My Favorite Fantasy Story

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As soon as mankind began to tell stories, the concept of fantasy was not far behind. From the ancient myths and legends every culture created to explain natural phenomena to the folktales, fairy tales, and our urban legends of today, our capacity for imagining the fantastic is exceeded only by our desire to find it. As the concept of fantasy literature evolved over the centuries, it has also become more refined, and now encompasses every type of fiction, from mainstream fantasy to epic high fantasy, from sword and sorcery to urban fantasy. But no matter how many types of fantasy literature exist today, the purpose behind the genre remains the same; to escape the real world and explore other places and events that exist only in the imagination.

Unlike science fiction, which required the fantastic to develop before it could even exist, the roots of fantasy fiction stretch back before the dawn of history. The first structured mythologies, of Mesopotamia and Egypt, pre-date the invention of the written word, as they appear already fully developed in the earliest of texts. The very first "novel"— the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, elements of which probably date back before the fourth millennium BC— in part relates the type of quest beloved of modern fantasy readers as the heartsick king of Uruk searches for the secret of eternal life.

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