Sturgeon's law
Sturgeon's Law is an adage derived from a quote by science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon: "Nothing is always absolutely so." The name is also frequently used for an adage that is more correctly known as Sturgeon's Revelation: "Ninety percent of everything is crud." In fact, most modern uses of the term Sturgeon's Law actually refer to the Revelation, including the definition currently listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.
Origins
Sturgeon's Law is referenced in Theodore Sturgeon's 1972 interview with David G. Hartwell (published in The New York Review of Science Fiction #7 and #8, March and April 1989): "Sturgeon's Law originally was 'Nothing is always absolutely so.' The other one was known as 'Sturgeon's Revelation.'"
The first reference to Sturgeon's Revelation appears in the March 1958 issue of Venture Science Fiction, where 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."
Another version of the story has Sturgeon involved in a panel discussion of modern literature with a professor of English literature. The professor read a few selected passages of "purple prose" from popular science fiction works, and declared "90% of this Science Fiction is crap." Sturgeon replied "90% of everything is crap."
Corollaries
Sturgeon's Revelation is sometimes expanded as follows:
- The Revelation: Ninety percent of everything is crud.
- Corollary: 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.
Alternative phrasing
Sturgeon's Revelation is often cited using crap or shit instead of crud. The percentage figure also sometimes varies, having been in print as "94%" and even "98%".
Very rarely, a more optimistic second clause is added, "...but the remaining 10% is worth dying for."
Some years ago I heard Mr. Sturgeon speak at the local library. A fan in the audience asked him what the "official" percentage should be. He confessed that over the years he had used everything from 90% through 99% and that he himself no longer remembered the percentage he used when he first coined the phrase.
Interpretations
The meaning of Sturgeon's Revelation was explicitly detailed by Sturgeon himself. He made his original remarks in direct response to ill-conceived attacks against science fiction that used "the worst examples of the field for ammunition." Using the same standards that categorize 90% of science fiction as trash, crud, or crap, it can be argued that 90% of film, literature, consumer goods, (and so on), are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crud is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artistic artifacts do.
Sturgeon's Law may be regarded as an instance of the Pareto principle.
Proving Sturgeon's Law
Most laws of nature are statements of the obvious, restated in less obvious ways. Carried to an extreme, one could say, "Nature always compensates. If a man is born with one shorter leg, the other will invariably be longer to compensate."
Sturgeon's Law is simply a restatement of Count Alfred Korzybski's basic principle of General Semantics, "the map is not the territory". As a science fiction reader as well as a science fiction writer, Sturgeon must have been aware of Korzybski's work, as A. E. van Vogt wrote a series of science fiction stories based on it, starting with The World of Null-A.
If there is any difference in "desirability", the bell curve of a normal distribution predicts that most experiences will involve average desirability, with roughly equal occurrences of excellence and gross inadequacy. Sturgeon's Revelation is an observation that once humans are exposed to excellence, mere average desirability is disappointing. The more proper formulation might be something like "80% of everything is crud, and 10% of everything is crap." If one either defines crud to include crap, or else defines excellence and crap to each be about 5% of all experiences, then "90% of everything is crud" would be true.