Examining the ways in which stories relate people to the world and to each other, five story types emerge:

Myth: Myth establishes the world. Think of the Enuma Elish or the opening passages of the Old Testament. It is in the broad contexts of mythic story that we create our world. Please see the Nature of Myth.txt file. Even things we would today consider most mundane were understood in ancient societies in the context of myth. Here, from the Babylonian Enuma Elish, is the origin of toothache:

After Anu had created the heaven,
And the heaven had created the earth,
And the earth had created the rivers,
And the rivers had created the canals,
And the canals had created the morass,
And the morass has created the worm,
The worm came weeping before Shamash,
His tears flowing before Ea,
"What wilt thou give me for my food?
What wilt thou give me for my drink?"

"I will give thee the ripe fig
And the apricot."

"What is that to me? The ripe fig
And the apricot!
Lift me up and let me dwell
Among the teeth and the jawbones!
The blood of the teeth I will suck
And will eat away
The roots of the teeth in the jawbones!"

Insert the needle and seize the foot (of the worm)!
Because thou hast said this, O worm,
May Ea smite thee with the might of
His hand!

Incantation against toothache.
Its ritual: Second-grade beer,..., and oil thou shalt mix
together;
The incantation thou shalt recite three times thereon and
shalt put (the mixture) on his tooth.
[Heidel, Alexander, The Babylonian Genesis (U of Chicago Press, 1969) p. 73-74]

Figs and apricots, here, are delicacies rejected by the ungrateful worm (which is actually the tooth nerve). Because of this, Ea fortunately gives us a way to find surcease of pain -- getting drunk and yanking the nerve out.

Apologue: As a story type, apologue defends the world once it is established. Think of the stories of the saints, the post-conversion T.S. Eliot, and the fiction of C.S. Lewis.

Action: Action stories explore, investigate and describe the world. Tom Clancy.

Satire: Satire attacks the world with the intent of making specific changes within it. A Modest Proposal.

Parable: Finally, parable intends to change the world as a whole and to most deeply unsettle our most settled certainties. Parable is not just some silly harmless story that you were told about Sunday school. A well-timed and effective parable can get you crucified. Tolstoy's "How Much Land Does a Man Need" is a simple parable. His Death of Ivan Illich is another, and not so simple. Tolstoy wasn't arrested, remember, only because the authorities decided that a martyred Tolstoy would be more of a problem to them than he was already.

THE BIG POINT: Myth and Parable carry the greatest burden of meaning in the world's religions. In religion, parable first pulls the lynch pins of the old, and then myth establishes and embodies a new world. Jesus of Nazareth, for instance, taught using parable, but his after his death, his life and teaching become subsumed in the myth of the Christ.

Myth and parable have always been primary story types of fantastic literature, and they are very centrally a part of science fiction. SF is a literary genre in which a concern for (and a play with) the things of the spirit just comes naturally.

Please combine this analysis with that of Rabkin's on the  Narrative Sources of the Fantastic.