The conflict between good and evil is central to every great fantasy novel, but the way writers handle that dichotomy has become ever more nuanced

As the Daily Mail's news values have moved up the news agenda this week, it's been fun watching the #MiddleEarthDailyMail hashtag on Twitter. Users have been pondering the effect of Sauron's immigration policies on Shire house prices, or imagining diet tips from Lady Galadriel – "Exclusive pics … inside". But I can't shake the feeling that Tolkien's version of good versus evil has something of the Daily Mail about it. Isn't Tolkien's demonisation of the Orkish peoples and their political leader Sauron just as bad as the Mail telling us that asylum seekers, single mothers and socialists are the cause of all evil? Aren't the Hobbits and the Shire really just idealised version of Little Englanders in the home counties?

The World Fantasy convention, which this year will be held in Brighton between 31 October and 3 November, celebrates the best fantasy fiction published today. It would be very easy to assume those books are just generic copies of The Lord of the Rings, cashing in on the apparently endless thirst for Tolkienesque fantasy – and in truth, a few of them are. But the best of today's fantasy writing is in a far more sophisticated dialogue with Tolkien's mythic masterpiece, and the entire question of good versus evil.

The David Gemmel award is one of two major prizes to be presented at this year's convention. The "heroic fantasy" it celebrates has a long history of morally complex storytelling that in fact pre-dates Tolkien's "epic fantasy" by decades. Writers like Jack Vance, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock and David Gemmell himself have produced remarkable novels that belie their origins in pulp fiction.

In recent years, a cohort of writers including Joe Abercrombie, Mark Lawrence and Brent Weeks has resurrected heroic fantasy and placed it firmly back in the bestseller lists. Well crafted, story driven and packing more true grit than John Wayne, "grimdark fantasy" presents heroes with a strong streak of evil running through their hearts.

Yet, while it claims greater moral complexity, grimdark fantasy frequently offers a disappointingly one-dimensional portrayal of the battle between good and evil, where evil usually wins because it is the only game in town. It's a particularly cynical worldview, that perhaps says more about the psyche of the young male readers and writers who dominate grimdark fantasy than anything else.

The shortlist for this year's World Fantasy award itself contains some truly beautiful fantasy writing. G Willow Wilson's Alif the Unseen, NK Jemisin's The Killing Moon and Graham Joyce's Some Kind of Fairy Tale head a list that, regardless of which book ultimately wins, will be honouring a great work of fantasy. One thing all these books have in common is a more nuanced approach to the question of good and evil.

Sir Terry Pratchett, who will be making a special guest appearance at the Brighton convention, cuts to quick on the subject; "Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things," he writes in I Shall Wear Midnight.

For fantasy writers striving to tell new mythic stories for the modern era, it's no longer good enough to say that evil is a monster we can fight. Or that evil always wins, so why bother. Instead, we have to think about exactly the kind of petty evil that the stereotypical Daily Mail headline embodies, spreading fear and hate, making us see people who are different as less than human, so that we can treat them like things and not people. Unless that's just a bit too #MiddleEarthTheGuardian of me …