2024 BNIRLY Award
It’s time for the 2024 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 2025, for a book I read in 2024, even though the nomenclature makes it sound like I am giving this award in 2024, for a book I read in 2023)
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 continues to ramp up in hours/stress. You may notice there are fewer finalists this year, and that’s because I’ve read significantly less! *lolsob
Here are the honorable mentions for this year’s reading:
• Nettle and Bone, by T. Kingfisher: An elegant, efficient, and occasionally brutal reimagining of fairy tale tropes; not usually my cup of tea but a wonderful gift from my brother. Maybe I should read more fairy tale-inspired fantasy?
• Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel: “What if our queen of dreamy lit-fic wrote a Doctor Who episode with no aliens” was not on my bingo card, but as always, St. John Mandel delivers, with her trademark beautiful prose and sharp plotting.
• The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John le Care: A monumental influence on spy fiction, of course, but le Care’s excellent little stale beer novel manages to both deliver a prototypical clockwork-thriller plot and a deeply unsettling, unflattering portrait of the humans crushed between the gears of politics and espionage.
The Runner Up for this year’s BNIRLY Award is The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen. An utterly uncompromising, painful, and often very bleakly funny mix of immigrant tale and spy story penned by a prose master. There are books that are filled with interesting characters, and books that tell you Important Things about America; it’s a rare book that can do both, and do so entertainingly. Additionally, by odd coincidence, I read this right before watching a performance of Qui Nguyen’s stage play Vietgone, which approaches similar themes from a distinctly different point of view; the parallax was fascinating.
And this year’s winner of the Best Novel I Read Last Year Award is:
Version Control, by Dexter Palmer.
It’s extremely hard to talk about how great this book is without spoiling one if its many and many-layered twists. Let us simply say that Dexter Palmer follows in the tradition of the greatest SF/F writers in using a science-fictional conceit to meaningfully explore a richly-drawn cast of characters and their relationships to one another, themselves, and the recognizable but twisted world around them, in a way you really couldn’t in non-genre land. Palmer knows how to use words as weapons, and carves threatening patterns of trauma, lies, and pain in the way only the most truthful storytellers can.
Version Control is also an exceptional exercise in contemporary world building, showing us an America distinctive from but instantly relatable to the one we now inhabit, with monsters and victims of all sorts lurking the shadows between pages. It’s odd, looking at the future it predicted when published where we are today, and invokes the strangest nostalgia for a time we never really had—in an entirely deliberate, and quite effective way (again, trying not to spoil anything).
Special Achievement in Literary Quality (SALQ) Award: Andor Season 2, by Tony Gilroy et al. I’m a gigantic Star Wars fan, so of course this was going to take the cake. This season heightens the tension while simultaneously pulling back the curtain on our ramshackle cast of (impeccably-acted) characters, while recontextualizing and enriching both Season 1 and the rest of the Star Wars media franchise. The writers’ craft is on full display here; I openly wept in the first season, and almost had a panic attack in the second, with even the most mundane moments gripping me. A substitute driver turns to greet her client; a woman dances drunkenly; a bellboy talks about the view from a hotel window; a policeman pushes through a crowd; a nurse wheels a patient through a hospital. All very simple when taken out of context; all insanely rich when woven into the tapestry that Gilroy and his writer’s room created.
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
• 2023: Gideon the Ninth, Tamysn Muir (Runner-up: Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel). SALQ Award: Breaking Bad, Vince Gilligan et al