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Last Sunday (and a very sunny Sunday it was) I visited the Sci-fi Museum in Seattle. It is near that space needle thing.

The museum is rounded off by some educational stuff about what sci-fi is all about and a hall of fame. Halls of fame are always good talking points, but I happy am those currently inducted and couldn't see any crimes of omission.

There was, naturally, an awful lot of Star Trek stuff there. While I have never been remotely interested in Star Trek it has been the bedrock of sci-fi for 40 years and it is hard to imagine that a sci-fi museum on such a scale would exist today had Kirk never set off on his five year mission.

I was somewhat surprised then, when reading this post, to discover that Star Trek is no longer running. I thought there were two or three current shows, a bit like the CSI franchise.

I don't really do TV and cinema. I will occasionally go to see a sci-fi movie if it is a book I particularly enjoyed, but otherwise my sci-fi enjoyment is solely through the printed page. Books give more scope for ideas, both in terms of social change and the hard science, and it is not easy to present such ideas in film form. Blade Runner would be a wonderful exception to that.

I ought to figure out my top 10 sci-fi novels sometime. There probably won't be many surprises in there - Asimov, Clark, Banks, Bester, Morgan, Reynolds, Simmons - the usual suspects plus a couple of newcomers.