I recently took my daughter to buy some books in a rather large UK book chain and was dismayed to discover that the Fantasy section had all but disappeared.
Whereas a decade or more ago it took up an entire wall, it’s now reduced to shelf space maybe eight feet long, if that. What’s worse, it’s no longer Fantasy: each work of imaginative fiction strains beneath the banner of Sci-Fi so that Tolkien shares space with computer game tie-ins.
While I’m always happy to see genre distinctions eroded (though I don’t see why it’s not all under a Fantasy banner) it made me realise just how low the genre has fallen in the public’s affections.
