Ah, conventions – that much misunderstood mainstay of genre fiction fan-dom. I’m off to my second con ever early next month, and I can’t wait. But I wish I’d had this list of sf con etiquette dos and don’ts with me last year, because then there’d be less people I need to avoid this year … [SFBC]

If you’re a fan of science fiction novels, the you can’t fail to have an opinion on this recent column in Asimov’s, wherein Norman Spinrad attempts to wrestle a perennial genre bugbear and define ‘hard’ science fiction. For my money, having read all the books he uses as examples, I think he’s done a pretty good job.

I’m gutted. AbeBooks, the nigh-ubiquitous second-hand book site, is offering the chance for you to win two tickets to the Nebula Awards ceremony this coming May; all you have to do is answer one easily-Googled question. Why am I gutted? It’s only open to US and Canadian residents. Meh. [SFBC]

If you’ve read Accelerando by Charles Stross, you may well remember the street-punk character from the beginning of the book named Spring-Heeled Jack, who bounds around town in a pair of petrol-powered booster-boots. Like any sf author with sense, Stross borrowed the idea from the real world, and CNet has an article that talks about the invention of the boots in Cold War Russia – they really did exist, though they never made it to the consumer market. More’s the pity … [SlashDot]

If you haven’t read Accelerando, you can download it legally for free. It comes highly recommended.

Rudy Rucker isn’t just a quirkily brilliant science fiction author, he’s also a computer science and mathematics professor with some real head-expanding ideas. The 10 Zen Monkeys blog has a video of Rucker talking about how natural processes are like computation, and there’s a companion article in words, too.