The Spinal Frontier
The new Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, occupying several renovated floors of EMP, is all glass and glowing orbs and good intentions. Someone's put a lot into it. The panels and consoles and fixtures beg you to imagine that you're not in a museum but rather on the deck of a spaceship--though instead of peering through glass windows into extended space, you peer into crowded, well-lit, heavily placarded displays of stuff: mostly movie props (the crossbow Jane Fonda used in Barbarella) and scary masks (from Predator, from T2) and spangled costumes (Will Robinson's, Dr. Spock's). Plus posters, comics, screenplays, replicas of NASA equipment, a life-size puppet of E.T. that was used in the movie, a complete collection of Star Wars action figures--in all, too much to list here. A constructed narrative sorts out the artifacts and guides visitors through the place: Here is the brief history of sci-fi, beginning with Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in 1818; here are all the famous sci-fi ships; here are all the famous sci-fi weapons; here are the planets, real and imagined. But in no way do you feel like you're on an adventure. There's not nearly enough interactivity along the way to bring the narrative design to actual fruition. You stand. You look. It's a museum. Even as a museum it doesn't really take you anywhere.
Oh, and it's full of books, obviously. A first edition of The Time Machine by H. G. Wells, a first edition of Slaughterhouse-Five, a first edition of Brave New World (signed by Aldus Huxley).... As objects, the books--you remember what a book looks like?--are already less glamorous than the Star Trek outfits, but in a museum environment like this one they just can't compete. Everything here is inaccessible to some extent, being behind glass, but at least a TV-show costume is meant to be merely looked at. Staring at a book? A book is a little less fascinating. I understand that it's the Science Fiction Museum and not the Science Fiction Library or the Science Fiction Bookstore, but it's still strange to stand in an exhibition that pays such a major tribute to books and not be able to hold or flip through even one.
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You could, though, if the spirit of sci-fi so possessed you, walk from the Science Fiction Museum up to the new Twice Sold Tales in lower Queen Anne. In the space that Titlewave Books occupied for 19 years, this Twice Sold Tales is significantly smaller than the one on Capitol Hill, though (unlike on Capitol Hill) it's the only bookstore in the neighborhood. Fittingly, the front windows are decorated with blown-up color reproductions of classic genre-fiction book covers, including the futuristic The Wave. Bookstores are strapped these days, but owner Jamie Lutton says that business is steady and that "having that museum down the street will increase the number of book readers in the neighborhood."
