Giant Space Robots And The Androids That Love Them

As my time in Seattle was quickly approaching the end, I decided to engage in a bit of tourism that I had heretofore assiduously avoided. Yes, I undertook the grueling 520 foot elevator ride that brings one to the top of the Space Needle.

However, before I did that I decided to finally use the ticket to the Science Fiction Museum that my good friend Ron had purchased for me a year earlier on the occasion of my 30th birthday. The rather ironic bit here is that I used the ticket almost exactly a year to the day that it was purchased. The ticket was purchased by Ron on August 28th, 2004 at 6:18 PM. The ticket was used on August 28th, 2005 at 6:05 PM.

The Science Fiction Museum was interesting, although my general impression of it conformed fairly closely to the critical reviews it had recieved in the local papers. The museum appears to essentially be a collection of science fiction memorabilia purchased over the years by Paul Allen. In that sense, it's rather interesting to see props from a wide variety of television shows and movies. My main complaint is that what's inside the northwest corner of the EMP building hardly deserves to be called a museum. There's very little intellectual content, and I suppose I've always believed that a museum is more than a place to see stuff. It's a place where you see stuff that makes you think.

The place has two floors. The top floor has nominally more intellectual content than the bottom floor in that it is devoted almost entirely to science fiction novels and the authors that write them. Unfortunately, for anyone who has read any science fiction, their treatment of the various novels falls woefully short. They break down the genre into subjects, ie "nanotechnology", "robots", "aliens", "androids", "computers" and other categories. They then provide a smattering of books that are "about" the chosen subject. For example, Isaac Asimov's "I, Robot" falls into the "robot" category and David Brin's "Kiln People" falls into the "android" category. Small placards are placed next to each book with a quick description of what the book is about and if you're lucky, when it was written and by whom.

Maybe I was expecting too much, but there was no in depth discussion of any of the authors, the books they had written or whether their visions of the future had proven to be prescient. Also, there were a number of books I thought were oddly missing. The Foundation "Trilogy" was nowhere to be found, nor were any of the Dune books. In fact, there were a lot of books that were present that I'd never heard of. A lot of them looked like the kind of books that I wouldn't read simply because the cover art made them look really cheesey. You know, the ones where some guy that looks vaguely like Han Solo is gripping a laser zapper in one hand and a hot big boobed babe in the other and either running from or to something. I did find out that Kim Stanley Robinson has a few books out that I didn't know about, so some good did come of it.

The lower floor was all memorabilia, and for some reason, a small section about Orson Scott Card and the Ender series. The memorabilia was okay, although after a while it got pretty repetative. I don't care much about TV as it is, so seeing the various costumes people wore and the fake blasters they carried wasn't all that exciting. They had a big section on War of the Worlds, which was full of stuff about the at-the-time upcoming movie. Scottland was pretty disappointed by this section, as there was absolutely nothing about the book or the radio broadcast that freaked out the nation other than a recording of the broadcast that you could listen to if you wanted. Also, there was an LCD display that kept replaying commercials for the upcoming season of shows on the Sci-Fi channel. Only, it was for the first season of Battlestar Galactica and Stargate : Atlantis, so a little out of date considering that we're nearly halfway through season two at this point.

So yeah, the Science Fiction Museum was interesting, but I'm glad I didn't have to pay for my ticket. Still, thanks for the ticket Ron, I'm glad I got to see it. If anything, it gave me a strong sense of what a science fiction museum should look like, and it also made me realize that I need to start doing a lot more reading. There's still a lot of good stuff out there, with new good stuff being written every day. I just need to avoid the dreck. I'll just be sure to not read most of what Paul Allen apparently reads. But then, I don't like big-boobed-space-babes, so that'll probably be pretty easy.