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I finally got around to reading 17776!
Which has already practically passed out of memory on Tumblr but by Dreamwidth standards this is like... posting from the future. I still have a lot I want to process about it but here's one thing:
The setting is presented as being basically post-historical. Things are now as they are going to be forever; the story is over and now we just perpetually hang out. A pretty central element of this is that babies aren't being born anymore. This is significant as an explanation for the stasis of the culture –there's no new generation with new ideas about how the world should be– but it's also a form of stasis in its own right –no new stories are beginning, just the infinite continuation of the old ones.
Except that's not quite true, is it? At the start of the story Nine comes into existence as a conscious being, after drifting through space without thought for thousands of years. No new humans are being born, but it's not true that no new people are. And what happened once (well actually three times that we know about) can happen again.
Admittedly, it's not a coincidence that Nine and Ten and Juice are products of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They are a sort of thing no one is very inclined to build any more. But... well, first, it's very much in the humans' power to create more minds. Though technology has in some ways stagnated, we're told that even a simple computer will become a person given enough time, and time is something that they have in unlimited quantities.
As for inclination, even if none of the eight billion humans want to make anything new now, given eternity and boredom eventually some of them will try. You can stay stuck at the bottom of a valley playing the same game for thousands of years, but if there's any way at all for the ball to get out of the gorge, eventually it will.
The setting is presented as being basically post-historical. Things are now as they are going to be forever; the story is over and now we just perpetually hang out. A pretty central element of this is that babies aren't being born anymore. This is significant as an explanation for the stasis of the culture –there's no new generation with new ideas about how the world should be– but it's also a form of stasis in its own right –no new stories are beginning, just the infinite continuation of the old ones.
Except that's not quite true, is it? At the start of the story Nine comes into existence as a conscious being, after drifting through space without thought for thousands of years. No new humans are being born, but it's not true that no new people are. And what happened once (well actually three times that we know about) can happen again.
Admittedly, it's not a coincidence that Nine and Ten and Juice are products of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. They are a sort of thing no one is very inclined to build any more. But... well, first, it's very much in the humans' power to create more minds. Though technology has in some ways stagnated, we're told that even a simple computer will become a person given enough time, and time is something that they have in unlimited quantities.
As for inclination, even if none of the eight billion humans want to make anything new now, given eternity and boredom eventually some of them will try. You can stay stuck at the bottom of a valley playing the same game for thousands of years, but if there's any way at all for the ball to get out of the gorge, eventually it will.
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