Neil Gaiman’s novel has already won the Newbery Medal, given by the American Library Association. It tells the story of a young boy whose parents are murdered and who is brought up by the ghosts in a graveyard. You may have seen Neil being interviewed about the book on The Colbert Report. Gaiman won Best Novel in 2002 for American Gods.

Cory Doctorow helps run the hugely popular geek blog Boing! Boing! and is a popular writer on topics such as copyright and civil liberties. This novel is set in a near-future San Francisco where a major earthquake is used as an excuse for an anti-terrorism crackdown. The book’s young hero uses his computer skills to fight back against government agents.

Neal Stephenson is the other past winner on the Best Novel ballot. His The Diamond Age won in 1996. Anathem is a 900 page novel set in a world in which scientists and philosophers hide themselves away from the mundane world in monasteries. The book has a lot to say about the nature of knowledge and scientific inquiry, and even has a few mathematical proofs in the appendices. This book is not available in the Hugo Voters’ Package.

Charles Stross has been a regular feature in the Hugo Award nominee lists for several years. This book, which features the adventures of a sexbot long after the human race she was created to serve has died out, is an homage to late-period Robert A. Heinlein novels, inparticular Friday.

John Scalzi is another hugely popular author-blogger. Zoe’s Tale is the latest story in his Old Man’s War series. Like the Gaiman and Doctorow books, it is marketed as YA, because the heroine is a 14-year-old girl. The book is actually a re-telling, from Zoe’s point of view, of the events of The Last Colony, which was a Hugo nominee last year.

Farah Mendlesohn is one of the most respected critics in the science fiction field, and the current President of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. This book has been hailed as a major breakthrough in our understanding of how fantastic literature works.

Paul Kincaid is a British fan and critic who for many years was the administrator for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. This book is a collection of his essays. It is published by a British small press and quite hard to come by except through the Hugo Voters’ Package.

John Scalzi’s Whatever is now one of the most popular science fiction blogs on the Internet. It is also very long-running. This book is a collection of the best of Whatever over the period 1998 to 2008.

The Spectrum Awards are one of the most prestigious sets of awards in the field of science fiction and fantasy art. Each year the award administrators, Cathy and Arnie Fenner, assemble a book from the best entries, and most years that book gets a Hugo nomination. This book is not available in the Hugo Voters’ Package.

If Hugo Awards are anything to go by Lois McMaster Bujold is one of the most successful SF writers ever. She has four Best Novel trophies, three of them for books featuring the character Miles Vorkosigan. Those are The Vor Game (1991), Barrayar (1992) and Mirror Dance (1995). This book, by Lillian Stewart Carl and John Helfers, is a guide to the universe of the Vorkosigan stories. This book is not available in the Hugo Voters’ Package.

Our first novel by a Campbell nominee is the first part of epic fantasy tale. It tells the story of a group of young royal children fighting to survive after their kingdom is conquered by foreign enemies. The author, David Anthony Durham, had a successful career writing historical novels before turning to fantasy.

Felix Gilman is a British lawyer living in New York. Thunderer is his first major sale. It is set in a vast, sprawling, god-plagued fantasy city. The Thunderer of the title is a flying warship. A second book in the series, Gears of the City, is now available.