2025 BNIRLY Award
It’s time for the 2025 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 2026, for a book I read in 2025, even though the nomenclature makes it sound like I am giving this award in 2025, for a book I read in 2024)
2025 was a confusing year for me; a number of the books nominated for BNIRLY’s were quite poorly rated in my mind when I finished them, and then on further reflection I decided to include them. It was also a year where, despite having many quality titles, the winner wasn’t immediately obvious, as you can see by the crowded field of runners-up.
Here are the honorable mentions for this year’s reading:
• Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh: I almost gave up on this book in the first hundred pages, which seemed to be a mediocre Ender’s Game knockoff filled with clunky, unlikeable, problematic characters, but Tesh manages to stick the landing with some interesting deconstruction of your typical Mil-SF and space opera tropes. If you can deal with some really nasty right-wing cult characters, you’re in for a treat.
• The Goblin Emperor, by Katherine Addison: It took me a while to place where I had found the wonderfully warm, thoughtful tone of this book before, and then it hit me: not in literature, but in TV’s Ted Lasso- a piece that showed that optimism and empathy are not antithetical to sophisticated storytelling. As I read this the same summer with A Game of Thrones, the contrast was remarkable.
• A Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin: Yes, I’m late to the party, and I saw the first episode of the TV show, and I’ve been exposed to all the memes. The book is still exceptional even when you see the twists coming, with rich world building and layers of irony that are perfectly earned by the characters.
• A Confederacy of Dunces, John Kennedy Toole: I hated, hated, hated this book when I finished it. HATED it. And yet, with some distance, I can’t help admit that it is exceptional, and the fact that its characters are all such awful, annoying, problematic people says little about its fine quality. Maybe I’m just depressed because we live in a world where the Ignatius J. Reilly’s lucked themselves into victory, but I shouldn’t hold it against the novel.
• The Peripheral, William Gibson: Pulpier and fun-er than other Gibson that I’ve read, while still managing to say some Very Important Things about colonialism and the way we dehumanize Other People.
The runner-up is Alliance Unbound, by C.J. Cherryh and Jane S. Fancher, another Alliance-Union yarn being cranked out by Cherryh’s story assembly line, which has Toyota-level consistency and quality control at this point. Yep, it’s got your sweaty, anxious, relatable protagonists; yep, it’s got your interesting world building that somehow is novel and yet fits perfectly with what’s already been established in an award-winning 20 book series (no, not that one, Cherryh’s OTHER award winning 20+ book series); and yep, it’s got the uncomfortable breakneck tension that in a lesser book would be produced by a hostage situation or a world-ending catastrophe, and here is produced by looking at dates on old souvenir receipts and waiting while the phone rings.
And this year’s winner of the Best Novel I Read Last Year Award is:
Stories of Your Life, and Other Stories, by Ted Chiang.
No, it’s not a novel; it’s eight absolutely perfect short stories, and technically shouldn’t qualify for a BNIRLY, but the jury (me) has agreed to an exemption for the exceptional Mr. Chiang. I’m not good at reading or writing short stories; I can count on one hand the number that I’ve truly enjoyed reading, and I think I have only ever finished one other collection of short stories (when I was 12). I also hate Big Idea stories, and each of Chiang’s stories centers around a Big Idea, thoughtfully and scrupulously examined in deceptively simple, unpretentious prose. I raced through these, setting aside my critic’s brain and simply allowing myself to enjoy, ruminate on, and eventually, admire these works of art.
Chiang is a writer of enormous subtlety and complexity; I understand now Peter Watt’s joke about how even atheist writers pray “Dear God, please don’t let Ted Chiang publish a story this year” when they have something up for awards. He’s gained significant recognition because of the adaptation of “Stories of Your Life” into the film Arrival (an excellent movie on its own merits), but the rest of the collection is as good, and in many cases better, than that particular story. The entire thing is worth reading, and re-reading.
Special Achievement in Literary Quality (SALQ) Award: Andor Season 2, by Tony Gilroy et al. [Note: this originally appeared on the 2024 BNIRLY Award roster because I was so far behind that I got my years mixed up, so it is being moved here] 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
• 2024: Version Control, Dexter Palmer (Runner-up: The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen)