I just booked my plane tickets for this year’s Readercon. I haven’t missed one since the very first, back in 1987. (Funny thing—I’d always remembered Readercon I as having taken place in 1986, but after an online search, and based on Evelyn Leeper’s write-up of the first gathering, it seems to have instead been 1987, proving my memory wrong.)

Why have I been so consistent? A review of the possible panel descriptions for the con’s upcoming 19th installment, just announced by the organizers, will explain. Unlike the panels at many other conventions, which often have broad and vague starting points, leading to discussions in which participants can spend the first half just figuring out what they’re actually supposed to be talking about, Readercon panels are different, beginning with sharply focused mandates which lead to lively discussions that tend to cover new ground.

Here’s one example of a panel description from this year’s list of possibilities:

You Say Plagiarism, I Say “The Ecstasy of Influence.” Prolific romance novelist Cassie Edwards recently lost her publishing contract when it was discovered that most of the background passages about her Native American settings (and one passage about ferrets) had been lifted nearly verbatim from a variety of sources. But as Jonathan Lethem wrote recently in Harper’s, “appropriation, mimicry, quotation, allusion, and sublimated collaboration consist of a kind of sine qua non of the creative act.” Lethem argues that the arts exist not only in a market economy but a gift economy like the open-source software movement, and that creative borrowing is an essential part of that economy. (Indeed, he borrowed the above quote and the economic insight, along with almost everything else in the essay.) Is borrowing as ubiquitous and important as Lethem claims, or has he overstated the case? It seems to us that it’s called “plagiarism” only when it’s done badly—Edwards got caught because the borrowed passages stood out so clumsily. But where exactly do you draw the line between good and bad theft (in both senses of the words)?

If you check the complete list at the link above, I’m sure you’ll want to book your hotel and air today.

Here’s a look at some of what you may have missed last year.