--- In
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "Juri Nummelin"
<juri.nummelin@...> wrote:
>
> --- In
rara-avis-l@yahoogroups.com, "foxbrick" <foxbrick@>
wrote:
> > That's pretty much what Sturgeon meant--from
the ridiculously
> awful to
> > the utterly humdrum mediocrity.
>
> Todd,
>
> it would be really nice to know why mediocre is
crap. I think
> someone like Brett Halliday or Edward S. Aarons is
mediocre, but
> they are not crap in any sense of the word. Or maybe
someone like
> G.W. Ford, from the more recent writers. Or Sue
Grafton (okay, I
> haven't read that much by her, but I wouldn't say
she's great nor
> would I say she's crap). Mediocre can be very
entertaining, while
> crap is almost never entertaining. (Unless it's
something like THE
> MESA OF LOST WOMEN.)
>
> I've been pissed at Sturgeon's Law for some time
now. Okay,
Sturgeon
> meant it as a joke (he was drunk, as Richard pointed
out) and we
> should treat it as such and not take it as a truth.
It's become
sort
> of a lame excuse. Someone says: "Hey, crime novels
are crap,
didn't
> you know that, read literary novels instead." And we
say back,
> smirking: "Hey, didn't you know that 90 % of
literary novels is
> crap?" And that's the end of discussion.
Well, anyone who dismisses all fiction of a certain subject
matter is a fool, anyway. (Mason's Uncharitable Estimate--a
fool to that extent, anyway.) If something is entertaining,
it isn't blandly, dully mediocre...but, this discussion is
approaching Sturgeon's Estimate, rather than Law, from the
wrong direction. As with your theoretical discussion, or
Mario's post, Sturgeon in first putting the estimate in print
noted that most people decided that all science fiction was
THE MESA OF LOST WOMEN, that almost always sf was being
judged by its worst examples. Certainly, he went on, 90% of
sf might be of less than stellar quality, but, then, so was a
similar percentage of every other kind of literature.
So the trite and the half-assed but somehow including some
sort of spark or even bad-laugh fun about them (you decide
the difference between, say, Bellem and Avallone) might fall
at the borderline, or on either side of the estimate.
Todd Mason
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