Longtime Santa Barbara resident T.C. Boyle is the winner of a number of literary awards — such as the PEN/Faulkner Award and France’s Prix Médicis étranger — and is the author of 26 books of fiction, including The Road to Wellville, The Tortilla Curtain, and The Harder They Come. I recently spoke with him about his new novel, The Terranauts, which was published in October.
The Terranauts is inspired by a real place in Arizona, Biosphere 2, and the several unsuccessful attempts to use it as an experiment of a closed ecological system. What drew you to that setting and subject matter? When the Biosphere 2 project was first announced in the early 1990s, I was mightily intrigued by it. It received enormous press coverage — the Biospherians (or Terranauts, as I call them) were presented to the public as heroes in much the same way that the astronauts were. What drew me in was the premise: absolute material closure, nothing in, nothing out. These eight men and women were expected to survive in an artificial ecosystem of 3.15 acres that incorporated some 3,800 species of plants and animals for a full two years, the first closure of a projected 50 consecutive closures. The question: Could we create a self-sustaining biosphere (like the one we inhabit, Biosphere 1), with an eye to creating an off-Earth colony?
The novel begins in 1994. That was a tumultuous time in the outside world —Rwanda, the war in Bosnia. Why did you choose that specific moment in history to enclose your characters in a prototype for an off-Earth colony?