I'm not sure what happened to the finalists for 1987 and 1988.
Wikipedia
does list some runners-up for 1988, but there's no corroboration on
SFADB,
so I'm personally loathe to add them to ISFDB.
Ansible seems to have
been on hiatus around this time. It wouldn't surprise me if there's a record
somewhere on eFanzines, but I wouldn't
know where to start looking.
It's slightly strange that the Golden Tentacle/Debut Novel award frequently goes
to one of the least rated books on Goodreads, whereas the Red
Tentacle/Best Novel frequently goes to one of the top two most rated books.
For a public-vote award, you might rationalize this as an author's established
fandom voting them up, whereas there'd be less of that in a debut novel
category, but that shouldn't really apply to a panel-judged award. The
Kitschies don't strike me as an award influenced by public popularity or a
desire to be contrarian - and I believe the panel membership changes every
year - so I can't think of any explanation for this state of affairs.
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