History
The first written reference to the adage appears in the March 1958 issue of Venture, 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. 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, etc. are crap. In other words, the claim (or fact) that 90% of science fiction is crap is ultimately uninformative, because science fiction conforms to the same trends of quality as all other artforms.According to Philip Klass (William Tenn), Sturgeon made this remark in about 1951, at a talk at New York University at which Tenn was present. The statement was subsequently included in a talk Sturgeon gave at a session of the World Science Fiction Convention in Philadelphia, held over the Labor Day weekend of 1953.
Read more about this topic: Sturgeon's Law
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“the future is simply nothing at all. Nothing has happened to the present by becoming past except that fresh slices of existence have been added to the total history of the world. The past is thus as real as the present.”
—Charlie Dunbar Broad (1887–1971)
“False history gets made all day, any day,
the truth of the new is never on the news
False history gets written every day
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the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
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“The history of modern art is also the history of the progressive loss of art’s audience. Art has increasingly become the concern of the artist and the bafflement of the public.”
—Henry Geldzahler (1935–1994)