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I noticed the attached article written for
the New York Times which was reprinted in a local free newspaper “The
Examiner”. The museum sounds pretty interesting and I’d
definitely check it out if I were in the area. There’s a picture
with the article showing a display with Robby the Robot, Robocop, a Battlestar
Galactica Centurion, Robot from Lost in Space, and R2-D2. You can
see the article as re-printed in my paper by following this link (Choose May 25th
edition and any of the 3 version choices) and checking out the Adobe file page
34. http://www.dcexaminer.com/edition/ Bill features history of science fiction BY EDWARD ROTHSTEIN The New York Times you history,” boasts the year-old of Fame here, but “only one takes you to the future.” And so it does, if the future includes the life-size model of the Alien Queen from James Cameron’s 1986 movie “Aliens”; a first edition of Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles” (1950); a collection of phaser guns from “Star Trek” (1966-present); the vinyl raincoat worn by Joanna Cassidy in the 1982 film “Blade Runner”; and a half-size reproduction of the roving explorer “Sojourner,” used on the surface of Mars in 1997. Actually, of course, it isn’t the future being shown, and it isn’t really history either. It’s something like a history of the future, or a history of ideas about the future. And as it unfolds here, it is dizzying in its miscellany. It also has some unusual resonances right now because science-fiction franchises like the “Star Wars” films and the “Star Trek” series have just been brought to a close. A gleeful mix In the museum, the influence of those epics is unmistakable, with sound effects and lighting shaping each exhibit’s environment. A “Stardock” window even seems to look out into cinematic space, where ships from “E.T.,” “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” (along with antiques like H.G. Wells’ moon capsule) glide past one another as observers at touch-screens learn about their origins and powers. Other displays mix genres and media with almost gleeful abandon. A vest worn by Michael York in “ a first edition of an Ursula K. Le Guin novel and a copy of Mad magazine. Hauntingly delicate drawings by a little-known Brazilian artist, Alvim Correa, illustrating a 1906 Belgian edition of Wells’ “War of the Worlds,” are around the corner from models of extraterrestrials assembled in a mock intergalactic saloon similar to the one in “Star Wars.” It is as if a molecular manipulator out of “The Fly” had scrambled a century of objects, grafting together disparate media and creatures. But within this phantasmagorical array of memorabilia, film and collectibles, a portrait of the history of the future does begin to take shape. The opening exhibit room, wrapped in a band of stars like a planetarium, offers a timeline of science fiction as the exhibits survey its preoccupations, its overlap with real science, its concerns with society, its fans-turned-practitioners. And the museum itself is really a rough first draft of that history, created by the Microsoft billionaire Paul G. Allen, 52, largely out of his own collection. He gave it a $20 million, 13,000-square-foot home in the same Frank O. Gehry building as the $240 million museum devoted to one of Allen’s other passions — rock music; in the Experience Music Project, as it is called, Jimi Hendrix’s guitar is as readily displayed as Captain Kirk’s tunic is here. In fact, scaled-back ambitions for the music project, which has been having problems meeting original expectations, created room for the once used for a three-story thrill ride. But the museum doesn’t leave science fiction at the level of toys and hobby horses. It is a good place to be reminded that a genre that was on the margins 80 years ago is now, at least in its cinematic incarnations, at the very center of culture. Science fiction pulp magazines once featured what insiders called “BBBs” fleeing “BEMs” — “brassbra babes” fleeing “bug-eyed monsters.” Not for long. Writers of the mid-20th century turned science fiction into something more profound; many recent writers have been scientists themselves. It is astonishing how often boundaries between fantasy and reality are broken down in the exhibits themselves. Objects from “Star Trek” are real. (“The phaser,” we are told, “was developed early in the 23rd century as a defensive weapon.”) Other objects, like a 1951 Dick Tracy radio, are called toys. A “Starfleet communicator badge” from “Star Trek” is labeled a “reproduction” presumably because it was not really a “communicator” used on the show. But in an exhibit of uniforms, a tunic from the 1956 film “Forbidden Planet” shares the same case as a NASA space suit from the Gemini program. Fiction and fact intermingle. The museum’s director, Donna Shirley, has said that reading Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles” at the age of 12 inspired her career. At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, she managed the Mars Exploration Program; here, she helped mount the museum’s Mars exhibit, which juggles science fiction and fact. Top: A visitor peers into a display of robots from various science fiction movies and television shows on Saturday at the and Hall of Fame in museum, the influence of sci-fi epics is unmistakable, with sound effects and lighting shaping each exhibit’s environment. Left: An exhibition case containing memorabilia from the “Star Trek” TV show. Photos by Peter Yates/NYT Gazing at futures past WEDNESDAY MAY 25, 2005 34
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