Sturgeon's law (or Sturgeon's revelation) is an adage stating "ninety percent of everything is crap". It was coined by Theodore Sturgeon, an American science fiction author and critic, and was inspired by his observation that, while science fiction was often derided for its low quality by critics, most work in other fields was low-quality too, and so science fiction was no different.
Sturgeon deemed Sturgeon's law to mean "nothing is always absolutely so".[1] This adage previously appeared in his story "The Claustrophile" in a 1956 issue of Galaxy.[2]
The second adage, variously rendered as "ninety percent of everything is crud" or "ninety percent of everything is crap", was known as "Sturgeon's Revelation", formulated as such in his book review column for Venture[3] in 1957. However, almost all modern uses of the term Sturgeon's law refer to the second, including the definition listed in the Oxford English Dictionary.[4]
A similar adage appears in Rudyard Kipling's The Light That Failed, published in 1890.
A 1946 essay Confessions of a Book Reviewer by George Orwell asserts about books:
According to science fiction author William Tenn, Sturgeon first expressed his law circa 1951, at a talk at New York University attended by Tenn.[5] The statement was subsequently included in a talk Sturgeon gave at a 1953 Labor Day weekend session of the World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia.[6]
The first written reference to the adage is in the September 1957 issue of Venture:
The adage appears again in the March 1958 issue of Venture, where Sturgeon wrote:
In 2013, philosopher Daniel Dennett championed Sturgeon's law as one of his seven tools for critical thinking.[7]