It’s time for the 2020 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 2021, for a book I read in 2020, even though the nomenclature makes it sound like I am giving this award in 2020, for a book I read in 2019)

2020 was a great year for reading and a terrible year for literally everything else (starting with a 1918 level pandemic and going downhill from there is a bit rough). You’ll notice that a certain C.J. Cherryh is somewhat overrepresented in this year’s nominees; I’m not sure what it says about me that I dived so heavily into work that strikes me as so coldly amoral this particular year. Nevertheless, they are all good, deserving yarns.

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

• Alliance Rising, C.J. Cherryh. A somewhat lighter and softer prequel set in her Alliance-Union universe, Alliance Rising marries slice-of-life perspectives about space merchant life with broader (and timely) exploration about the practicalities of class resentment, collective bargaining, decentralized government, and defunding the police in a near-authoritarian state.

• The Land Across, Gene Wolfe. Wolfe’s Kafkaesque take on both the detective thriller and Eastern European travelogues by snotty white men (or IS it?), written with his characteristic moody, dreamlike prose and imagery. I’m still not sure what really happened on this trip to the undiscovered country, but the story is still worth delving into.

• Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett. As always, Pratchett is sui generis, his Airplane!-dense jokes and whacky characters flying fast and heavy as covering fire for his thoughtful and razor-sharp exploration of real-world issues (in this case, Peelian policing, the banality of evil, and the authoritarian underpinnings of the Hero’s Journey).

• Cibola Burn, James S.A. Corey. It’s not often that series get better four books in, but Cibola Burn explores the messiness of diplomacy and conflict escalation, deeper themes that play out surprisingly interestingly in its pulpy frame.

• War Girls, Tochi Onyebuchi: Pitched as something like “Gundam, except in future Nigeria”, War Girls is a brutal, expertly written look at the price of war in a science-fictional wrapper, neat (and terrifying) ideas about our dreary, polluted, colonialist future sitting cheek-by-jowl with unflinching views of the madness and brainwashing of future child soldiers.

• Serpent’s Reach, C.J. Cherryh: Cherryh builds an intricate plot of political intrigue and inter-species cultural exchange that tears through her very strange future society with the epic scale of Dune...in the first three chapters. She manages to cram a series’ worth of journeys and ideas into a short novel, including a gripping multi chapter sequence about…playing dice on a cruise ship.

• A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine. If you can read only one Aztec/Byzantine interstellar space empire mashup murder mystery-political thriller this year, make it this one.

• Architects of Memory, Karen Osbourne. The unfortunate novel labeled “the other ‘memory’ book from 2020’s reading list” more than holds its own, with a thriller’s look into a grim space corporate dystopia chock full of the incompetence and malicious apathy that is, of course, totally alien to our current reality.

The runner up for this year’s BNIRLY Award is The Tyrant Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson, the third novel in the Masquerade series, which continues a long and hallowed tradition of Baru Cormorant novels only being released in years with insanely competitive BNIRLY lineups. While not as cleverly bleak as The Traitor Baru Cormorant or as cuttingly absurd as The Monster Baru Cormorant, The Tyrant is arguably the best of the three books so far, weaving together Dickinson’s customary blend of intricate world building and lovely prose with thoughtful theses that shine new light on what we’ve already seen in the previous books. For far more eloquent discourse on the genius of this book and its series, see here: https://canmom.github.io/crit/baru/monster.

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

C.J. Cherryh’s Finity’s End

Science fiction entices because of its ideas, but it endures because of its characters. Finity’s End, on its surface, is a small-time story with small-time stakes compared to the grand space opera of other Alliance-Union works. But by putting the story on the ground level, Cherryh builds a story about loss, trauma, and acceptance whose power is in its relatability, in its bullies and snobs and mentors and outcasts who could exist in a cul-de-sac as easily as they do in the massive and historic starship that gives the novel its name.

That’s not to say that Cherryh’s particular brand of space opera isn’t still packed to the gills with the practical and unassuming worldbuilding that characterizes her oeuvre. But the real genius comes in the people who populate the universe she creates, whose conflicts and hopes and secrets and desires grow and twist together into intricate knots that might more properly belong in a novel with “Bronte” on the cover.

Finity’s End, more than any other candidate for this year’s BNIRLY, is about family, looking upon the good and the bad of it with Cherryh’s signature cool lack of judgment. No saccharine sappiness, no bitter grimdark, just real people living and loving and hurting and humiliating each other in equal measure.

Special Achievement in Literary Quality (SALQ) Award: The Noble Hustle: Poker, Beef Jerky & Death, by Colson Whitehead takes home this year’s SALQ. A nonfiction novel that is ostensibly about the 2011 World Series of Poker, in the way that Neuromancer is ostensibly about the future of computing, written with absurdist rollicking wit and thoughtful self-awareness. Whitehead deserves his MacArthur Genius Grant based solely based on his insightful sketches of the various crazy characters you will find at poker tables (all of whom I have met in real life.)

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.