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From: Ahasuerus <ahasuerus@email.com>
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: 1974 Nebula Finalists
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2024 22:01:52 -0400
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On 3/12/2024 9:29 AM, Michael F. Stemper wrote:
> On 11/03/2024 18.27, William Hyde wrote:
>> Garrett Wollman wrote:
>>> In article <usn14n$3cg$1@reader1.panix.com>,
>>> James Nicoll <jdnicoll@panix.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> [big snips]
>>>
>>>> 1974 Nebula Finalist Novels
>>>>
>>>> Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein
> 
>>> a lot more of Heinlein's friends and admirers were in SFWA at the
>>> time.
>>
>> And given his recent health issues, they may have felt that this was 
>> their last chance to nominate him.
>>
>> I suspect that the overlap between the people who voted "No Award" to 
>> keep Gene Wolfe from a nebula a couple of years earlier and those who 
>> nominated this would be large.
> 
> Huh? What did they have against Wolfe? His stuff's not my cuppa,
> but I wouldn't cross the street to keep him from an award.

Apparently it was James Sallis’s “The Creation of Benny Hill” that 
particularly infuriated the Old Guard. Here is what Gardner Dozois once 
wrote 
(https://www.tor.com/2011/02/20/hugo-nominees-1971/comment-page-1/#comment-166772) 
about the episode:

 > This was the height of the War of the New Wave, and passions
 > between the New Wave camp and the conservative Old Guard camp
 > were running high. (The same year, Michael Moorcock said in a
 > review that the only way SFWA could have found a worse thing
 > than RINGWORLD to give the Nebula to was to give it to a comic
 > book). The fact that the short story ballot was almost
 > completely made up of stuff from ORBIT had outraged the Old
 > Guard, particularly James Sallis’s surreal “The Creation of
 > Benny Hill”, and they block-voted for No Award as a protest
 > against “non-functional word patterns” making the ballot.
 > Judy-Lynn del Rey told me as much immediately after the
 > banquet, when she was exuberantly gloating about how they’d
 > “put ORBIT in its place” with the voting results, and
 > actually said “We won!”