90% of everything is crud.
This is actually Sturgeon's Revelation, but common usage has it that this phrase is what is meant when the Law is cited. The actual quote for the Law is: "Nothing is always absolutely so."
The first reference to Sturgeon's Revelation appears in the March 1958 issue of Venture Science Fiction, where science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon wrote: "I repeat Sturgeon's Revelation, which was wrung out of me after twenty years of wearying defense of science fiction against attacks of people who used the worst examples of the field for ammunition, and whose conclusion was that ninety percent of SF is crud."
There is also a possibly apocryphal story that tells of Sturgeon making the above comment during a panel discussion at a science fiction convention. When the audience protested, Sturgeon reportedly blinked and replied, "90% of
everything is crud."
Sturgeon's Revelation is sometimes expanded as follows:
- Corollary 1: The existence of immense quantities of trash in science fiction is admitted and it is regrettable; but it is no more unnatural than the existence of trash anywhere.
- Corollary 2: The best science fiction is as good as the best fiction in any field. (It's clear this doesn't necessarily follow from the Revelation.)
- Our Corollary: The difficulty of getting a group of people to agree on which is the non-cruddy 10% exponentially approaches infinity as the size of the group increases. (Or, "Crud is in the eye of the beholder... so to speak.")
- Critic's Corollary: 90% of people lack the taste necessary to distinguish between crud and non-crud.
Sturgeon's Law is particularly obvious when the barriers to entry -- the whims of publishers -- are removed. Thus, self-publishing, especially in the virtually cost-free environment of the Internet, makes this cruddy 90% visible to the public, rather than leaving it to languish in an aspiring writer's desk drawer. This often leads to the false impression that, for example,
Fan Fic attracts poor writers; the fact is that the poor writers have
always been out there, but until recently their poor writing had few outlets to the eyes of the public. Now they have
Fan Fiction.net.
If we assume that the 90% figure applies only to published works, then about one in a million of all things out there is not crud. Most people, though, have seen more than one non-cruddy thing in their lifetime.
Often the phrase is followed by the even more cynical addendum, "... including the other 10%." Very rarely, a more optimistic second clause is added: "...but the remaining 10% is worth dying for."
A variation of this law employed by critic
Ben Croshaw, known as the
Guantánamo Bay approach, dictates "Everything is crud until proven otherwise".
The
Nostalgia Filter and
Import Filter can be considered both side effects of this and a major balancing factor.
In person, Theodore Sturgeon didn't use the word 'crud' when this subject came up, in 1979.
