2021 BNIRLY Award

It’s time for the 2021 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 2022, for a book I read in 2021, even though the nomenclature makes it sound like I am giving this award in 2021, for a book I read in 2020)

2021 involved a little more comfort-reading than I’ve had in past years, seeing as many of my top reads reflected authors I already knew and trusted (with the exception of the BNIRLY Award winner). While it’s never a bad thing to go back to wells of known purity, I hope in 2022 to make some new explorations.

That said, a lot of the comfort reads turned out to be pretty freaking good! Here are my honorable mentions for this year’s reading:

• Night Watch, Terry Pratchett: Another novel, another banger by Pratchett, who balances categorically perfect comedy and simmering-rage commentary about the use (and abuse) of power by the state. Did he do this while also working in a time travel story and parodies of the French Revolution? Yes. Does it work? Also yes.

• Islands in the Net, Bruce Sterling: I thought this was a sort of early Gibsonian cyberpunk novel when I plucked it out (and can you blame me? Look at the cover!) Yet despite some of the crammed-prose and bizarro-tech stylings of cyberpunk, it transcends the label (the protagonist is a mother of a newborn, for starters…). Sterling didn’t get everything about his predicted 2023 quite right in 1988, but his counter history is nonetheless absolutely fascinating.

• Devil to the Belt (Heavy Time/Hellburner), C.J. Cherryh: I count this as one novel despite the fact that it was published as two novellas before being reissued as an omnibus. Cherryh takes her used future aesthetic to its maximum limit here, with a terrifying, claustrophobic look at blue-collar mining and grunt-level military work. It’s a novel that takes place in spaces the size of phone booths, ratcheting up the tension beyond anything dreamed of in the Expanse with the simple question “What time is it?”

• Invader, C.J. Cherryh: Last year, I wasn’t sure what the hype was all about when I read Foreigner, the first novel in Cherryh’s other multi-award-winning 20+ book long space opera saga, but Invader found its feet with memorable characters and chokingly paranoid plots. I am now sold on the sequence.

• Escaping Exodus, Nicky Drayden: Escaping Exodus is a fun adventure in a proudly and unrepentantly weird setting, a world carved out of the guts (and hearts, and parasites) of a giant space whale flying through the cosmos. And yet somehow in between all the visceral body horror and bodily fluids, Drayden puts together a grounded and relatable set of protagonists to take us on this bizarro tour de force.

The Runner Up for this year’s BNIRLY Award is the other book about a creepy house, Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi. For her followup to the sublime Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, Clarke does something devilishly tricky: she creates a novel that is entirely unlike her previous work and yet totally, completely recognizable as uniquely hers, showing a range that is rare for writers in any genre. Without spoiling the many delights hidden within Piranesi, in her second novel she switched from epic to intimate, from coolly sardonic to warmly optimistic, from photorealistically textured to dreamily impressionistic, and does so with grace and poise. Piranesi is the diary of Someone exploring a House, who goes on Adventures. I may praise it, but it doesn’t need me to extol its marvelous virtue. It is Beautiful.

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

Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia

It’s an uncomfortable fact that so many of my favorite genre’s luminaries were deeply embedded in virulent racism, misogyny, etc. But one of the better trends of the 21st Century has been writers in the genre who are willing to acknowledge and learn from the past. Mexican Gothic is not the first book to grapple with H.P. Lovecraft’s work and its tinge of bad-even-for-its-time infesting ideology, but it is certainly one of the finest.

Noemi is a sharp young woman in 1950s Mexico City who goes to check in on her cousin Catalina, married off to a lifestyle of English wealth and privilege in a looming, crumbling mansion. What starts as a sort of Gothicesque melodrama splashed with a touch of racial tension creeps into an entirely different sort of novel, as Moreno-Garcia shows a mastery of both the twists and tropes of Old World character-driven storytelling and the creeping unease of psychological (and later, physical) horror. This is a novel that dearly loves its 19th Century heritage AND acknowledges the gnawing, diseased roots of said heritage, and we as readers are all the richer for it. It’s a novel that has Things to Say, but more importantly, that has a Story to Tell: a genuinely unnerving descent into darkness of all kinds, by a character who is determined to not just survive, but triumph.

Settle down in an antique easy chair with a snifter of something strong and the fading light from sunset, and prepare to have some fun.

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