to immediately jump into the sequel 20020. 

17776 and 20020 are both roughly novella-length web fictions, heavy on the hypertext and interspersed with gifs and embedded videos. They’re written from the perspective of sentient space probes looking down on a human race whose births and deaths had inexplicably ceased thousands of years before. With freshly infinite lifespans, humanity must find something to occupy its collective attention. And in much of the United States, that occupier of attention has come in the form of football—modified to take on an epic scale. 

While both stories are clearly written by and for people with a deep affection for college football, that shouldn’t be taken to exclude wider audiences. The shift in the scale of the games creates a future football that’s hardly recognizable, and there’s relatively little time spent on strategic minutiae in 17776 (there’s more in 20020–I’ll get there). College football fans will doubtless appreciate some of the references—including a tremendous use of the Kick Six broadcast—but the ideal audience for these stories depends less on particular fandoms and more on their appreciation for Bois’ surrealist sense of humor and penchant for divergence into anecdotes about quirky bits of small-town history. 

For me, 17776 was absolutely hilarious, so there wasn’t much chance I wouldn’t have a good time. The space probes have distinct personalities, with the wisecracking European bringing levity and the naive newcomer endearing in their earnestness. Humor is notoriously subjective, so it won’t work for everyone, but I would’ve enjoyed 17776 if it had had the thematic depth of a mud puddle. But while you may come for the silly characters and the bizarre game design, you’ll find that 17776 contains a lot more lurking just below the surface. Because at heart, it’s a story about dealing with immortality. While 17776 came first, its thematic exploration may ring familiar to fans of The Good Place, especially the latter’s final story arc. 

17776 has no real overarching central plot, but instead skips around the country at science fictional speeds, hunting for the little stories in which people find meaning. A lot of times, that’s in entertainment, with new games and strategies arising to meet the needs of immortal players and audiences—and despite the subtitle of the story, those games aren’t all football-based. But a lot of times, that’s in passing through random towns and looking for the stories. Because everywhere has a story, and even after tens of thousands of years, there are always more to find. 

The result is a tale that’s both hilarious and heartfelt, with exemplary use of low-brow technical effects to tell a story that will make the reader smile but also make them think. And shoot, it’s a love letter to sports that may well generate genuine investment in the hopes and fears of old-timey space probes, which is no small feat. It’s a tale that’s difficult to categorize—it was long-listed for Hugo Awards in both the Novella and Graphic Story categories, and you could’ve made an argument for Related Work—but one that’s very well worth the read. If it were up to me, it’d have won that Hugo. . . I’m just not sure which one. 

I didn’t plan on jumping straight into 20020, but 17776 was such a delight—not to mention a quick read/watch/experience that I knocked out in a single afternoon—that it only took a couple days before I was reading the sequel. It doesn’t spoil much of 17776, mostly because there’s not that much to spoil, but it does feature the same characters and world and should definitely be read second. 20020 moves (moderately) away from the anecdotal style of the first, zeroing in on a new football descendent: an epic-scale, 111-team game that feels almost like a giant game of football-flavored Capture the Flag. 

While the immortality returns from the first book, 20020 is not an immortality story. Instead, it’s a pandemic story without the pandemic, zooming in on one married couple attempting an audacious gambit that requires them to stay in the same 160-foot-wide space for century after century. 

Focusing on a single storyline allows 20020 to dive much deeper into the game mechanics than its predecessor had. And for the sort of people who enjoy deep dives into game mechanics, it can be fascinating. It hammers home the difficulty and creativity of the couple’s strategy, setting up some genuine plot-related drama—admittedly drama that ends on a cliffhanger with a sequel that’s been shelved indefinitely. 

But while there is some exploration of the squabbling that comes from forced proximity and a difficult, high-stakes project, it doesn’t feel quite as deep as the meditation on immortality and meaning-seeking on display in 17776. This is really one for the game nerds—not necessarily football nerds, but any game that rewards a dive into the wonky details. 

The humor from the first book is still here, and the little glimpses into a variety of lives don’t disappear entirely, even as they’re reduced to make room for the main plot. All that makes 20020 still very much worth the read, but it’s not the triumph that is its predecessor. 

Overall, 17776 is pure brilliance. It’s hilarious, heartfelt, and wildly creative, with wonderful exploration of living with immortality and finding meaning in sports. It can be easily read as a standalone, and I’d recommend anyone who appreciates surrealist humor to give it a try, whether or not they’re football fans. The sequel keeps up a lot of things that make the first book fun and should be an enjoyable experience for fans of Bois’ style, but it digs deeper into game mechanics than psychology and doesn’t rise to the must-read level of its predecessor. That said, I’m fascinated by the news that Bois has been picked up by Tor for a print book set in this universe, and I’ll absolutely be requesting an ARC of 50007 when the time comes. 

Recommended if you like: fandom, surrealist humor, searches for meaning, rules wonkery. 

Overall rating: For 17776, 19 of Tar Vol’s 20, five stars on Goodreads. For 20020, 15 of 20 and four stars.