Seattle was lovely. ♥ Though I must point out that nobody (online, offline, sideline) mentioned the steep streets! Miami is flat, flat, flat, so they took us a bit by surprise. Though I will say, there was a satisfied feeling of a job well done when we made various climbs. I've concluded that stairs beats hills both in the up and the down, and I think up actually beats down just for the sake of my shins. I can't imagine it, but I saw several women take on the hills in heels (not, I should add, the extreme heels I spot regularly here in Miami, but heels none the less), to which I can only say, "wow".

I was a teeny-tiny bit disappointed in the weather. They had a near record breaking sunny streak and I'd been looking forward to a good gloom, but that seems the sort of thing it's kind of rude to complain about. ;)

We did all the touristy things, our Frommer's guide clutched firmly in hand. (By the way? Frommer's rocks.) Seattle has tons of fun touristy things to do. But the thing that affected me the most, and in a way I didn't realize I even needed, was the Science Fiction Museum. It reminded me that I'm a fan! :D A dorky media fan more than a bookish fan (though I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of authors I had read), but a fan none the less.

Science fiction has taken some serious hits this past year. Some of it, in my opinion, has been well deserved (the painful but very, very necessary "Racefail '09" discussions), and some of it has been grossly disappointing (depressing reactions to female characters). But it left me with the feeling that science fiction was a rather nasty little playground with a few shiny objects to lure in the ignorant.

Visiting a place that celebrates all the things science fiction does well, reminded me that there are in fact things science fiction does well. :D I have always, always been attracted to the shiny optimism that human beings are going to make it, that there are tons of nifty new phenomena and worlds to explore, that there's always going to be something worth striving for. That's what I've always loved about science fiction, and that's something it's still able to offer.

It's not a perfect genre, obviously. It makes plenty of mistakes, some of them rather egregious. But when it gets it right, science fiction can hit a storytelling sweet spot in me no other genre can. I'd lost sight of that and I'm grateful to Seattle's Science Fiction Museum for reminding me. Thanks, Seattle! :)