8 Laws Named For Writers

I might want this information again at some future point; so this is pretty much just for the notebook.

Muphry’s law (of writing about editing)

• If you write anything criticizing editing or proofreading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written.

Gaiman’s laws

1. If there’s a typo in the book you wrote, that typo will be on the page the book falls open to the first time you pick it up.
2. All scientifically possible technology and social change predicted in science fiction will come to pass, but none of it will work properly.

Sturgeon’s law

• Ninety percent of everything is crap.

Herblock’s law

• If it’s good, they’ll stop making it.

Celine’s laws

1. National security is the chief cause of national insecurity.
2. Accurate communication is possible only in a non-publishing situation.
3. An honest politician is a national calamity.

Clarke’s three laws

1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

Poe’s law

• The unit of poetry must be fixed by the reader’s capacity of attention, and … the limits of a poem must accord with the limits of a single movement of intellectual apprehension and emotional exaltation.

Three Laws of Robotics

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given to it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.

Though this is just a list of the laws, there’s further discussion on these laws at the source article.

8 Laws Named For Writers « PWxyz.