The heroic adventure story is an archetypical narrative structure that can be found in many rituals and a wide variety of world literature, including epics, fairy tales, myths, religious tales, and film scripts. Joseph Campbell’s classic account significantly bears the title The Hero With a Thousand Faces (1988 [1949]). These faces include those of Odysseus, Jesus, Buddha, Heinrich Schliemann, Rocky, Indiana Jones, Stargate’s Daniel Jackson and Lara Croft, among many others.

The adventurous journey of the hero always features the same stages of separation, initiation, and return: (1) The hero leaves home in order to embark on a quest into the unknown; (2) the hero is tested and subjected to all sorts of (possibly supernatural) ordeals but also encounters helpers and eventually triumphs in a spectacular way; and (3) the hero returns as a transformed person after the quest has been fulfilled and something significant has been revealed. The transitions between each stage are marked by prominent threshold crossings, but throughout the entire journey the hero has moral superiority on his (or nowadays increasingly: her) side and never needs to question the mission as such.

A look at the listings on the satellite TV channel Adventure 1 shows the variety of hero journeys that are popular today, reflecting a desire for out-of-the-ordinary experiences. Beyond the screen, people enjoy reading adventure magazines (like the German P.M. magazines), visiting adventure parks (like those managed by the American corporation Anheuser-Busch), taking their kids to adventure playgrounds and adventure pools, practicing adventure sports (like climbing or mountain-biking), and going on adventure holidays to Lappland or on safari in Africa (Köck 1990). But scientific discovery is arguably the greatest of all adventures (Haynes 1994: 130). The scientist as heroic adventurer is one of six recurring archetypes of scientists in Western literature: ”Towering like a superman over his contemporaries, exploring new territories, or engaging with new concepts, this character emerges at periods of scientific optimism. His particular appeal to adolescent audiences, deriving from the implicit promise of transcending boundaries, whether material, social, or intellectual, has ensured the popularity of this stereotype in comics and space opera. More subtle analyses of such heroes, however, suggest the danger of their charismatic power as, in the guise of neo-imperialist space travellers, they impose their particular brand of colonization on the universe.” (Haynes 1994: 3)

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