Because I wouldn’t think of his stuff as sci-fi. The aforementioned *Neverwhere *and *American Gods *are more like magical realism. And before you roll your eyes at comic books, I strongly suggest you pick up the first TPB of Sandman–it really is an amazing work.
Well, he’s a rather well known award winning author, not TV. A number of his books have been adpated for film, such as Stardust and* Coraline*.
And I do relate the two to an extent. For example, I expect any intelligent person to *know who *Robert Heinlein is, even if they don’t read SF. Now, sure- to be able to name all his books and discuss film adaptations veers past simple cultural literacy towards geekness. I expect them to *know who *Ang Lee is, who Ringo Starr is, and so forth. That’s just part of being well read.
Too late.
I remember American Gods. I remember picking it up, thinking, “Oh hey, this might be pretty good.”. And then I got to the vore* scene. This was in chapter one, mind you, without any warning. It wasn’t like “Just so you know this book will be really creepy at times”. It was more like “Oh hey guys howDEARGODWHATAREYOUDOING?”. Why would I want to keep reading that and how on earth could one describe it as “high-brow”?
*An incredibly disturbing sexual fetish where one of the partners is turned on by eating the other one mid-coitus.
[QUOTE=Shot From Guns;13025850
Because I wouldn’t think of his stuff as sci-fi. The aforementioned *Neverwhere *and *American Gods *are more like magical realism. And before you roll your eyes at comic books, I strongly suggest you pick up the first TPB of Sandman–it really is an amazing work.[/QUOTE]
He’s considered more a (modern) Fantasy writer that true “Science Fiction”. Mind you, I actually prefer his novels to his comics by quite a bit.
But if all he did was comics, I’d forgive you, Boyo. However, his many award winning books and two well known films put him into mainstream writer.
I know who all these folk are, though I wouldn’t put Ang Lee in the same league as Ringo or Heinlein. I don’t even think I’d put Heinlein in the same league with Ringo. I know quite a few very smart people who know nothing at all about sci-fi. Their intellectual curiosity takes them in different directions.
I remember reading on another board about a guy who assigned the book at his (private, I think) high school; apparently the first chapter had been read by half the people in the school the first night it was assigned, having been passed hand-to-hand accompanied by commentary such as “holy shit, I can’t believe he wrote that.”
Well, this thread has wandered all over the place.
I think the tie-in now is eating.
There not much at all like magical realism; they’re straight-up fantasy, albeit in a modern setting.
This is what happens when restaurants give out crowns to their customers.
Oh dear my yes! Everyone knows that if you want class, you go to Wendys. 
(God, and I thought I WAS the queen of thread FAIL)
If you live in a car, can you even be trailer trash? Aren’t you…car trash or something? Anyway, I just can’t imagine that they told old Stan about their living situation. I’m pretty sure he just made it up, just like that thread where he decided that someone who worked at Borders was automatically not very smart. And then he wonders why the world is rude to him. Jeez, can’t a guy just jump to insulting conclusions without everyone getting all up in his face about it?
Yes, and Arthur C. Clarke, Ian Fleming, Vladimir Nabokov, P. G. Wodehouse, and Margaret Atwood all are skin magazine writers.
Too true, but I think the OP doesn’t know that he’s supposed to stop wearing it after he’s done with his Whopper.
You’re still the Queen, dear. 
Others are just bucking to sit beside you on the throne.
Yes, I’d quite imagined. Are you actually going to fight your ignorance and try some, or will you continue to make smug assumptions about the quality of an entire medium with no basis in experience?
1.) I wouldn’t say it qualifies as vore anymore than *Lolita *qualifies as child porn. The point is not to tittilate the audience, but rather that the world does not work by the rules you always assumed that it must. It’s also helping to lay down the new rules of worship as power.
2.) I, personally, never claimed Gaiman was “high-brow,” simply good fiction.
Urban fantasy, then, if you prefer. Really, though, “magical realism” is just what people call especially well written urban fantasy, when they don’t want to hitch it to the cart of genre fiction. And I wouldn’t say that Gaiman is a genre writer in the same sense as someone like, oh, Mercedes Lackey. Though obviously I wouldn’t put any of his stuff on the same level as something like Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children.
There’s a significant stylistic difference; the magic in fantasy stories is usually rationally explicable once you know what the rules are; magical realism not so much.
Pulling from the Wikipedia article…
I’d say that applies to American Gods quite neatly.
Of course, the distinction that is often made is that in something more traditionally considered magical realism, the fantasy elements are presented in a very straightforward way, as though they’re perfectly natural; while in Gaiman’s novels, the surreal is encountered as another layer that exists below the reality we see now, but something that is very surprising and unnatural to the protagonist being exposed to it. Although one of my favorite authors is Haruki Murakami, and I’d qualify some of his stuff as falling into this classification–and the protagonists there often exhibit the same unfamiliarity with the other worlds as do Gaiman’s.
Given some definitions of magical realism, however, it could simply be that I’m using the term in a less commonly accepted or idiosyncratic way.
Errr … what thread am I in again?
I prefer Palatino Linotype and refused to watch Helvetica too. Absolute rubish. 