A lista dos nomeados para o Hugo apresenta uma única semelhança com a apresentada para o Nebula: Little Brother de Cory Doctorow, distribuído online. Para além destes, foram nomeados Anathem (Neal Stephenson), The Graveyard Book (Neil Gaiman), Saturn’s Children (Charles Stross) e Zoe’s Tale (John Scalzi).

Anathem é um daqueles livros cuja sinopse e capa não me atraem – ambos me parecem de teor religioso. Apesar de ter sido referido por diversos blogs como uma das melhores leituras de 2008, o seu volume de páginas é intimidatório (podem encontrá-lo na FNAC) e para ler livros deste tamanho, só tendo a certeza que iria pegar em algo extraordinário. Aqui fica uma parte da sinopse:

Fraa Erasmas is a young avout living in the Concent of Saunt Edhar, a sanctuary for mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers, protected from the corrupting influences of the outside “saecular” world by ancient stone, honored traditions, and complex rituals. Over the centuries, cities and governments have risen and fallen beyond the concent’s walls. Three times during history’s darkest epochs violence born of superstition and ignorance has invaded and devastated the cloistered mathic community. Yet the avout have always managed to adapt in the wake of catastrophe, becoming out of necessity even more austere and less dependent on technology and material things. And Erasmas has no fear of the outside – the Extramuros – for the last of the terrible times was long, long ago.

Como praticamente tudo de Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book entrou para a minha Wishlist mesmo antes de ter sido lançado.

Também referenciado em várias listagens de melhores do ano, possui um resumo estranho e diferente, o que para mim é razão principal para considerar comprar um livro:

Bod is an unusual boy who inhabits an unusual place-he’s the only living resident of a graveyard. Raised from infancy by the ghosts, werewolves, and other cemetery denizens, Bod has learned the antiquated customs of his guardians’ time as well as their timely ghostly teachings-like the ability to Fade.

Can a boy raised by ghosts face the wonders and terrors of the worlds of both the living and the dead? And then there are things like ghouls that aren’t really one thing or the other.

Charles Stross é o autor de Accelerando (disponível online), um livro muito badalado, mas que não me convenceu.

Saturn’s Children parece enquadrar-se dentro do género Space Opera, um tributo de Stross aos últimos Heinlein. Entre a sinopse e a minha experiência anterior com Charles Stross, não penso em ler este livro nos próximos tempos:

Freya Nakamachi-47 has some major existential issues. She’s the perfect concubine, designed to please her human masters; there’s just one problem: she came off the production line a year after the human species went extinct. Whatever else she may be, she’s gloriously obsolete. But the rigid social hierarchy that has risen in the 200 years since the last human died, places beings such as Freya very near the bottom. So when she has a run-in on Venus with a murderous aristocrat, she needs passage off-world in a hurry — and can’t be too fussy about how she pays her way. If Venus was a frying pan, Mercury is the fire — and soon she’s going to be running for her life. Because the job she’s taken as a courier has drawn her to the attention of powerful and dangerous people, and they don’t just want the package she’s carrying. They want her soul …

John Scalzi é outro autor que desconheço, mas do qual já cá possuo um livro, à espera de ser lido: Android’s Dream, um título que relembra o Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep do Philip K. Dick que promete uma história irónica de humor pelo menos acizentado.

Zoe’s Tale parece não se enquadrar neste espírito, como quarto livro da série Old’s Man War, um recontar da história que podem encontrar em The Last Colony, mas pela perspectiva de uma das personagens, Zoe. Zoe’s Tale parece também não se enquadrar no género que mais aprecio:

I ask because it’s what I have to do. I’m Zoe Boutin Perry: A colonist stranded on a deadly pioneer world. Holy icon to a race of aliens. A player (and a pawn) in a interstellar chess match to save humanity, or to see it fall. Witness to history. Friend. Daughter. Human. Seventeen years old.

Everyone on Earth knows the tale I am part of. But you don’t know my tale: How I did what I did — how I did what I had to do — not just to stay alive but to keep you alive, too. All of you. I’m going to tell it to you now, the only way I know how: not straight but true, the whole thing, to try make you feel what I felt: the joy and terror and uncertainty, panic and wonder, despair and hope. Everything that happened, bringing us to Earth, and Earth out of its captivity. All through my eyes.

It’s a story you know. But you don’t know it all.