2023 BNIRLY Award
It’s time for the 2023 edition of the Most Prestigious Award in All of Literature (TM), the Best Novel I Read Last Year Award (BNIRLY), colloquially known as a “Stephenson”.
(Note that the award is given in 2024, for a book I read in 2023, even though the nomenclature makes it sound like I am giving this award in 2023, for a book I read in 2022)
I usually aim to get these awards published in January of the following year, which means they usually go up on the blog in March. I’m a weeeee bit later this year, as my work changed and ramped up in hours/stress quite dramatically in January. Mea culpa!
(Also for those of you keeping track at home, I broke my wrist and had to have surgery in fall 2023, so it’s really been a whirlwind!)
Here are the honorable mentions for this year’s reading:
• Harrow the Ninth, Tamsyn Muir: It would be hard to top Gideon the Ninth as a sequel novel (hint hint), but Muir continues to claim her role as a modern-day Gene Wolfe with this twisty, evocative space-horror-fantasy combo. As with other books in the series, don’t read anything about it going in!
• Slow Horses, Mick Herron: Apple TV’s adaptation of the Jackson Lamb series is excellent and well worth watching, with a quite credible adaptation of Mick Herron’s plots, characters, and dialogue. The one element that the adaptation cannot touch is his exceptional prose, which elevates the novel into the lofty heights occupied by Le Care’s oeuvre. Worth reading even if you’ve already seen the series.
• No Country for Old Men, Cormac McCarthy: I’m not a huge fan of McCarthy’s, but I can’t deny the minimalist artistry that went into plating this Neo-Western with a side of rumination on masculinity and the American nostalgic myth. (The movie is even better).
• Use of Weapons, Iain M. Banks: A fun (if you can call it that) Ancillary Justice-esque far future space opera, with all of Banks’ typical masterful weirdness, grotesquerie, and sharp political commentary woven seamlessly along its Literary Device.
• Zone One, Colson Whitehead: It’s hard to do new things with zombie novels, but Whitehead pulls it off with aplomb, using the zombies as vehicle for commentary about gentrification, race, and how much he hates Connecticut.
• This is How You Lose the Time War, Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar: Yes, I did get this book because of “bigolas dickolas wolfwood’s ” recommendation on Twitter. Gorgeous wordplay in a bizarro sci-fi setting wrapped with a love story, and 100% worth it.
• Peace, Gene Wolfe: WTF I can’t even— yet another maddeningly mysterious, beautiful, rambling novel by Gene Wolfe, with the truth hiding somewhere at the very edge of your vision. Perhaps in 20 years I’ll be smart enough to understand it.
The Runner Up for this year’s BNIRLY Award is Station Eleven, by Emily St. John Mandel. As with last year’s The Glass Hotel, St. John Mandel has a sui genesis ability to ramble about with multiple characters and plot strands, leaving you admiring her prose and baffled by her digressions, wondering “Where on Earth is this going”, until the cleverness of the plotting snaps into focus and the beauty of the story bursts forth. If you only read one post-apocalyptic novel after Zone One, make sure it’s this one.
And this year’s winner of the Best Novel I Read Last Year Award is:
Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir
I’m not sure if Gene Wolfe was the best SF/F writer of the 20th Century or just the trickiest, but Tamsyn Muir is following in his illusive, elided, steganographic footsteps, with her own gorgeous prose style in one hand and dick jokes in the other. This is a book that has layers like Troy, each carefully constructed, abraded, eroded, and hidden within and around and under and on top of the next, with Muir entrapping you in her twisty lair even as you’re alternating laughing and sobbing about the abusive maybe-romance in Gothic Science Fiction Deep Space.
Muir, like Wolfe, is also a real SF/F writer, not a dilettante tourist coming by from MFA land, so the universe she creates has solid speculative bones and a horde of fascinating details that get drip-fed to us in between the mystery, hilarity, and nastiness. Her science fantasy is unique in ways that I find myself at loss to describe, or even analogize.
There are few writers who can write like Wolfe, and not one of them can make me laugh like Muir. Go read this book.
Special Achievement in Literary Quality (SALQ) Award: Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan and company. I missed this phenomenon when it came out, but I heard the hype. “Best show ever”. “Elevating what TV can be”. “Once in a lifetime performances.” “Every season is better than the last one.”
Being doped to the gills on painkillers post surgery was the excuse I needed to binge-watch, and the show is pretty much exactly as good as I was told. Even my spouse, who loathes violence and refused to watch the show with me, kept asking me, “So what’s Walt up to this week?”
The pastor at my old church described it as “Biblical”, and to be frank, it is- in the Old Testament sense. The surface story is about crime, but the deeper story is about pride, bad decisions, and consequences of sin. An absolutely magnificent piece of work.
Previous Stephenson winners:
2006: Cryptonomicon, Neal Stephenson (Runner-up: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susannah Clark)
2007: A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess (Runner-up: Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert Heinlein)
2008: No winner recorded (and I can’t remember)
2009: Dune, Frank Herbert (Runner-up: The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov, trans. Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor)
2010: Distraction, Bruce Sterling (Runner-up: (Tie) The Cyberiad, Stanislaw Lem, trans. Michael Kandel, and Double Star, Robert Heinlein)
2011: Anathem, Neal Stephenson (Runner-up: Declare, Tim Powers)
2012: The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson (Runner-up: Eifelheim, Michael Flynn)
2013: Last Call, Tim Powers
2014: The Name of the Wind, Patrick Rothfuss (Runner-up: The Player of Games, Iain M. Banks)
2015: The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester (Runner-up: Cyteen, C.J. Cherryh)
2016: Doomsday Book, Connie Willis (Runner-up: (tie) Annihilation, Jeff VanDerMeer, and The Traitor Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson)
2017: Kindred, Octavia Butler (Runner-up: (tie) The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Gene Wolfe, and Authority, Jeff VanDerMeer).
2018: The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell (Runner-up: The Monster Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson)
2019: To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis (Runner-up: Hyperion, Dan Simmons). SALQ Award: The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe.
2020: Finity’s End, C.J. Cherryh (Runner-up: The Tyrant Baru Cormorant, Seth Dickinson). SALQ Award: The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky, and Death, Colson Whitehead
2021: Mexican Gothic, Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Runner-up: Piranesi, Susannah Clarke)
2022: The Vanished Birds, Simon Jimenez (Runner-up: The Glass Hotel, Emily St. John Mandel). SALQ Award: Margin Call, J.C. Chandor