Why are so many people snobby about Fantasy Fiction?

Kazuo Ishiguro, who won the Booker prize in 1989 for his novel The Remains of the Day, is one of the literary world’s most respected novelists. It raised eyebrows in 2005 when he published Never Let Me Go, a dystopian science fiction novel about children who discover that they are clones destined to be harvested for their organs, though the book is now regarded as one of his best works. But when the literary world learned that his new book, The Buried Giant, is an Arthurian fantasy about the quest to kill a dragon, it didn’t just raise eyebrows—it made heads explode. Ishiguro was puzzled by the response.