But this latest and little absurd no-no is part of a larger climate of super-sensitivity, giving rise to proliferating prohibitions supposedly in the interest of social justice that constrain fiction writers and prospectively makes our work impossible.
The date is guesswork, of course; but the idea is no longer intrinsically absurd.
"But this brutal and violent individual, this wild animal, this primate, obviously no, it's absurd".
Certainly, the idea that Mars once harbored life no longer seems absurd: Mars used to have briny ponds, perhaps even salty marshes.
Charming, seductive, yes, certainly; a friend to women and, first of all, to his own woman, naturally, but this brutal and violent individual, this wild animal, this primate, obviously no, it's absurd".
It no longer seems absurd, as its consequences continue to ramify, to say that Marcel Duchamp's invention of the readymade was as startling an intellectual innovation as the contemporary intellectual breakthroughs of Freud and Einstein.
No less absurd were the Right Wing idiots.
The European Union's common fisheries policy, for instance, is no less absurd than its agricultural namesake.
Sometimes the human theater is less dramatic, if no less absurd.
