Sci-fi shrine opens in Seattle

SEATTLE – For nearly all of her adult life, Donna Shirley has dealt with science nonfiction. At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, she organized missions to every planet except Pluto, helped put a rover on Mars and worked on making solar power cheaper.

But it was science of the fictional variety – most notably, Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles” – that first captured her imagination at age 11. Now, more than five decades later, she’s delving back into the genre as director of Seattle’s Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame, opening this month.

“What if? – that’s what science fiction is about,” Shirley says. “What if your best friend was an alien? 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’s going for more than geek-appeal, though it has plenty of that. Among the exhibits are Captain Kirk’s original command chair from “Star Trek” (no, you can’t sit in it); a wide array of fanzines; and a ray-gun collection that would get the NRA excited about galaxies far, far away.

Created with $20 million from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, the Science Fiction Museum opens June 18 in a remodeled section of his other museum – the Experience Music Project – and it’s hard to imagine a more appropriate location. The shiny, twisted, futuristic building designed by Frank Gehry is at the foot of the Space Needle. The Monorail – a 1960s conception of future travel – runs through it.

Allen, who according to Forbes magazine is the world’s fifth-richest man, says he began reading sci-fi in grade school. He was encouraged by his librarian parents, who brought him on frequent trips to used bookstores. As his wealth grew, his collection of sci-fi pulp turned into a world-class accumulation.

Many of the museum’s artifacts, including its “Attack of the 50-ft Woman” poster and Kirk’s chair, come from his private stash.

“I had a pretty intense love for science fiction back then,” Allen says. “It gives people an unfettered ability to look at the future and think about the future … and thinking about the future in interesting ways has always been something I’ve tried to do.”

Indeed, Allen and buddy Bill Gates pictured a world of desktop domination in an era when regular people didn’t own computers – a vision that doesn’t seem like such a far cry from sci-fi.

Through exhibits chock full of movie props, posters, first edition books and manuscripts, the museum tracks the genre from Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel “Frankenstein” through the prescient atomic war stories of the early 1940s, “The Jetsons,” “2001: A Space Odyssey,” “Star Wars” and more recent movies, such as “The Matrix.”

One section, “Not-so-weird Science,” shows examples of how technology has advanced to nearly fulfill the frightening prophesies of sci-fi writers. “Frankenstein” and Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” are conceptual cousins of today’s genetic engineering, the exhibits suggest, and “1984” seems ever more relevant as governments and businesses develop new ways to track their citizens and customers. Sex-change operations and the prevalence of cosmetic surgery could be out of the gender-bending writings of Theodore Sturgeon in the early 1960s.

The museum explores developments in fictional space travel; one of the coolest sections is an interactive, computer-animated display that mimics a space station. Several ships float past, from the Enterprise and the Millennium Falcon to the Planet Express of the cartoon TV show “Futurama.” Visitors can view images of the ships from any angle, learn about their dimensions and features, and see clips of them in action.

The museum hopes to attract 100,000 visitors in its first year, many of them school kids on field trips.