Many people shrug off fantasy books as a waste of time. They think people who read in this genre are at best harmless time wasters and at worst crazy or anti-religious. Most academics ignore the genre as nothing more than commercial junk without plots, characterization or themes. People miss the point about what fantasy is about.

Fantasy is a commercial literary category of books dealing with magic, mythical creatures, quests and great battles between good and evil, though there are other types too. It is not a genre that promotes Satanism. It is a genre as old as civilization. "the best of past fantasy," states author Greace Chetwin, "offers a true record of what a society once believed; for instance, how it saw the world, what it saw as right and wrong." (Grace Chetwin on Fantasy) She goes on to say, "True fantasy is not about improbable people in never-never lands: on the contrary, it speaks the deepest, innermost truths about the huamn soul." (Grace Chetwin on Fantasy)

This genre is important to read for getting insights into what it means to be human. "Only in fantasy can you get to the core of things, without distractions, without lots of apparatus." (Darrell Schwietzer) The genre is not about devils or magic in the real world. As Darrell Schwietzer says:

"Dragons, elves, trolls, unicorns, magic and other fantasy elements are not there to be taken literally. Such elements, in a good fantasy story, are not there for speculative reasons at all, but as symbols, as myth, not for what they are but for what they suggest and mean. Le Guin speaks of getting "in touch with reality in a special, private, profound fashion." Fantasy that fails to do this, that isn't true on some inner level, is like bad poetry, merely useless verbiage. Good fantasy is not an escape. It doesn't cover up reality. It lets us see things as they are, perhaps more clearly than any other kind of writing except the great myths."

In conclusion, fantasy reveals a world or life view of the author, who is making myths. Through the threat of sorrow and failure we get a fleeting glimpse of joy and discover an underlying reality or truth. As Jane Yolen states: "In fantasy stories we learn to understand the differences of others, we learn compassion for those things we cannot fathom, we learn the importance of keeping our sense of wonder. The strange worlds that exist in the pages of fantastic literature teach us a tolerance of other people and places and engender an openness toward new experience. Fantasy puts the world into perspective in a way that "realistic" literature rarely does. It is not so much an escape from the here-and-now as an expansion of each reader's horizons."