In the wake of the Columbia disaster, science fiction is on a lot of people's minds this week. A disaster to a mundane little space ship returning from mere earth orbit, having been studying the behaviour of insects in zero G if you please, has caused the bereaved space fans to take refuge in reveries about what it may all be leading to, despite all the frustrations and banalities of what passes for space travel now.

I did the libertarian science fiction binge when I was in my late teens, but now … it doesn't really do it for me any more. But SF remains a big deal for many of my libertarian friends. Paul Marks has a piece on Samizdata today, and is typically pessimistic about how statist SF authors have, he argues, now become. But, read the comments. And Tom Burroughes has a piece over at Survivalarts, about SF book covers. This was in response to an earlier piece by Russell Whitaker, blogmaster of Survivalarts, which Samizdata also used on Tuesday, in explicit connection with, as he put it, "you know what".

The bad BCBlog news for SF people is that I probably won't have that much to say about SF here, and what I do say is as likely to be critical as positive. This is deliberate. My tastes in art don't seem to fit with the usual libertarian tendencies. BCBlog will thus be especially keen to point out that if you want to be a libertarian, that does not mean that you have to share the widespread libertarian fascination with SF, Lord of the Rings, etc. If, like me, you prefer hard history to hard SF, or you like to read strictly earthbound novels suggested to you by TV serialisations (I read the whole of A Dance to the Music of Time about a year ago) - if you prefer Jane Austen to Robert Heinlein (as I now do) - you should feel quite at home here. Apologies for what follows, though. You might want to stop reading this posting now.

Because … one fairly recent SF book I did enjoy a lot was Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon The Deep. The elaborate stuff about mini-dog-packs I couldn't get excited about. But the way that doomed emailers would send out calmly analytical descriptions across the depths of the galaxy about why they were about to be wiped into oblivion, or why some other emailer was perhaps not to be trusted, was, for me, charming. And I liked that the emails were easy to find in the text because typographically distinct. I read them all with great care.

Some of the emails that concerned the forthcoming arrival of The Blight were rather as if Dale Amon had been doing something like his Columbia disaster analysis for Samizdata last weekend, but while he himself was on board a space ship whose forthcoming incineration he was calmly trying to account for. "So, here's what I think will happen … if I'm right about how the left wing will behave, we will see the first explosions from inside the capsule, and our best hope will be to … but this will almost certainly not work … then we'll probably have about another one to two seconds of life before we get blown to buggery, but I remain open to correction on that … I think it will be a quick death, but that could be wishful thinking on my part …"

I didn't participate in the email chat era myself, and still feel (note: not think – this is not an argument, merely an unexamined emotional response) that chatrooms are pointless dead-ends, just another bunch of places where opinions can go to die – which I'm sure is how lots feel (ditto – above) about blogs. For me an email is just a cheap and convenient telegram rather than a means to have a serious conversation. But Vinge captures and universalises an entire era, or what I imagine was an era. I especially like how he reproduces all the guff you get at the top of an email, about how the message travelled, via what giant machines, who else is getting it, and so forth, just like with a lot of emails now, or perhaps I mean then. He also goes into the details of how much it is all costing, the way more and more people are able to forget about now, but had to concern themselves with at first.

Reviews I've just been glancing at for linking purposes suggest that, for a real SF-er, the email stuff is fairly obvious. So 1990s man. But wow, how about those dogs! And the changing laws of physics! But for me, the emails helped me to make sense of the physics, and gave me a sense of the vastness of the galactic civilisation(s) Vinge was evoking. And thank goodness also for the map at the beginning.

But those reviewers are right. Just as TV SF tells you more about the technology and fashions when it was made than the technology and fashions of the far flung future, so A Fire Upon The Deep – certainly the email aspect of it – tells you about the 1990s rather than about the time that the book is supposedly set in. "More interesting than Single White E-m@il" hardly counts as a rave review.