Exploring Our New Reality (Pass the Soma)

This weekend was the first ever trip to the Science Fiction Museum, located in the same building as the Experience Music Project, under the Needle. Evidently EMP is famous or something. The SciFi Museum is far cooler.

The building has some righteous architecture around it, most especially so the EMP building itself, with the monorail running straight into it. The building is in this bended liquid metal form, that can't really be described. It's a matrix.






Inside the SciFi Museum, well, there are no pictures allowed :-( What I could get was in the ticketing line- the bathroom signs, and a model of my dad when he was doing movie extra work in LA back in the day.

After entering you're treated to everything that ever happened in the world of science fiction. Particularly impressive are a few videoglobes, with internal projectors showing an entire fictional or real planet or moon from all angles. I enjoyed one viewing window where you could see ships from many books and movies coming together, and compare their relative sizes. You haven't lived until you see the ship of Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind moving next to Rama, the Enterprise 1701, and the Millenium Falcon.

Models were everywhere, including ship models and the actual costumes worn by the TV Superman, Star Trek, Star Wars, and many others. I learned that the metal spacesuit that Bones wears in TOS is actually all fabric. And the unitard that 7 of 9 wears in STV totally doesn't look as good when it's just hanging there on a rack. Don't know why...

Throughout there was a detailed history of science fiction, with small cards discussing notable works of interest. I gathered tons of ideas for that next Science Fiction book on my list. (Why won't they stop writing books!? There are just too many of them already!)

Notably missing was 1) information on British series- they had the uniform of Cat from Red Dwarf, but that was about it; 2) anything Christian- saw one book of L'Engle's, but nothing of Lewis or Lawhead; and 3) that new burgening genre of Alternate History which often merges with SciFi- including the master, Turtledove. But the museum is continuously updating from it's rapidly changing genre, so there's hope for more inclusiveness in the future. Every year they add on new members to their Hall of Fame- those in SciFi who have contributed the most over the years.