As a writer and a long-time reader of fantasy I like to take a look sometimes at the state of the genre in the place where I live – in part because it’s a good strategy to keep an eye on the market, in part because this is, after all, my tribe, and I like to see what the tribesmen are doing.

Being irremediably old, I have no problem mentioning the fact I find the current over-excitement of a juvenile part of the public for what Ian McShane called Tits & Dragons somewhat tiring. When somebody pops up and tells me they like Robert E. Howard for the relentless violence, the explicit sex scenes and the obscenities peppering the dialogues, I despair about the state of the genre and for literacy in general.

But together with the fixation for “fantasy of hard knocks” – basically an alibi for writers to write to the minimum common denominator – there is a new trend that is not new but is positively scary: the derailment of fantasy on the part of politics.