It’s time for the 2019 edition of the Most Prestigious Award in All of Literature, the Best Novel I Read Last Year (BNIRLY) Award, colloquially known as a “Stephenson”.

(Note that the award is given in 2020, for a book I read in 2019, even though the nomenclature makes it sound like I am giving this award in 2019, for a book I read in 2018)

2019 was a fun year for reading. Looking back, I spent a lot of time reading the first books of trilogies (or in the case of Book of the New Sun, the first trilogy in a saga) without going on to the next books, either due to availability or time pressure from other books. Hopefully in 2020 I will have more time to actually finish series.

Here are my honorable mentions for this year’s reading:

·       Cuckoo’s Egg, C.J. Cherryh: You can’t have a BNIRLY award without Cherryh represented. I’m not as familiar with Cherryh’s alien work as I am with her human-side stuff (with the exception of the Chanur books), and from this work, I really should be. Her aliens might be biologically similar enough we could build them in a movie studio, but their culture is rich, well-realized, and alien enough to shine a sharp light of contrast against our own inborn assumptions.    

·       The Red: First Light, Linda Nagata: Nagata writes sharp Tom Clancy-style technothriller action and marries it with plot-relevant exploration of legitimate SF/F Big Ideas—I really don’t understand how this hasn’t become a big multimedia franchise yet (oh wait…Hollywood). Nagata also explores the fundamentally right-wing underpinnings of many Mil-SF stories in a way that doesn’t feel preachy (a big plus for me).     

·       Pale Fire, Vladimir Nabokov: The weirdest X-Men fanfic I’ve ever read. Subtle, beautiful, and deceptively deep (though oddly not connected to much of the comics mythos); I can’t wait to see James McAvoy and/or de-aged Patrick Stewart handle this one.

·       Empire Games, Charles Stross: The fourth book in the Merchant Princes series cranks up the alternate-universe tour, showing us the beginnings of a modern Cold War between two different Americas, one of which is self-aware of patterns of history and one of which is decidedly not. I enjoyed this book even more because I’ve been watching Starz’s sublime television series Counterpart, which explores similar ideas from a personal, rather than political standpoint. I heartily recommend both—in parallel.

·       Starfish, Peter Watts: Blindsight is, among deep-state Reddit circles, considered to be Watts’ masterwork, but I think Starfish may actually be a better novel (it’s close enough that I’d have to go back and re-read Blindsight to be sure). Along with his usual overdose of hard-SF ideas and neato nihilistic reflections on human nature, Watts creates moving portraits of deeply psychologically damaged people trying to survive and grow during an epic, world-shaking plot. 

The runner-up for this year’s BNIRLY Award is Dan Simmons’ Hyperion, a novel that was so hyped to me as a “modern classic” that any compliment I bestow is done through clenched teeth. And yet, it really is a modern classic: Simmons expertly builds multiple stories in multiple subgenres, each of which would stand strongly alone due to the strength of the prose and worldbuilding. There are not many homages to The Canterbury Tales that are also set in a far-future epic space opera setting, but if you have to read one this year, I would suggest Hyperion.

And this year’s winner of the Best Novel I Read Last Year is:

To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis

Dying is easy; comedy is hard. Comedy in print is harder, and I don’t think I’ve ever laughed as hard as I have while reading Willis.

To Say Nothing of the Dog is the second book in Willis’ time-traveling oeuvre, which take place in a world where time travel is possible but not particularly useful—you can’t use it to change history (we think), you can’t bring things back from the past (other than knowledge), etc. The main users of time travel tend to be historians and other academics, and one of them, Ned Henry, is having a bad day at the office. To say more would be to ruin the Rube Goldberg machine of delightful and expertly executed surprises that Willis creates.

What I will say is this: the best comedy isn’t about the gags, in the same way that the best SF/F isn’t about the ideas. It’s the characters that live and breathe that create the best comedy, from the conflicts that arise naturally and logically from their personalities and motivations and relationships. And Willis truly is a master of building those characters. I cannot give a higher compliment to her work.

(Note: you don’t have to read Doomsday Book, the first book in the series, to enjoy To Say Nothing of the Dog, but it helps due to the sheer contrast between the darkness of the first and the lightness of the second—and Doomsday Book also happens to be an exceptional novel in and of itself, the 2016 BNIRLY Award winner)

Special Achievement in Literary Quality (SALQ) Award: This year, I’m adding a special side award, more or less to honor Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun, which I’m not including in the regular novel category as it is technically four and a half novels meant to be read as one piece. The Book of the New Sun is a genuine masterwork—Neil Gaiman was not exaggerating when he stated it might be “the best SF novel of the last century”—but it is not for everyone, and it is a book that really must be read twice (or maybe 3+ times, if you’re a dunderhead like me).

The Book of the New Sun is good enough that I am going to write an entirely separate blog post on it. Stay tuned!

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)