Sturgeon's Law

[Toby G Levy]

It's CRUD, dammit, not crap! Why does everyone misquote and misattribute
Sturgeon's Law?  The word crud was used for a reason. Crap simply means
excrement, whereas crud means "something loathsome, despicable, or
worthless." A far more evocative word, isn't it?

And I always heard that it was the interviewer who first used the word.
It was a radio interviewer in the 1950s who asked Sturgeon "Isn't ninety
percent of Science Fiction crud?" And Sturgeon replied, "Yes, but..." You
know the rest.

Toby

> As the science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon (the original for 
> Kurt Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout) observed: "Ninety per cent of science
> fiction is crap. But 90 per cent of everything is crap." How can we
> identify the 10 per cent, or less, of fiction available that is not
> crap?