{"id":321,"date":"2004-06-18T21:49:01","date_gmt":"2004-06-19T01:49:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=321"},"modified":"2004-06-18T21:49:01","modified_gmt":"2004-06-19T01:49:01","slug":"science-fiction-museum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/?p=321","title":{"rendered":"Science Fiction Museum"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"SF<\/a> Today was the opening day for Seattle’s new Science Fiction Museum<\/a>, Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen’s latest toy. The museum is actually in a corner of the Experience Music Project<\/a> building designed by Frank Gehry. (They took out a virtual reality ride, called “Journey to the Heart of Funk,” or some such, to make room for it. What, George Clinton wasn’t science fictional enough for them?).
\nI missed the opening ceremony, but I got to see the exhibits, such as they are. Basically it’s a series of dimly lit rooms, with items Paul Allen must have thought it was cool to collect, such as first editions of famous SF novels, uniforms worn on the starship Enterprise<\/em>, and so on, together with a bunch of high tech displays (a touch screen allows you to choose among various imagined planets, from Solaris to whatever the planet in Dune<\/em> was called; information about the chosen planet is given in that generic, slight-upper-class-British-accent voice that is typically used for nature documentaries).
\nVaguely “spacy” music is played in the background.
\nThe downstairs exhibit area is arranged like a spaceport, you have ticket areas, waiting areas, and a door (which never opens, of course) to the spaceship on which you would embark. The gift shop, which of course you encounter on the way out, is sadly understocked.
\nOf course, there are enough simultaneous sources of light and sound that you feel a certain effect of sensory overload; though the main result isn’t anything psychedelic, just that it becomes harder to notice how sparse and uninteresting the exhibits actually are.
\nPhotos inside the museum are not allowed; I didn’t try to take any, though I probably could have gotten away with it.
\nTo be less snide just for a minute: what makes the Experience Music Project worthwhile is not the silly exhibits, but the spinoff activities that the museum sponsors: such as educational stuff for kids, and the annual Pop Conference<\/a>, at which I have had a great experience for three years running. It remains to be seen what the Science Fiction Museum will do in a similar vein, but if they offer anything similar it will be quite worthwhile (it would be great if they could sponsor something, emulating the Pop Conference, that was neither a fan convention nor an academic conference, but that nonetheless brought together creators and people who think seriously about the genre).
\nI didn’t really need to go the first day the Museum was open; but since I will be leaving Seattle for good, Real Soon Now, I thought I should take the opportunity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today was the opening day for Seattle’s new Science Fiction Museum<\/a>, Microsoft billionaire Paul Allen’s latest toy. The museum is actually in a corner of the Experience Music Project<\/a> building designed by Frank Gehry. (They took out a virtual reality ride, called “Journey to the Heart of Funk,” or some such, to make room for it. What, George Clinton wasn’t science fictional enough for them?).
\nI missed the opening ceremony, but I got to see the exhibits, such as they are. Basically it’s a series of dimly lit rooms, with items Paul Allen must have thought it was cool to collect, such as first editions of famous SF novels, uniforms worn on the starship Enterprise<\/em>, and so on, together with a bunch of high tech displays (a touch screen allows you to choose among various imagined planets, from Solaris to whatever the planet in Dune<\/em> was called; information about the chosen planet is given in that generic, slight-upper-class-British-accent voice that is typically used for nature documentaries).
\nVaguely “spacy” music is played in the background.
\nThe downstairs exhibit area is arranged like a spaceport, you have ticket areas, waiting areas, and a door (which never opens, of course) to the spaceship on which you would embark. The gift shop, which of course you encounter on the way out, is sadly understocked.
\nOf course, there are enough simultaneous sources of light and sound that you feel a certain effect of sensory overload; though the main result isn’t anything psychedelic, just that it becomes harder to notice how sparse and uninteresting the exhibits actually are.
\nPhotos inside the museum are not allowed; I didn’t try to take any, though I probably could have gotten away with it.
\nTo be less snide just for a minute: what makes the Experience Music Project worthwhile is not the silly exhibits, but the spinoff activities that the museum sponsors: such as educational stuff for kids, and the annual Pop Conference<\/a>, at which I have had a great experience for three years running. It remains to be seen what the Science Fiction Museum will do in a similar vein, but if they offer anything similar it will be quite worthwhile (it would be great if they could sponsor something, emulating the Pop Conference, that was neither a fan convention nor an academic conference, but that nonetheless brought together creators and people who think seriously about the genre).
\nI didn’t really need to go the first day the Museum was open; but since I will be leaving Seattle for good, Real Soon Now, I thought I should take the opportunity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pop"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=321"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/321\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shaviro.com\/Blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}