Did people feel they'd slighted her in some previous year? What happened there?
If I recall correctly, Falling Free won in a year when there were several very strong nominees -- William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive and Gene Wolfe's Urth of the New Sun, to pick the two standouts, plus entries by Orson Scott Card and Greg Benford and George Turner and Lewis Shiner -- and there was a lot of what I suppose you could call partisan spirit going on, where the cyberpunk crowd who picked Gibson for their first choice wouldn't vote for Gene Wolfe if you paid them, and vice versa. The Nebula ballot uses a preferential voting system, so in a year where you've got a couple of strong candidates that divide the electorate it's entirely possible for all the supposed front runners to knock each other out of the running and have the election go to the candidate who's nobody's favorite but is the second or third choice of a lot of voters.
no subject
If I recall correctly, Falling Free won in a year when there were several very strong nominees -- William Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive and Gene Wolfe's Urth of the New Sun, to pick the two standouts, plus entries by Orson Scott Card and Greg Benford and George Turner and Lewis Shiner -- and there was a lot of what I suppose you could call partisan spirit going on, where the cyberpunk crowd who picked Gibson for their first choice wouldn't vote for Gene Wolfe if you paid them, and vice versa. The Nebula ballot uses a preferential voting system, so in a year where you've got a couple of strong candidates that divide the electorate it's entirely possible for all the supposed front runners to knock each other out of the running and have the election go to the candidate who's nobody's favorite but is the second or third choice of a lot of voters.