Sturgeon’s Law was too generous, argues science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer. Writer Theodore Sturgeon said that 90 percent of science fiction was “crud” (or “crap,” depending on where he’s quoted.) But actually, the chances of choosing a good SF novel at random are way lower than that, Sawyer tells Bookmarks: Someone who gets interested in science fiction and picks up a book from the “vast SF rack… will be turned off, because the work will almost certainly be crap. . . . Yup, you could read a good SF novel a week each week of the year, no doubt. But if you read an SF novel a week picked at random from the rack, you’d never come back for a second year of such torture.” [Bookmarks, via Utne Reader]
