2022 BNIRLY Award

It’s time for the 2022 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 2023, for a book I read in 2022, even though the nomenclature makes it sound like I am giving this award in 2022, for a book I read in 2021)

2022 was the first year I really got into using Libby, which opened my horizons in turns of book availability and selection, which lead to both more novels and more nonfiction being read. Furthermore, while I’m still 100% a paper book lover, there was definitely something nice about being able to sneak a few pages in during my lunch break at work or waiting at the doctor’s office.

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

• Inheritor, C.J. Cherryh: Most trilogies don’t get noticeably better as they go along, but Cherryh’s diplomacy-gone-wrong thriller takes us deeper and deeper into the looking-glass worlds she created, enlightening and recontextualizing what has come before.

• Leviathan Falls, James S.A. Corey: It’s hard to end a series, especially one nine novels long, with a plot that seems sensical and character arcs that finish satisfactorily. Kudos to Abraham and Franck for doing a pretty doggone decent job at it.

• The Freeze-Frame Revolution, Peter Watts: As always, Watt’s work here is crammed with cool ideas and bitter observations on the deflating value of human life, with the typical cosmic horror creepiness we’ve come to expect.

• Invisible Sun, Charles Stross: See above note on the difficulty of ending a series in a satisfactory way. Stross doesn’t pull any punches or leave any easy answers to the Big Questions of the Merchant Princes series, just lays out a fun technothriller plot that honors the dilemmas his characters face about how to run a revolution in an uncaring universe.

• Lagoon, Nnedi Okorafor: A weird, clever, and subtly radical twist on the typical first contact story, with a guided tour through the fantastical reality and realistic fantasy of life in modern-ish Nigeria, all wrapped around a solid SF/F core.

• Heavy Weather, Bruce Sterling: Distraction was Sterling’s early-90s eerily accurate meditation on the destructive future of American politics; Heavy Weather is its sibling focused on climate change and fascism. Its apocalyptic vision is depressing, horrifying, and painful, but never uninteresting.

• A Desolation Called Peace, Arkady Martine: The second part of Martine’s space opera series does the best thing a sequel can do, which is explore a different direction (in this case, military SF tropes) that nonetheless fits perfectly with the tone of the original.

The Runner Up for this year’s BNIRLY Award is The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel. A slice-of-life novel in the literary tradition isn’t typically my cup of tea (I say, as I stare at Gene Wolfe’s Peace on my TBR pile), but I found myself drawn into its gorgeous writing and pinballing cast of intriguing (if not admirable) characters. And as I progressed deeper and deeper into its dreamlike depths, Mandel reveals her virtuosity, the seemingly random segways and discursions suddenly coalescing into the structure of a plot as tightly engineered as any thriller’s. A sad, beautiful, and worthwhile read.

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

The Vanished Birds, by Simon Jimenez

Every once in a while, I’m lucky enough to stumble into a book that drives me green with envy as a writer, a book that demonstrates a breadth and depth of talent that angers me for how brilliant and yet impossibly unapproachable it is. The Vanished Birds is one such book, a novel that can only really be described using superlatives, filled with all the gorgeous prose and insightful character interiority that us mere mortals can only dream of, framed with the science-fictional tropes I love in a way that shows Jimenez knows and loves them too.

The Vanished Birds is, ostensibly, about an ensemble of characters making their way across the ‘Verse in ramshackle spaceships, with all the trimmings and fixin’s of a full vaguely cyberpunkish space opera feast. But it’s also a book about tragedy, about poor choices and the consequences that follow naturally, about sacrifices and the people who make them (and the people who don’t). It weaves together stories and their moral centers without ever being preachy, and it brings together the highest of art without ever losing its sense of fun.

Special Achievement in Literary Quality (SALQ) Award: Margin Call, J.C. Chandor. At the beginning of 2022, it would have been absolutely inconceivable that a movie would take a SALQ home this year, especially in a year when I lucky enough to read as much brilliant and varied nonfiction as I did (including Kyle Buchanan’s Blood, Sweat & Chrome, which is an achievement almost as monumental as Mad Max: Fury Road, the movie it depicts; Connie Bruck’s Predator’s Ball, which handholds you through a painfully detailed tour through the excess and idiocy of 1980s Wall Street; and Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential, a Dante-esque descent into the horrors of the restaurant industry).

It’s also inconceivable that if I were to pick a film for the SALQ that I would skip over Andor, the best Star Wars content made by Disney, Goodfellas, the standout Scorsese in a career full of standouts, and Players, which was hilarious and also a legitimately good sports “documentary”.

And yet.

Margin Call is a tightly-wound film with a Mamet-esque focus on immersion over explication. Its portrayal of the culture of Corporate America is chillingly accurate, down to the tiniest tics and inane side conversations its actors live and breathe. The tensions bubbling in every glance and exchange of jargon, the blame-throwing politics and hierarchy of rank, the unspoken conversations encrypted beneath passive-aggressive surface pleasantries, the twisting and flailing of low-level workers attempting to avoid the wrath of eldritch and incomprehensible managers…it is the most true-to-life depiction on screen of the bizarro pocket universe I inhabit, painted by an elite ensemble cast armed with a script that crackles with insight.

It is 109 perfectly-executed minutes that have leased a space in my mind rent-free for months now, and for that, it is deserving of recognition for literary quality.

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)