This is a book of fiction that performs the service for which fiction is uniquely suited — detailing the contours of consciousness — while performing a rather unusual bracketing in a context of higher truth. It comes amid a wider renaissance in horror cinema and literature, with some of the best work often described as “post-horror.” Beginning in the mid-2010s, artists have taken up the genre as a means for exploring the irrational and ineffable dimensions of human life — or to poseideas that, stated overtly, would be seen as tactless or impolitic. This, even as they break its conventions or, as in Lee’s case, blend them with other forms. 

A “prisoner’s cinema,” as we learn in the title story — its longest and best — is the series of hallucinations a person’s mind will produce after he is kept for a prolonged time in complete darkness. In this story, a child rapist waiting on death row engages in a series of verbal jousts with the demon who encouraged him in his crime, and who continues to mock him as he waits out his last days. The moral lines seem clear here, yet the unconventional structure of this long story confounds the reader’s expectations, offering no easy resolution, and a twist toward the end adds a sci-fi element to horror that was previously mostly psychological or ontological. The result is terrifying: the suggestion that the human mind is the most fearsome demon of all.

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A Russian novel saved my mind

By Noah Kumin

As the line from G. K. Chesterton goes: “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” The rational mind unbalanced, overheated, and off its tether is the true protagonist of these stories. Characters reason and use logic; they follow a flow of linked theses and fateful decision trees; they rationalize, or they victimize where they have been victimized. The result, far from making sense, is the most fetid tangle of human flesh this side of Hannibal Lecter’s pantry.  

In “Gods and Spiders,” a hypnotist returns a young man to the primal scene of his mother’s violent death at the hands of the Bosnian paramilitary. In “Lovecraft,” a philosophizing butcher allows a tenant who lives below him to tenderize some very suspicious meat as a form of stress relief. In “Lightning in a Cloudless Sky,” a disgruntled son of two newly dead parents bashes in the head of an intruding hoodlum. But the real brutality for this young man, Lee suggests, is internal: an animus between the protagonist and his brother that simply can’t be fixed. 

Lee’s compendium of gore is accomplished with subtlety and literary grace. “Never Find Us Here,” a story about a narcissistic young man who decides to volunteer for a day at the Salvation Army, keeps us on tenterhooks by sliding seamlessly between surrealism and psychology. And, as in the most crafty of short stories, an anticlimax serves as the perfect ending. Lee also has a knack for a good metaphor. He writes, for instance, of “the dark lips of ditches”: precisely the right word for the little mounds that might circumscribe a hole one has dug, turning it into a yawning black mouth. And the virtuoso vitriol that opens “Lightning in a Cloudless Sky,” — “They always have sallow skin, these whores, these meth-heads, wasted high-school beauties, soma-addled slack bodies, all with the same seeping sallow skin carrying Christ-knows-what proud strains of plague in their milky sebum . . .” — is mellifluous bile indeed.

But it is the moral stakes that set Lee’s writing apart. Literary fiction is a genre on the wane — like contemporary art and independent cinema. We suffer from a glut of writers and a dearth of readers, from a surfeit of publicity and a paucity of art. It is no coincidence that the successes over the past few decades have been the products of writers such as Michel Houellebecq, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Elena Ferrante, who are earnestly grappling with the morality of how one ought to live in a society that offers fewer answers by the day. 

In this sense, the contemporary writer of fiction is no different from the pundit on X (formerly Twitter), but whereas the online pundit is incentivized to provide extreme approbation or condemnation, the novelist may take a longer view. Today the craft of the novelist may not be as remunerative as the pundit’s — a few mega-writers excepted. But by making abstract problems concrete and by playing both sides, so to speak, the novelist offers wisdom no pundit can match.

One can, for example, argue all one likes about what it means for society that some men rob, rape, or kill. But Lee, an editor at the religious journal First Things, has done something much more difficult and important: he has, through imaginative exercises, made such actions concrete. He has told us their tastes and smells. Only a moralist would bother to tease out the thread of immorality with such care. Who else would bother with the mental anguish of such people? Lee thus does the reader the service of taking him somewhere he never wanted to go. Complacency, that most common 21st-century sin, is not an option once you’ve entered Lee’s fictional world.

None of it is easy to read, and Lee has written of an author’s struggle with his subject, in the form of dialogues with the demon “Paul” in three linked stories that make up the series “A Briefer Epic.” In these stories, the demon taunts the author, sophomorically questioning his sexuality, or suggesting that his preoccupation with the dark constitutes evil in itself. The back-and-forth is often amusing, but the scaffolding feels unnecessary, since many of the issues come through in the stories. Moreover, a writer allowing a clever demon to argue against his project may tempt a few too many readers to side with the devil and put down the book. 

But this is a quibble. In an age where art veers between empty entertainment and empty formalism, it is a pleasure to find a new voice deeply interested in how we ought to live. For Lee, that question manifests as a preoccupation with what in our world is most horrific. As in the ancient tragedies, Lee offers a chance to purge ourselves by following his characters down the long path to hell, before we return to the blessed freedom of our day-to-day lives. It is a bracing and, in the end, ennobling trip. I look forward to the next time Lee will lead me to a place I don’t want to go.

But there is another contingent. A friend — a prolific Vinted seller who makes a considerable side income there, and so is accustomed to the usual cranks — reports that something has changed in recent months. She’s been getting messages from a new sort of prospective buyer, one with encrypted names and faceless profiles. One that requires lots of provenance, lots of pictures: how many times have you worn this? Have you washed it? I don’t mind if not, actually I prefer it. One who makes strange requests, hunting for mirror selfies of skimpy Nike Pro shorts; one who asks how “good” items smell. That’s right: the pornsick men have arrived.

Paraphilia seeping into mainstream internet culture is nothing new. Wherever there are feet, knickers or even mirrors, fetishists will follow; mostly, people (men) with these predilections are viewed with wry mockery, seen as quirky, basement-bound inevitabilities contained within a generally harmless digital subculture. Some women have long profited from these men’s requests: I have read confession threads from those who sell counterfeit “used underwear” (I will keep the pungent, pantry-sourced concoction one woman used on the gusset a trade secret). Their operations involve production lines of bulk-bought cheap lace thongs flogged at $50 a pop, sent off to a hive of priapic patrons whose purchasing power, and willingness to spend on getting off, sees them through university.

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Virginia Giuffre: imperfect victim

By Poppy Sowerby

This sort of transaction is the acceptable face of prostitution: remote, semi-anonymous and putatively safe. Selling pants online crystallises the new pornography/prostitution nexus: here, the canny content creators of OnlyFans trade in fantasies rather than services, with physical totems offered as added extras. You may recall “gamer girl” influencer Belle Delphine’s bathwater stunt, in which the 19-year-old offered the jars for $30 each; they quickly sold out, and she made $90,000. That was in 2019; at the time, it provoked outrage — a young woman monetising the infinite horniness of internet nerds was an uncomfortable spectacle. In the years since, OnlyFans and its depressing philosophy has exploded: sex-selling has become casualised, with managing a fetish account becoming about as remarkable as having any other social-media platform. It is no longer shocking, shameful or embarrassing to be in the dirty knickers game; on the contrary, liberal feminism deems you empowered and entrepreneurial for hawking pants to pervs. Clearly, this is a tragedy which dupes women into their own oppression — but is there something else at play?

I am a porn doomer. Pornography has always existed and will always exist — but something has shifted in its ubiquity and extremity. Its proliferation is making men weirder, training them to desire and demand the satisfaction of offputting paraphilias (such is the arms-race model of algorithms) and making them much worse in bed. It is causing them to expect extreme acts of pain or humiliation; it is normalizing the entitlement to degrade women in ways which, a mere decade or two ago, would have seen them dumped and blocked. Perhaps worst of all, it dissolves the very necessary boundaries between the sexual and the non-sexual — boundaries created not by feminism but by older social codes of propriety — in the name of self-expression. Liberal feminism and the pornography lobby (funny how those two are so often in cahoots) both tout identity and desire as the inviolable markers of being “free”: denial of impulse, sacrifice, restraint and rationality are the enemies of each. So it is that if a man shouldn’t be shamed for drooling over Evri orders of soiled underwear, a woman shouldn’t be shamed for posting them. Here’s why they should be shamed.

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The dirty truth about the OnlyFans economy

By Sarah Ditum

Mainstream feminism over the past few decades has flogged to death the concept of “objectification”; this rich conceptual seam has been overmined to the point where we no longer consider the connotations of becoming an object, of being reduced to body parts like those of animals sold at market. The purchasing of trinkets from sexy girls online — buying their pants, their sweaty tops, their shoes — is an interesting literalization of this concept: a buying of bodies at one remove, a 21st-century echo of a much older, grimmer trade.

The boundaries of public, sexless and restrained versus intimate, erotic and impulsive are crumbling. Men asking unknowing young women on Depop and Vinted for sexual content and objects — also known as “fetish mining” — represents this process of social breakdown: such behavior can only emerge from a sexual culture which preaches that we are all, always, entitled to arousal. Because of the saturation of internet culture in pornography, other more covert, extreme or high-risk subjects of arousal gain cachet; masquerading as common-or-garden Vinted users buys access to women’s wardrobes, glimpses of their bedrooms in mirrors, even scents of their bodies. Here women will treat you nicely, with the camaraderie of a nightclub toilet, unsuspecting of your secret intentions. It might seem bizarre that considering the availability of pornography, men are still doing this: but the risk and the sense of violation is precisely the point.

The writer Brook Urick recently appeared on Louise Perry’s podcast; she had both been a “sugarbaby” and had worked for the sugardaddy dating website Seeking Arrangements. Clearly, there is a greater degree of mutuality in such an arrangement than in unsolicited sexual messages on a clothes-selling platform; nevertheless a revelation from that episode had broader resonances here. Urick suggested that the male users exploited young women’s naïveté about the sex industry: many believed in the website’s self-promoted status as a dating platform and not a prostitution site, and many were convinced that they would not have to sleep with or even touch the older men who hired them — and that they’d be whisked away to Aruba or Cabo to boot. They believed in marketing which told them they could get something for nothing. Many were, inevitably, convinced to negotiate on these boundaries; many were fleeced, some were raped. The point, Urick said, was the deception: the men enjoyed not just the company of attractive young women but the attrition of their boundaries. The girls, many of them “nice” college students — not the wily, experienced prostitutes also available to the men — were more attractive prospects because they were vulnerable to beguilement: half of the gratification lay in their naïveté. Now look to the villains of Vinted. They mine at risk of recriminations or being reported for the same reason: the discomfort, the sense of transgression and risk, the snare. Availability breeds boredom, so true transgression comes at a premium.

As ever, the midwives of this predicament are our tech overlords, who have little incentive to implement proper safeguarding. At the breakneck pace of porn advancement — inevitably among the first industries to be enhanced by AI, VR and other new technologies — wanting to whiff smelly socks seems almost quaint, old-timey. It seems to belong to a less sinister and more predictable low-tech sexual era, the horrors of which have long been surpassed: I suspect it is for this same reason that the singer Chappell Roan appeared on Ru Paul’s Drag Race last week dressed as a blow-up doll. What was viewed decades ago as manifestly anti-feminist and humiliating becomes a joke in the present world of hyperrealistic silicone models and deepfakes. But this is about more than clothes, more than bodies, more even than the problem of the sex trade: it is about the premium placed on violation, and the way liberalism has reframed coercion as self-expression. Pornography and fetish culture have been around forever: what is new is how they ooze into the everyday, becoming inescapable if you simply happen to be a woman. What these grotty messages amount to is a bigger moral question for our time, one that feminism must stand up to: why must I participate in your fantasy?

New Bedford has come for the publishing industry — for its “Big Five” publishers and its MFA-trained fiction writers — in the form of Romantasy, a new genre rewriting all the rules, perhaps for the better. The portmanteau term, for the uninitiated, means “any fantasy novel that has romance as the main plot or a strong side-plot”, according to Katie Cunningham, owner of Kiss & Tale books in Collingswood, NJ. The books also tend to be hashtag-friendly, include explicit sex scenes, and wildly sample from the folkloric palate of tropes and subgenres established by previous narratives: Hades and Persephone, love triangles, friends-to-enemies, shapeshifters, slavery, Greek Gods, dragons, and vampires, to name just a few.

The combination of romance and fantasy isn’t new, of course. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, published in 2005, was a breakout success that mainstream publishing has strived in vain to replicate ever since. But it wasn’t until TikTok that readers got together and demonstrated through their choices and enthusiasms just where the sweet spot lay.

The numbers speak for themselves. Five of the top-10 best-selling titles of 2024 were written by the category’s two most prominent authors, Sarah J. Mass and Rebecca Yarros, according to Publisher’s Weekly statistics from October. Bloomberg estimates that in 2024, Romantasy books achieved $610 million in sales, up from $454 million in 2023. The category is juicing the statistics on overall book sales, which are in decline, and has contributed to a boom in romance-focused bookstores in the United States.

“It has been amazing and crazy to me how busy we’ve been,” says Cunningham. Katie Steele, the Romantasy expert at A Novel Romance, a Kentucky bookstore, says that demand was so high the owners moved to a new space “10 times the size” after only a year in operation. Steele’s other topic areas are manga, danmei (Chinese novels with male-male, or MM, romance), and queer.

Victoria Gerken, the publisher of Podium Entertainment, a digital-first publisher that has moved into print distribution on the wings of Romantasy, believes the genre has been so successful because it “provides entertainment for its audience that’s not available in any other format”. This entertainment is a form of escapism that allows women whose daily lives have little magic in them to imagine themselves as bold and powerful, starring in an exciting adventure and having great sex. Perhaps it’s the chick version of the thrill that men get from video games. It’s also worth noting that the magical framing allows women to perform girl-power and to be swept off their feet by men (or male beings) who are unapologetically dominant and boast castles and domains, too. Between the genre’s unique pleasures and an audience Gerken describes as “voracious”, she says “it’s a little bit of a perfect storm. The demand has always been there, but nobody harnessed it.”

Just how a multibillion-dollar industry devoted to selling books managed to miss the demand is an interesting question, but it’s clear that the category is being driven by authors and fans, with little distinction between mainstream and self-published titles.

The first breakout Romantasy title was the conventionally published Sarah J. Mass series A Court of Thrones and Roses (#ACOTAR), a young-adult fantasy romance in which a young woman falls in love with a Lord of the Fae. The series began publication in 2015 but blew up online during the pandemic, around the same time its publisher, Bloomsbury, reclassified it as an adult due to its increasingly graphic sexual content.

Yet sales are also being driven by the proliferation of self-publishing platforms, with authors increasingly winning a following as self-published audiobooks, e-books, or print-on-demand, and only later making deals with the corporates. One of the current best-selling titles, Quicksilver, another Fae romance, just appeared in print through Forever, an imprint of Hachette, in December 2024. Author Callie Hart had published several previous series as e-books or print-on-demand through Amazon’s CreateSpace, and it was only after Quicksilver’s success online that she teamed up with the French giant. Podium Entertainment’s Gerken says that “the vast majority” of Podium’s title acquisitions are independently published first.

A January 2025 story in The New Yorker on a copyright infringement lawsuit against publisher Entangled and author Tracy Wolff, the creator of best-selling Alaska-based vampire-romance series Crave, contained a quote that generated some pearl-clutching by writers online. An anonymous writer who’d had dealings with Entangled told The New Yorker that its publisher and CEO, Liz Pelletier, said to her that “the problem with traditional publishing is that they just let writers write whatever they want, and they don’t even think about what the TikTok hashtag is going to be”. From a traditional viewpoint, that sounds like the death of creativity and a loss of authorial control.

The New Yorker story also reports on several other objections to the genre. It’s allegedly not diverse (often written by socially conservative and photogenic white women with good social-media skills); it moves very quickly, sometimes forcing writers to adhere to brutal delivery dates with little time for polishing their work; and it can be relentlessly formulaic, with the huge volume of titles contributing to the problem.

From a different viewpoint, however, the trend is empowering authors who are able to build their own fan base. Companies like Podium and Bloom Books, a new independent romance imprint that launched during the pandemic, offer the kind of hybrid rights deals traditionally forbidden by major publishers. Bloom’s star client is E.L. James, whose Fifty Shades of Gray was originally published as an e-book and print-on-demand title in 2011. It’s one of a growing number of publishers whose business model is to scoop up successful self-published authors, often allowing them to keep their lucrative e-book and audiobook rights, while supplying the kind of print distribution and brand-building muscle that independent writers find difficult to achieve. Authors working with such publishers can sometimes retain creative control of cover design and marketing strategy. And they can reap dream benefits, such as the publisher’s ability to send out expensive influencer boxes or put their work out in gorgeous deluxe or collectible editions, another publishing trend that has synergy with the Romantasy market.

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In defence of fantasy

By Mary Harrington

A perusal of popular Romantasy titles reveals perhaps even more groundbreaking developments. Blue Box Press co-founder Liz Berry, speaking to Publishers Weekly, says of star author Jennifer Armentrout that “she has a capability to drive the plot and romance forward, while mixing character development with high-concept plotting, that few people have”. I found this type of clean forward motion — a grasp of the essentials of storytelling — in all the highly recommended titles I tried. I also found tight writing and world-building, atmospheric and fun detail, crisp conflicts, exciting high stakes, and two engines of narrative pleasure — a romance plot and fantasy-adventure plot — for the price of one.

There’s a common opinion in writing and publishing circles that the reason for declining book sales is that the readers are uninterested in or unable to appreciate great work. However, in the mega-hits of this unusually reader-selected genre, there were few of the errors that make bad mass-market fiction so bad, such as inconsistent characters with unclear motivations, convoluted plotting, unnecessary detail or description, and clunky dialogue. The knack for keeping the finger on the pulse of the story tends to cut away such dross, and the readers, it turns out, can recognize it.

The readers don’t care, however, about most of the rules of good writing. The Romantasy characters I encountered were psychologically consistent, but not necessarily complex or psychologically real. The prose was sometimes laden with clichés. Every broomstick offers an echo of Harry Potter, every magical wall taps Game of Thrones. And the narrative voices are quite simply contemporary, regardless of where in time or space the books are set. Characters in Medieval-ish settings have thoughts such as “painkillers are awesome”. They use the magical equivalent of the internet, love fashion and shopping, have anxiety attacks, and display modern values like girl-power and casual promiscuity.

Romantasy writers are the lawless “bumpkin dandies” found in Melville’s New Bedford, for sure, but they can tell a great story, and I found something liberating in their freedom. If more writers were trying to grab readers directly, literature would be better off.

Yet as even a brief confrontation with the classics of silent cinema will show, certain ideas and “moves” which we now take for granted (e.g. insert shots, cross-cutting, alternation between close-up and wide) were already present then, developing out of a real necessity and a growing sense of the adaptivity of the audience. That is, as silent cinema grew into its great flourishing of the 1910s and Twenties, it was fast becoming a medium unparalleled in its ability to shape the expectations and attentions of its viewers. And among the giant innovators of the era, there remain a small handful of names whose enormous reputations have stayed essentially intact a century later: D.W. Griffith, F.W. Murnau, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton — and Fritz Lang, whose landmark fantasy epic Die Nibelungen marks its centenary this year. The film (and its director) has ultimately had an inescapable influence on everything that came after — not only in cinema, but in the whole of European and American popular culture.

Born to a converted-Catholic Jewish mother and a Moravian father in Austria, in 1890, Lang’s life conformed remarkably to the trajectory of the early 20th century. The stories of his early career have been told and retold over the years: there was his youthful sojourn to Paris to study painting, his enlistment in the Austrian army during the First World War, then a move to Berlin at the dawn of the Weimar Republic. Next came his first great period as a director, at the behemoth German UFA studios (then the largest outside of Hollywood), a series of masterpieces spanning the 15 years between his initial films in 1919, and the classic sound pictures M (1931) and The Testament of Doctor Mabuse (1933).

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The Nazis would ban The Testament for being plainly critical of the party, which led Joseph Goebbels himself to reach out to Lang in conciliation, offering him a place in the newly consolidated studios under the Reich Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. Lang never took the offer, eventually fleeing Germany via Paris for Hollywood, where he would remain a successful director for two decades. In the midst of this, he managed to either perfect or outright pioneer entire genres, including film noir (in his earlier Mabuse film of 1922), utopian science fiction (Metropolis, 1927), espionage films (Spies, 1928), serial killer movies (M), and of course, epic fantasy in 1924’s Die Nibelungen.

What makes Die Nibelungen so powerful all these years later? For modern viewers, the first and most obvious thing is surely its sheer scale. Filmed over nine months on gigantic exteriors and in cavernous indoor studios, Lang had almost completely free reign to shoot as much and as long as he liked, against mattes, projections, and sets the size of which few films have managed since. The later French auteur theories of the Cahiers du Cinéma posited any director as primary author of a given film, and Lang was often cited as one of the perfect exemplars of the paradigm. Yet reports from the sets of his great UFA films suggest he might better be referred to as a general: at the head of a small army of technicians and designers, he had more or less total authority over the building, filming, and post-production processes.

The entire project was pitched at a mythic scale. The two halves of the film, Siegfried and Kriemhild’s Revenge, total close to five hours long — epic by any era’s standards. Woven by Lang’s then-wife Thea von Harbou out of the traditional myth, Richard Wagner’s opera and a 19th-century theatrical version of the story, the two films tell the tale of the great Nordic/Germanic hero and symbol of Teutonic pride, Siegfried. The first recounts his battle against a dragon, his feats on behalf of the Burgundian King Gunther, his marriage to Kriemhild, and his final betrayal. In the second half, the despairing widow Kriemhild uses a strategic marriage to Atilla the Hun to destroy the Burgundians entirely.

Much has been made of the film’s relationship with German Expressionism, which was as defining to the art and culture of the time as Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. Beginning with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919), the German cinema dealt intimately with the emerging theories of art the Expressionists were espousing. The great film historian Lotte Eisner lays this out best in her influential book The Haunted Screen (1952), defining the goals of Expressionism as a pure abstraction almost at war with nature. The Expressionists sought — often in those weighty, untranslatable terms of German philosophy — to apocalyptically repudiate everything that had come before, whether it be Impressionism, Naturalism, or Romanticism. In Eisner’s words, what they were ultimately expressing was “that the world has become so ‘permeable’ that, at any one moment, Mind, Spirit, Vision & Ghosts seem to gush forth, exterior facts are continuously being transformed into interior elements & psychic events are exteriorized”. This, Eisner argued, was the same atmosphere evoked in the classic films of the German cinema.

But while Lang’s film delighted in the permeable, it was doing something else as well. Certainly, there was deeply abstract expression in the broad, slow gestures of the actors; in the mist and rocks where Siegfried wanders; in the general eschewal of realism or psychology in favour of pure, solemn archetypes. But instead of the usual warped planes or jagged lines of more normatively Expressionist movies (if such an oxymoron can be said to exist), Lang filled his frames with enormous, heavy symmetries, with rows of impeccably costumed soldiers, and vast diagonals and arches of buildings. In this, he took inspiration from the mythical paintings of German Romantics such as Arnold Böcklin and Caspar David Friedrich.

The influence of Die Nibelungen is still palpable wherever cinema engages in high fantasy. Star Wars, The Lord of the Rings, even Denis Villeneuve’s recent Dune movies would be largely impossible without Lang’s accomplishment. Yet Lang’s film is still somehow more genuinely mythic than those films. This may be partially because of its silence, partially because its old-fashioned effects have aged enough to pass from the merely hokey into an elegant unreality. Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings may be the lone fantasy to have surpassed its scope — yet Jackson’s sense of coverage and place are far more cluttered than Lang’s distant, detached spaces. Villeneuve’s Dune borrows amply from Lang’s shots of people dwarfed by enormous architecture, yet is still bound to naturalistic acting and contemporary demand for psychological ambiguity.

In fact, it may be this last factor which makes Die Nibelungen more authentically mythic, and more alien to our current sensibilities. Contemporary audiences are more or less trained to search for psychology and realism in their plots, in films and TV shows — they need reasons, causes, effects, and complex motivations for their heroes and antiheroes alike.

Die Nibelungen offers no such cushioning. Instead it offers a world without psychology, a world bound by outsized feelings and tragic destinies (though this is not to say the characters lack emotion or motivation). Perhaps the only contemporary filmmaker capable of summoning up such a world is the young American Robert Eggers, who in his three films The Witch, The Lighthouse, and The Northman has — to varying degrees of success — tried to escape modernity and enter the wilds of older, stranger times. It’s surely no accident that his next film is a remake of Murnau’s Nosferatu, another masterpiece of Twenties German cinema.

But contemporaneity aside, Die Nibelungen is still worth deep attention and study precisely because it stands in such sharp relief to our muddled modernity. Particularly in the first Siegfried section, Lang achieves a clarity of image and architecture that is electric. As Siegfried emerges from the mist, perfectly framed between giant rocks and 100-foot trees, the viewer is confronted with a totalising image which wipes aside history, wipes aside nature, and — like the music of Wagner, its nearest analogue — realises something eternal and wholly symbolic.

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If this is beginning to sound even vaguely fascistic, well, the reference to Wagner is clear. Goebbels had, after all, offered that special position to Lang because Die Nibelungen had been such a source of pride for Germany. It was a perennial favourite of Hitler’s, and an immense influence on the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl. It told the story of a favourite hero, central to the concept of Aryan heroism and purity, and of course included many grotesque trollish creatures and barbarous Huns—classic figures for racist caricature, of Jews in particular. Like Wagner, Lang’s work was brimming with big Teutonic ideals such as Weltanschauung and Gesamtkunstwerk — a very consciously Romantic questing after essentially totalitarian experiences. It is hard to watch Die Nibelungen and not see the ways in which it could be used to further such a cause.

Yet the reality of Lang’s later films and his rejection of the Nazi party (knowing full well that even his mother’s conversion would not save him from being legally considered an ethnic Jew) redeem him. It’s hard to imagine watching the vision of slave-class revolt in Metropolis and declaring it fascist. Yet as with Wagner, there is still something haunting left in Lang’s epics. A sense, perhaps, that lofty and mythic ideals can very quickly dovetail into destructive projects, always seeming to embark on a mission to “cleanse” impurities in the name of ostensibly building a better society.

Ultimately, Die Nibelungen survives its era in a way that many other films cannot. Its power derives from an extraordinary vision of a great artist, handling a myth which is far older, grander, and stranger than any modern doctrine. To view it now, from the standpoint of this tremulous technocratic century, is to clear one’s mind of psychological dross, to stand in a mist of time out of mind, among those ghostly abstractions of mind and spirit. It is to get a glimpse into one of the greatest secrets of the cinema — that myth is far from gone, that myth is only sleeping, waiting for a mind to take and hold onto, from a light, projected like an eye, on a screen.

Just like the neocons before them, they are bewitched by the prospect of war with an enemy they believe poses a threat to their way of life. The only difference is that this deadly menace doesn’t live in some far-off land, but right at home. They might even live next door.

As The New York Times put it in an editorial last week, “the Republic faces an existential threat from a movement that is openly contemptuous of democracy and has shown that it is willing to use violence to achieve its ends”. And there is only one way to survive this threat: to “mobilise at every level”. The NYT was, of course, referring to the attack on the Capitol last January: “Jan. 6 is not in the past,” we’re warned. “It is every day”.

It is hard to exaggerate the feverish excitement with which many progressives responded to the Capitol riot. While the spectacle of hundreds of Trump supporters smashing their way into one of the sacrosanct sites of American democracy generated widespread condemnation, for many progressives the dominant emotional register was one of apocalyptic disgust — and arousal.

Here, finally, was irrefutable proof that they had been right all along: that Trump’s hateful rhetoric would finally become a hateful reality. Here, finally, was a war that could give their lives meaning. There were now Right-wing insurrectionists among them, and they would need to be fought. It was almost as if, on some deep level, they had wanted the Capitol siege to happen.

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The liberal fantasy of the Capitol coup

By Edward Luttwak

Every group that spoils for war needs a wound or trauma to mobilise around. For the neocons and the liberal hawks who supported them, it was the destruction of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That wound would take a lifetime to heal; but it was also massively generative, filling a spiritual void at the heart of American life at the End of History.

In the half-decade prior to 9/11 one of the biggest political stories in America centred on President Clinton’s marital infidelity with a 22-year-old intern. Was a blowjob really an act that existed outside of the realm of “sexual relations”, as Clinton had sought to claim? And should his receiving them in the Oval Office warrant his resignation? In America, the period leading up to 9/11 was, in other words, one of monumental banality and puerility.

The instant the second plane hit the south tower of the World Trade Centre on 9/11 that period came to an abrupt end. America had entered, in Martin Amis’s expression, “the Age of Vanished Normalcy”: idle talk about illicit blowjobs would no longer cut it. This was a time of war, a clash of civilisations. Such was the level of danger that we could no longer wait for threats to gather, but would need to pre-emptively act to stop them from emerging.

It was all very dramatic and clarifying, as Christopher Hitchens acknowledged from the very start: “I am not particularly a war lover, and on the occasions when I have seen warfare as a travelling writer, I have tended to shudder. But here was a direct, unmistakable confrontation between everything I loved and everything I hated.” Hitchens, who confided that he felt “exhilarated” at the prospect of this confrontation, would soon go on to insist that it was a matter of moral principle for the US to topple the Saddam Hussein regime. He was less rousing and persuasive on whether it was the prudent thing to do, but prudence was never Hitchens’s metier.

The storming of the Capitol was to elite liberals what the destruction of the World Trade Center was to the neocons: a bracing vindication that they had been right all along, and a pretext for engaging in a battle that would give their lives a greater meaning and a chance to prove their virtue. What could be more exhilarating than taking on the historic forces of white supremacy now threatening to destroy the republic? And what could be more virtuous?

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None of this is to deny the vast ideological differences between the neocons and modern progressives, the most salient of which is that the latter would never support an American-led occupation of a Muslim-majority country. Nor is it to make a false moral equivalence between the events of 9/11, where more than 3,000 civilians were murdered in carefully coordinated attacks, and the events of January 6, where the only person who was shot and killed was one of the rioters.

Yet the parallels between these two political tribes are striking. So keen were the neocons to invade Iraq that they had to drastically inflate the threat-level of the Saddam Hussein regime. They did so by arguing that the threat was “existential”: that if Saddam were to remain in power, he would not only continue to amass WMDs, but would likely use them to attack America. It later transpired that this argument was based on unreliable evidence: no major stockpiles of WMD were ever found and Saddam’s relationship with al Qaeda was overblown. But such was the war fever that had gripped the neocons that they were apt to ignore any evidence that contradicted their conviction.

Today’s liberals are similarly flushed with ideological fervour, believing that they are in a cosmic struggle of Manichean proportions: they are the elect, the chosen ones, and they believe that their responsibility to purge all traces of white supremacy and hateful extremism is a grave one. Indeed, such is their keenness to root out white supremacy that they are apt to find it everywhere, even where it patently doesn’t exist. They are equally apt to inflate its threat where it does exist, like comparing the storming of the Capitol on January 6 to the terror attacks of 9/11.

Note my use of inflate: no one would deny that there is a white power movement in the US, and there is much evidence to suggest that far-Right terrorism in America has increased markedly over the last few years. It is, however, important to maintain a sense of proportion: America is intensely divided right now, but the idea that the country is in the grip of a perpetual far-Right insurgency is catastrophic to a pathological degree.

In his 1989 article The End of History?, Francis Fukuyama declared that the great ideological battles of the 20th century were over and that Western liberal democracy had triumphed. This, he argued, was a good thing. But, concluding his essay, he lamented: “The struggle for recognition, the willingness to risk one’s life for a purely abstract goal, the worldwide ideological struggle that called forth daring, courage, imagination, and idealism, will be replaced by economic calculation, the endless solving of technical problems, environmental concerns, and the satisfaction of sophisticated consumer demands.”

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More than two decades later, people in liberal democratic societies such as America enjoy a level of freedom, opportunity and material wealth unmatched anywhere else. And yet, as the response to the Capitol riot shows, they suffer from a deficit of meaning and spiritual fulfilment. This, as Fukuyama observed, fuels a sense of nostalgia for history and all its dramatic entanglements. “Such nostalgia,” he noted, “will continue to fuel competition and conflict even in the post-historical world for some time to come.”

So when The New York Times publishes an editorial on how “every day is Jan. 6 now”, it is hard not to see this as a form of nostalgia for the kind of historical drama and contention that is clearly missing from the lives of the comfortable, Ivy-League educated, New-York based journalists who wrote it and who represent the vanguard of what Wesley Yang calls the “successor ideology”. Their hysteria, then, says more about themselves than the events of last year.

In his memoir, the Vietnam War veteran Philip Caputo reflects on his motivations for enlisting in the war. Preeminent among them was the desire “to prove something: my courage, my toughness, my manhood, call it whatever you like”. For those Western liberals who secretly wish for an impending civil war at home, the thing they most want to prove is not their courage, and it certainly isn’t their toughness or manhood, something which they would no doubt contemptuously regard as toxically heteronormative. Rather, what they desperately want to prove is their virtue — even if it means engaging in irresponsible fear-mongering and flagrant exaggeration.

Flying cars are a great example. They’re anything but new; US aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss built and tested the first flying car in 1917. There have been many others since then, and some of them worked, after a fashion. The problem is that the engineering compromises needed to make a vehicle that’s both roadworthy and airworthy guarantee that your flying car will have lousy performance in either role. It will also cost so much that for the same price, you could buy a good car, a good plane, and put a down payment on a midsized yacht. That’s why we don’t have flying cars. They’ve been tried, they’ve failed, and only the fact that people won’t let go of the fantasy keeps engineers perpetually pushing on a door marked “Pull”.

Take any other iconic technogimmick that popular culture assigns to the future and you’ll find that it was a familiar notion a century ago. Fusion power? Jules Verne wrote about that in 1869. Replacement of human labour by robots? Introduced in 1921 by Karel Capek, the writer who invented the word “robot”. 24/7 internet connectivity for all? It’s a major plot point in E.M. Forster’s 1909 tale The Machine Stops. Space travel? Already done to death before the pulp magazines of the Twenties got to it. All of them, interestingly enough, turned out to have the same problem that doomed the flying car: sure, they’re possible — well, except for fusion power; the jury’s still out on whether that can be done on a scale smaller than a star — but the limited benefits don’t begin to cover the sky-high costs.

Yet the same old futures, grey with decades of dust, remain stuck in place in the popular imagination. Take Star Trek, the show that still defines the future for an embarrassingly large number of people. It premiered in 1966. In that year cars still had tailfins, surfer movies starring Annette Funicello and Frankie Avalon were all the rage, books on space travel had chapters beginning “When man lands on the Moon,” and slide rules were the standard calculating device because computers were fragile contraptions the size of warehouses. That was the year when Ronald Reagan began his political career. Star Trek isn’t our future. It’s the embalmed corpse of a future that fell over dead a long time ago.

There’s an ugly political subtext behind this act of mummification. The rebels of the 1960s and 1970s framed their challenges to the status quo in visionary terms, portraying futures dramatically different from the present. Theodore Roszak’s Where the Wasteland Ends (1972) and Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia (1978) were among the most widely read of the literature that resulted. Those challenges caused stark panic among the comfortable classes. When the backlash hit in the 1980s, the corporate establishment set out to erase the idea that the future could differ from the present in any way that mattered.

Those who lived through those years will recall how environmental action groups were bought out and neutered, the scruffy radicals who founded them abruptly replaced by slick corporate enablers. The same thing happened to every other movement that threatened the existing order of things: that’s when feminism gave up on changing society, for example, and settled instead for giving middle-class women prestige jobs within the system. Stuffing the visionary futures of the previous decades down the nearest available memory hole was part of the same process.

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That’s how we spent forty years spent parading around the crumbling mummy of a failed future under the delusion that we were doing something innovative. At this point even true believers are beginning to have doubts. Every year we get told by the lab-coated cheerleaders of progress as usual that fusion power is only twenty more years in the future, that we’ll be going back to the Moon sometime soon, and so on through a litany of broken promises. Meanwhile creeping dysfunction spreads through the world’s industrial nations, marked by the accelerating decay of the built environment and the ongoing crapification of everyday life.

The result has been a paralysis of the imagination with dismal political consequences. Have you noticed how many of the political crusades of the last forty years have been against something rather than for something? It’s all about fighting this or stopping that, not about envisioning constructive change and then setting out to make it happen. Political parties pitch themselves to their captive constituencies by insisting that the other side will make things worse, without offering a scrap of hope that things might get better. It’s no wonder that so many people cherish apocalyptic fantasies. Compared to a future that’s never any better than the wretched mess of the present, global annihilation has a certain charm.

Anyone who wants a future different from the present thus needs to start by ditching the faux-future we’ve been sold by the corporate media for the last forty years, and envisioning something genuinely different. That’s harder than it looks. Most of the supposedly innovative futures these days abandon the Star Trek future in order to chase something even more antiquated.

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Consider Klaus Schwab and his loudly ballyhooed “Great Reset.” In the future Schwab and his fellow plutocrats are promoting, you will own nothing, vast intrusive bureaucracies will monitor every detail of your life, and you will be happy. You’d better be happy, because it’s clear what will happen to you if you’re not: the future Schwab is proposing, after all, is a carbon copy of the Soviet Union under Stalin with a few technology upgrades, and the only question he hasn’t discussed in print is where he plans on putting the gulags and mass graves. That sort of future was fresh and new in the late nineteenth century. At this point it’s roughly as fresh as Lenin’s corpse, and we all know how well it worked in practice.

How about the future that begins with young enthusiastic people moving out to communes in the countryside to lay the foundations of a new society? That’s even older than the futures we’ve already discussed. Nathaniel Hawthorne of The Scarlet Letter fame wrote a novel, The Blithedale Romance, which was published in 1852; it’s set on a commune in rural Massachusetts, with a cast of characters you could have found in rural northern California just after the Summer of Love. By the time Hawthorne penned that story, communes had been a familiar presence in the United States since colonial times. Nor did the communes of early nineteenth century America last longer or accomplish more than their lineal descendants in the 1920s or the 1960s.

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The moral of the story? If you’re going to borrow a future from the past, find one that worked. If you’re going to invent one from scratch, don’t repeat the failed gimmicks of futures that are already long past their pull date. Don’t make your future depend on some infinitely abundant source of energy that doesn’t happen to exist: that was the fatal flaw of the Star Trek future. Don’t hand unchecked power to a bureaucratic system under the fond illusion that it won’t be abused: that was the problem with the allegedly glorious socialist future that turned Soviet Russia, Maoist China, and Khmer Rouge Cambodia into abattoirs. Don’t assume that you can run away from society and create a utopia on fifty acres in the country: it’s been tried countless times, with a success rate best counted in imaginary numbers.

The futures that matter at this point are those that don’t simply rehash the failures of the past. They don’t extrapolate from the failed present in a straight line, for that matter. A glance back at the visionary futures proposed in the 1960s and 1970s might be useful; a glance at the strange alternative histories being dreamed up on the fringes right now might also help.

The exotic visions of past and present being promoted in conspiracy culture these days show that there is still a collective imagination out there. It’s just that the people involved in creating and circulating those visions have somehow managed to convince themselves that the bumbling stooges who run our political and economic institutions are monomaniacal masterminds obsessed with conquering the world they already mismanage. If the conspiracy-minded can shake themselves out of that dysfunctional notion, they can put their imaginative gifts to better use and start conspiring to bring about more interesting futures.

It’s a challenge that all of us would be well advised to face. One great lesson that can be learned from the total failure of the Tomorrowland future is that the world ahead of us won’t look like anything churned out by today’s corporate media. Nor, it probably needs to be said, will it follow any of the various linear extrapolations being hawked about by the single-minded these days. We need to be prepared to deal with technological progress and technological unraveling, sudden jolts and slow transitions, new opportunities and hard limits — all of these, all at once. That’s the way history happens. The sooner we grasp that, and ditch the outdated futures that clutter up the collective imagination these days like so much Victorian bric-a-brac, the more likely we will be to imagine a future worth having — and then to go out there and create it.

There are times when asking questions is more useful than offering answers, and this is one of them. Set aside the decrepit futures pushed at you by the corporate media, and ask yourself what you want in a future.

As Arthur C. Clarke put it:“I know nothing comparable to it except The Lord of the Rings.” It’s a justified parallel. Dune is as central to science-fiction as JRR Tolkien’s masterpiece is to fantasy.

With Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2021) on general release we finally have a decent film adaptation. Villeneuve has done for Herbert what Peter Jackson did for Tolkien in the Rings trilogy (2001-2003). But dig a bit deeper into the comparisons, and I fear that team Tolkien comes off worse.

Let’s start with the central character in each story: Frodo Baggins in Tolkien’s epic and Paul Atreides in Herbert’s. Both embody the archetype of the reluctant hero. On screen, they’re portrayed by similar actors — Elijah Wood as Frodo and Timothée Chalamet as Paul. These are very much of a type: one part leading man, two parts haunted Victorian doll. Chalamet, though, oozes charisma, while Wood merely gains our sympathy. Score one to Dune. 

Then there’s the rest of the cast — which in the case of Dune meets the multi-ethnic criteria of contemporary film making. The Rings trilogy, almost 20 years older, does not. This is hardly Jackson’s fault — nor Tolkien’s for that matter. There’s an obvious difference in context between a fantasy world inspired by Nordic legend and the galactic melting pot of the far future. 

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As for gender balance, it must be admitted that Tolkien’s tale is a bit of a Boy’s Own adventure. Nevertheless, Jackson did his best to push female characters to the forefront. It hasn’t been so difficult for Villeneuve. For a start, the source material provides more to work with — for instance the “Bene Gesserit”, an order of terrifying space-nuns. Also Villeneuve was able to change the sex of one of the originally male characters, the scientist Liet Kynes, without it making much difference to the plot. I’m not sure Jackson could have done the same to, say, Gandalf. 

Still, such excuses won’t cut much ice with today’s progressives. We can expect their tutting disapproval to be layered on top of previous attacks on Tolkien and everything he supposedly represents. 

Dune is a progressive view of the future — it features a revolution against the established order. Tolkien’s fiction, on the other hand, is portrayed as nostalgic and reactionary — a yearning for a golden age that never existed. After all, what are the Hobbits except idealised Little Englanders who’d have definitely voted for Brexit?

The irony is that Lord of the Rings was once at the cutting edge. Though first published in the mid-1950s, it didn’t become a publishing sensation until a decade later — around the same time as Dune in fact. Both novels achieved cult status with the counterculture of the late 1960s. This was a more comfortable fit for Herbert, the free-thinking Californian, than for Tolkien, the tweedy, Catholic Englishman. Yet the latter did once observe that his political opinions “lean more and more towards Anarchy”.

The narcotic obsessions of the Sixties are lavishly catered for in Dune — whose entire plot (spoilers ahead!) revolves around a perception-altering substance called “Spice”. There is rather less druggery in Tolkien’s fiction, but some have interpreted the “pipeweed” of the Hobbits as consisting of more than tobacco. Certainly, one can see why the hippies were so entranced by the bucolic, laid-back lifestyle of the Shire. 

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A strong current of environmentalism runs through both books. However, while Herbert was a self-taught ecologist, Tolkien’s obvious distaste for industrialisation strikes his critics as sentimental and unsophisticated. Herbert’s ideas appear to be more astute because they’re informed by scientific and technological speculation. Though the events of his novel take place 20,000 years into the future, they clearly relate to the concerns of our own time. 

Let’s start with the desert world of Dune itself, also known as Arrakis. The planet is the only source of the aforementioned Spice — a drug that enables humanity to navigate between the stars. Without it, space travel would be impossible. Wars are therefore fought to control access to this indispensable resource. 

One only has to substitute crude oil for Spice to see what Herbert was getting at. For a book written in the early 1960s — years before oil shocks of the 1970s — he was well ahead of the curve. To drive the point home, his description of Dune and the culture of its native inhabitants is saturated with words and concepts adapted from Arabic and from Islam. 

Herbert tackles some other contemporary concerns — for instance the risks posed by artificial intelligence. In the future he imagines, AI has been forbidden: the most solemn of religious commands is “thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind”.

A technology that hasn’t been banned is the “Axlotl Tank” — an organic machine used by a branch of humanity called the “Bene Tleilax” to give birth to clones. The horrible suggestion is that because the Bene Tleilax are exclusively male, the Axlotl Tanks are all that remain of their females. This is the bio-politics of surrogacy taken to its ultimate, ghastly conclusion. 

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You won’t find biting social commentary like that in the Lord of the Rings. Tolkien’s story was more expansive; it was about something that will never change, which is the corrupting effect of power. Yet this is where Tolkien is superior to Herbert. His heroes — and heroines — pass the test because they refuse to accept the world-changing power that the Ring would confer upon them.

My favourite passage in all of Tolkien is where Frodo freely offers the Ring to Galadriel. For a heart-stopping moment, the elven queen is tempted. It would, after all, be better for her to wear the Ring than the evil Sauron. Yet she understands that she too would be made monstrous by it: “All shall love me and despair!” And so she refuses Frodo’s gift. 

Frank Herbert’s hero, however, does not refuse. There is no actual Ring in Dune, but there is ultimate power. Paul Atreides takes it. Later he has second thoughts, but not before his galactic Jihad has killed sixty billion people and sterilised ninety planets. Bit late to turn pacifist after that. 

Perhaps I’m being unfair. Herbert did say that the “power attracts pathological personalities” and that his stories were meant as a warning that “superheroes are disastrous for mankind”.

And yet in the sequels to Dune, Paul’s son, Leto, takes up where his dad left off. In fact, he turns himself into a giant worm (don’t ask) and imposes an absolute dictatorship on the known universe for next three thousand years. Crucially, Herbert provides him with an excuse — the “Golden Path” — meaning a super-human vision of the best possible future for all mankind. Any unpleasantness along the way is justified by the greater good. 

I think we’ve heard that one before. 

In 1965 Tolkien was sent a copy of Dune. The next year, he was sent another one. Writing back he confessed that he was familiar with the book — and disliked it “with some intensity”. As usual, the old man was right. 

No other nation knew its past as entertainment — not even America — and it is one of the reasons for England’s cultural power, drawing in millions of tourists to breathe in the air where Bolingbroke toppled his cousin, where Hotspur fought Prince Hal, and where monstrous Richard III murdered his nephews in the Tower. They don’t come for the weather or food.

Among the many American tourists visiting the country back in the 1980s was George R.R. Martin, already an established author who at 13 had read J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic The Lord of the Rings, set in a fantasy world heavily influenced by Anglo-Saxon England.

Here Martin visited Hadrian’s Wall, and as the darkness drew in he looked north and wondered what it must have felt like to be a Roman legionary, many of whom came from old cities bathed in the Mediterranean sun. Here they stood, staring into the darkness of Caledonia, not knowing what terrors existed beyond in the vast cold wastelands. What if, he wondered, it wasn’t barbarians they faced, but something altogether more frightening?

Centuries ago the people who lived by the ruins of that wall did fear such things. The walking dead were a part of northern European folklore, across Britain and Scandinavia; the Vikings talked of draugr who would rise up and attack livestock and people, ripping their bodies apart with their sheer brutal strength, and killing their victims so they, too, turn into draugr.

These ancient myths would form part of Martin’s novel A Game of Thrones, an idea first laid out in a letter to his agent in 1993. He called the book, which would be published three years later, “a cycle of plot, counterplot, ambition, murder and revenge, with the Iron Throne of the Seven kingdoms as the ultimate prize.”

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A further four books in the A Song Of Ice and Fire series followed, and by the fifth Martin was being called the “American Tolkien” and had sold tens of millions of copies; meanwhile Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Films film trilogy had provoked renewed interest in fantasy and the medieval. Two more books in the series are expected… at some future date.

When the first episode of Game of Thrones aired ten years ago this week, it was an instant hit, critically and commercially, seen as one of the greats from the golden age of television, beginning with the Sopranos in 1999 and taking in The Wire, Mad Men and Breaking Bad.

It was the most epic of epic productions and each episode could be as expensive as a film; indeed, some battle scenes cost as much. The cast of characters, even with huge chunks of George RR Martin’s vastly complex epics cut out, felt enormous; Martin’s novels are so complicated that he sometimes forgets what has happened to a particular character and has to email a superfan in Sweden to remind him if the poor guy has been killed already.

The line-up of mostly British actors, both greats of stage and screen as well as up-and-coming talent, was unprecedented. You can’t watch any television series without spotting “that guy who gets beheaded in season 4” or the “man who has to eat molten gold” or “poor Theon, who, you know…”.

It was hard not to feel a certain love for characters like Sandor Clegane, the scarred monster capable of remorseless violence and cynicism, yet also a man with a certain sense of justice, and who forms a bond with Arya. “Lots of people name their swords,” she tells him, as they open series four righteously killing some low-born rapists. “Lots of cunts,” he replies.

Or Bronn, the loveable mercenary, in the spirit of Rhett Butler and Hans Solo; he doesn’t care for any cause and is quite nakedly in it for himself, but he’s not venal or cruel. Yet unlike previous examples of that archetype, he’s not going to turn good. As he later tells Tyrion Lannister, when refusing to fight the monstrous Mountain on his behalf: “I like you, pampered little shit that you are. I just like myself more.”

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Tyrion was, of course, the figure we were most drawn to, a character who possessed a sense of pity and empathy. Tyrion is a letch and a coward, but he is humane and educated (not always qualities that went together in real late medieval history). “I have a tender spot in my heart for cripples, bastards and broken things,” as he tells that other outcast, the bastard Jon Snow.

When asked by some gormless backwoods cutthroats how he would like to die, Tyrion replies: “In my own bed, with a belly full of wine and a maiden’s mouth around my cock, at the age of eighty.”

It summed up the show’s excess, both in the violence and sex, with scenes so gratuitous that porn actresses were used; indeed I wonder if, like 18^th and 19^th century editions of Shakespeare where King Lear has a happy ending, much will be excised as society’s moral wheel turns again. I hope so, from a purely selfish point of view; I’d like to watch it with my children one day, boring them silly by talking about all the historical analogies.

Yet despite this moral excess, George R.R. Martin and the show’s creators, David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, were able to escape both the traps of genre fiction and popular culture by plugging deeper into England’s folklore and tradition.

The comparisons with Tolkien are made because, while Martin covers so many similar themes, he inverts (or some would say perverts) almost all of them. While Tolkien drew on the Arthurian tradition of chivalry, Martin turned it around; here the knights are tortured monsters like the Hound, closet homosexuals like Loras Tyrell or, in the case of King Joffrey, the very opposite of Prince Charming.

Lord of the Rings has a strong Christian theme; Game of Thrones exists in a Christless world, Ross Douthat once describing the sinister fanatic High Sparrow as “the ghost of Christendom in G.R.R. Martin’s otherwise more pagan/stoic vision of medieval Europe”.

Similarly Game of Thrones reimagines the English national story, inverting the Henriad by giving it a Northern accent. Ever since Athelstan of Wessex united all the Angles and Saxons in 927 the South of England has dominated. Many medieval kings would never venture beyond the Trent, and when they did it was with an army at their back. Yet Martin’s epic often tells the story from the Northumbrian point of view, facing overmighty southern kings on one side and the wild men of the north on the others.

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Game of Thrones begins with the House of Stark in their rocky, harsh homeland, Ned Stark administering justice for the North. The southern lords are essentially treacherous and conniving, the southern capital of King’s Landing a pit of snakes; the North is poorer and has its dangers but it is a place where people show loyalty to each other, and its rulers look their people in the eye.

In reality the House of Percy played a similar role as Kings in the North. The Percy home of Alnwick, like Winterfell, was perfectly placed to hold the North, which the family had done for generations, winning the loyalty of northern men who would come in their thousands to fight for Percy but had little love for the king in Westminster. Indeed, at one point during the War of the Roses the House of Percy ran the North virtually as a separate kingdom; their story is largely forgotten, because the national story came to be written down by the banks of the Thames.

British history is defined by the geographic gap separating the island; it is further from the rich markets of mainland Europe, that stretch of land  from the Netherlands to northern Italy that has been the continent’s richest and most productive for almost a millennia. No amount of levelling up can defy that geographical destiny.

During the late medieval period on which Game of Thrones was loosely based, numerous chroniclers observed how much poorer the north of London was. The border land was said to consist mostly “in wast grounds and ys very cold hard and barren for the wynter” and it “bredyth tall men and hard of nature”.

When Ned Stark arrives in King’s Landing, he’s asked whether he wants to wear something “more appropriate,” his clothes appearing rough and coarse to southern eyes. At the time, Northern aristocrats in London really would have looked far poorer and less elegant, and with much cheaper horses.

Far poorer than the Southern counties, the North could never hope to win in any trial of strength, and when the Reformation triggered the last Rising of the North in 1569, led by the House of Percy, once again the South was the victor. It always was.

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The Northern leaders not only suffered death and defeat, but their story never came to be told, while Queen Elizabeth became a central protagonist in Our Island Story. In Shakespeare the Percys become proud and foolish, ultimately getting what they deserve by going against the rightful southern king. Even though through the prism of fantasy, it’s taken an American novelist, and two American screenwriters, to retell that story with a Northern voice.

The final series of Game of Thrones came out two years ago and ended with great disappointment, in fact so much so that millions of people demanded that it be remade (which perhaps says something about how mundane our problems were before 2020).

Yet although all those people who called their daughters Khaleesi are probably regretting it now, the show’s finale at least told a certain truth. The attraction of Game of Thrones, compared to most historical fiction, is that alt-history allows its creators to tell an almost purer truth about history and human nature. As amoral as some of the characters are in Westeros, they behave as people would have done in such a situation, devoid of modern idealism or comforts.

Daenerys, the queen over the water, is the only true idealist among the contenders for the throne, and campaigns to end slavery in Essos before liberating her homeland. And yet when she arrives in Westeros she turns out to be far more murderous and oppressive than what went before. Likewise the ancien regime, terrible that it was, had nothing on the horrors unleashed by modernity, which contained far greater lies than the world of chivalry.

Like with so much in the show, it was true to life, and we would have expected nothing less. As the cheerful psychopath Ramsay Bolton once put it: “If you think this has a happy ending, you haven’t been paying attention.”

Back then, fantasy was a nerd hobby. Today, though, both fantasy and the moral policing of fantasy seems increasingly mainstream. Fantasy novels can be pulled for wrongthink and even wildly successful fantasy authors such as JK Rowling get dogpiled. Not even actors representing fantasy characters are safe: witness the treatment meted out to Mandalorian actress Gina Carano after being judged by the court of social media to be guilty of heresy.

To those uninterested in fantasy “fandoms”, these may seem absurd dramas. After all, when we’re talking about imaginary worlds populated by imaginary people, who cares about the private opinions of those who create the stories, or represent them on TV?

This dismissive attitude is a mistake. The truth is that a culture’s ideals are always delivered via stories, and in most cultures telling and re-telling these has been taken very seriously indeed. It’s only in our modern world that tales of gods and monsters, rather than taking centre stage in our shared cultural life, have been shoved off into a box called “fantasy fiction” and treated as a mezzobrow hobby for the incorrigibly childish.

It should be clear by now that I have a personal stake here: I’m a full-bore fantasy fiction nerd. Whether it’s solemn sword-and-sorcery, the comic adventures of Terry Pratchett, or the weird worlds of China Miéville or Josiah Banks, if it’s even half-decently written and concerns fantastic kingdoms and impossible adventures I’m there. But I’m also, to a modest extent, interested in literary history. And it’s striking how fantasy fiction popped into existence as a Western genre more or less at the exact point where epic poetry in the classical style stopped being taken seriously.

Rewind a few hundred years, and everyone writing in English sprinkled references to the Greek and Roman gods into their stories and poems, while the Homeric myths occupied a place in the Western imagination almost as central as the Bible. It’s difficult to imagine today but figures such as Athena, goddess of war and wisdom, Circe the sorceress and snake-headed Medusa were common cultural reference points for the educated class.

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And it wasn’t just the mythic memes of antiquity that larded our literature — it was the forms as well. The hero’s quest, as set out in The Iliad and The Odyssey, and later in Virgil’s Aeneid, formed a template for heroic narrative that continued almost unchanged into the 18th and early 19th centuries.

Countless authors borrowed, imitated, translated and ironically reworked the epic mode, from Spenser’s hallucinatory Faerie Queene (1590) to Milton’s barnstorming retelling of the Christian story, Paradise Lost (1667), to arguably the last effort at epic poetry, Byron’s Don Juan (1819). But it couldn’t last. In Don Juan, Byron captured something sad but unmistakably true: the classical epics were losing their aura, leaving behind only a sense of lost grandeur. As Byron’s hero laments, while trapped on a Greek island (with only a nubile pirate princess for company):

THE isles of Greece! the isles of Greece
Where burning Sappho loved and sung,
Where grew the arts of war and peace,
Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!
Eternal summer gilds them yet,
But all, except their sun, is set.

Byron’s 16,000 lines of satire, sex and mourning for the vanished glories of classical antiquity put paid to epic as a usable form for anyone with a desire to be taken seriously as a writer. Or was it science? Imagine a looming form that by candlelight seems a shadowy, terrible monster — then turns out, with the lights switched on, to be just a coat-stand. With scientists explaining away ever more of the world’s mysteries by the light of reason, maybe the old gods just started to look a bit silly.

So a few short decades later, the epic style migrated into the first fantasy novels: George MacDonald’s Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women (1858), and the children’s adventure The Princess and the Goblin (1871). Even as epic poetry died off, modern fantasy fiction was born.

The high point for our rational world — Peak Reason, if you will — was probably the end of the Cold War, when it seemed all the grand battles between good and evil had been won. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it was in the 1980s that the fantasy market went supernova.

Remembering my adolescence in the 1990s, the everyday world seemed flat, dull and stripped of all enchantment. But fantasy blossomed: after my baptism-by-Belgariad, I fell feet-first into the then freshly-published greats of modern fantasy, by now-classic authors such as Robin Hobb, Tad Williams and of course JK Rowling. Epic imagination scaled new heights, even as geopolitics sought perpetual peace under the “liberal international order”, the Communist threat evaporated, and the scope for heroic achievement in the “real” world seemed as vanished as Byron’s vision of classical Greece.

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Those who went on dreaming of earth-shattering battles or heroes plucked from obscurity to save the universe have spent the Age of Reason with their heads down. Tolkien’s classic of 20th-century fantasy, The Lord of the Rings, is one of the best-selling books of all time; but one 1955 letter to WH Auden, Tolkien ruefully describes being “scourged with such terms as ‘pubescent’ and ‘infantilism'”. And everyone loves dragging millennials about the Harry Potter thing.

But while science has plenty to say about the “what” and “how” of our world, it has far less to offer on “why”. We may laugh at the tweeness of being a Harry Potter obsessive in your thirties, or someone with a mortgage and two kids cosplaying at a Star Wars convention. But we’re not so different from our fireside-storytelling ancestors, in craving stories that help us get at the dark, strange questions — or the big ones about power, empire, good and evil.

And while mythology seemed temporarily defeated by the End of History, today successive crises of finance, terrorism and pandemic have shown our world to be far more dangerous and unpredictable than we once imagined. So even as history has come roaring back, we shouldn’t be surprised to see gods and monsters doing the same. They might take the form of Baby Yoda memes or emetic Gryffindor avatars, but they’re playing the same role as the Greek and Roman pantheon centuries ago: providing a common narrative language for debates about the big questions.

From this perspective it’s easier to see how quarrels over whether or not an actress thinks you should wear a mask, or what JK Rowling thinks about transgender women, aren’t ludicrous culture war sideshows at all. Rather, they’re border skirmishes over the content of our moral operating system. The woke grasp this fact instinctively, which is why they reserve a special fury for policing heresy in our emerging new mythologies.

But the new would-be guardians of our epic mythologies are likely to find in time that their subject has a habit of escaping their control. The long history of stories that survive and replicate tells us it’s not the morally correct ones that make the cut, but the ones that ring true. No one today reads that classic of 17^th-century woke literature, John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, unless they absolutely have to. Meanwhile, it’s a testament to the continued power of the old pantheons, that having disappeared from highbrow literature, they’ve since reappeared in (among other things) PlayStation games and the Marvel universe.

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And the power of such gods lies partly in their refusal to be domesticated: they’re two-faced, ambivalent, bloody, capricious and awe-inspiring. They’re not at all inclusive. They carry a payload of intuitions about — for example — the persistence of power, violence and hierarchy, the often-untidy dynamics between the sexes, and the obnoxiousness of heroic personalities, that don’t sit comfortably with the sanitised modern imagination. Stories are too unruly to be easily contained by moral correctness.

It was the pursuit of Reason that chased the old gods into the shadows of children’s literature. But today, our faith in Reason is well on its way to collapsing. David Goodhart wrote recently about how, as media control has decentralised in the internet age, what looked like a consensus on “objective” discourse has been upended by a tidal wave of emotionally inflected personal testimony. Even the New York Times, which has for decades styled itself as the objective ‘paper of record’, has been convulsed by civil war over whether it should instead embrace more polemical, politicised stances.

As the lights go out and we see the world by firelight again, expect to discover the old gods striding, full-sized, across our imaginations again. We may find their return a mixed blessing.