Kurt Loder has a new book coming out, The Good, the Bad, & the Godawful, and in this interview he explains the preponderance of bad reviews by quoting Keith Richards:
Citing Keith Richards seems so wrong that I have to wonder if this was a calculated effort to get thousands of geeks to publicly denounce him and cite Sturgeon’s Revelation, from 1958:
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.