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IN THE HERO WITH A THOUSAND FACES, JOSEPH CAMPBELL DEFINES THE monomyth as that single "consciously controlled" pattern most widely exhibited in the world's folk tales, myths, and religious fables" (255-56). Its morphology is, in broad outline, that of the quest. The hero is called to an adventure, crosses the threshold to an unknown world to endure tests and trials, and usually returns with a boon that benefits his fellows (36 - 38). Already abstracted from numerous mythological and fantastic sources, the monomyth has again been replicated many times over since (as well as prior to) its articulation by Campbell in 1949. Probably most widely known as the underlying plot structure incorporated into George Lucas's initial Star Wars trilogy (Gordon; Mackay; Sherman; Tiffin), it has also been used as the plot structure for numerous other science fiction films from the second half of the twentieth century, including George Pal's The Time Machine (I960), 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dune, Back to the Future, The Terminator, The Last Starfighter, Time after Time, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure (Lundquist), Lagan's Run, Escape from New York, Dreamscape, Tron, The Matrix (Kimball), and the first four Star Trek films (Baker; Reid-Jeffrey): Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Roth), Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Although essentially a mythological plot structure that would appear to lend itself most naturally to works of fantasy, and thus might seem anomalous in works of science fiction, it also occurs in meticulous detail in some of the most well-known and artistically successful science fiction novels of this period, such as Daniel Keyes's Flowers for Algernon (Palumbo, "Algernon"), each of the six volumes in Frank Herbert's Dune series (Palumbo, "Dune"), Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun series (The Shadow of the Torturer, The Claw of the Conciliator, The Sword of the Lictor, and The Citadel of the Autarch), and Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination.2
Published in 1956, The Stars My Destination is the first of these science fiction novels and films to use the monomyth so extensively as its underlying plot structure. Although perhaps most remarkable for its exhaustive elaboration of the monomyth's pivotal death-and-rebirth motif-as protagonist Gully Foyle...