Star-travelling at Seattle's sci-fi museum

By GENE JOHNSON

The director of Seattle's new science fiction museum wants to get people thinking about "What if".

"What if your best friend was an alien?" Donna Shirley asks. "What if you could erase things from your past? It gives people permission to speculate. We want to get kids thinking about what could really happen."

In other words, the museum is going for more than geek appeal, although it has plenty of that.

Among the exhibits are Captain James T. Kirk's original command chair from Star Trek (no, you can't sit in it), an interactive space station exhibit, fan magazines, posters and a ray-gun collection that could get America's National Rifle Association excited about galaxies far, far away.

The Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, created with US$20 million ($32 million) from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, is housed in a remodelled section of Allen's other museum, the Experience Music Project.

The museum's appropriately shiny futuristic building, designed by Frank Gehry, is at the foot of the Space Needle, and the monorail - a 1960s concept of future travel - runs through it.

Greg Bear, the best-selling author of Forge of God and Darwin's Radio, and the advisory board chairman, says his home city of Seattle is the perfect location.

"Seattle is a science fiction city," Bear says, "and many of the influential people in Seattle are science fiction fans and readers."

Exhibits track the genre from Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein through the prescient atomic war stories of the early 1940s, to TV's The Jetsons, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars and The Matrix.

For most of her adult life, Shirley has been involved in real-life space travel, working on Nasa missions. Now she is returning to the stuff that fired her imagination when she was 11. "That's what science fiction is about," she says.

Allen, ranked by Forbes magazine as the world's fifth-richest man, says he began reading sci-fi as a child. As his wealth grew, so did his collection of sci-fi pulp fiction and many of the museum's artefacts - including Kirk's chair - come from his private stash.

He echoes Shirley when talking about science fiction.

"It gives people an unfettered ability to look at the future and think about the future," Allen says, "and thinking about the future in interesting ways has always been something I've tried to do."

One museum section - called Not-so-weird Science - shows how technology has advanced to nearly fulfil concepts devised by sci-fi writers. The exhibits suggest that Frankenstein and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World are conceptual cousins of today's genetic engineering.

One of the coolest sections is the interactive, computer-animated display that mimics a space station. Ships float past - including the Enterprise of Star Trek , the Millennium Falcon of Star Wars and the goofy Planet Express of the cartoon series Futurama.

Another highlight is a globe-shaped projection screen developed by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Using four projectors, it can accurately display the surface of planets, from Jupiter to the ice world Hoth from The Empire Strikes Back.

"If you read a thriller, it's pretty much: 'Here's the way things really are,"' Shirley says. "Science fiction says, 'Here's where things could be.'

The Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame