The terranauts

IN SEPTEMBER 1991, amid great flashbulb fanfare, eight people in jumpsuits stepped into an eight-story, glass-and-steel greenhouse complex occupying three acres in the Arizona desert. The complex, called Biosphere 2, was (and remains) the world's largest closed ecological system - a scaled-down replica of Earth (a.k.a. Biosphere 1) replete with a desert, a savanna, a rain forest and a wave-machine-rippled ocean, as well as its own sealed and calibrated atmosphere. The mission for the four men and four women was to inhabit this Earth simulator, for two locked-in years, to test the feasibility of colonizing Mars with similar systems - as a dress rehearsal, that is, for a Noah's Ark-like scheme to reseed the planet's flora and fauna, including humans, in outer space. It flopped. Just 12 days in, an injured crew member was evacuated, dispelling any pretense of a "closed," Mars-ready system, and thanks to respiring soil bacteria, a glut of carbon dioxide threw the atmosphere out of whack. Most of the animals and insects went extinct. The Biospherians, as they were called, fared only slightly better - "We suffocated, starved and went mad," as one would later describe their plight - and the poisonous infighting inside spread to the $150 million project's management team outside, eventually resulting in an invasion of federal marshals armed with restraining orders. Eight years later, with the complex reduced to a dingy shell, Time magazine deemed Biosphere 2, along with New Coke and plus-size spandex, one of the 20th century's 100 worst ideas. The project's cultural influence would seem to back up this designation: Biosphere 2 inspired "Bio-Dome," a 1996 comedy starring Pauly Shore and Stephen Baldwin that you won't catch much flak for calling the worst movie ever made. And as the acknowledged inspiration for the original Dutch version of "Big Brother," which triggered a seismic shift in television programming following its 1999 debut, it's fair to call it the genesis of reality TV. This is a boozy late-night argument, to be sure, but the lines are there to trace the ascendance of the reality-TV star Donald J. Trump back to the legacy of Biosphere 2 - to see good intentions, as the saying goes, recycled as paving stones. The bar is low, then, for T.C. Boyle, whose latest novel, "The Terranauts," is a reimagining of the Biosphere 2 melodrama with a few details shifted sideways (Biosphere 2 is rechristened E2, E for Ecosphere) and with one significant plot twist. Why Biosphere 2 would have exerted a magnetic force on Boyle isn't hard to see. In his 15 previous novels he has shown a deep and abiding interest in messy utopias ("Drop City"); ecological fervor ("When the Killing's Done"); grandiose guru figures (his fictional portraitures of John Harvey Kellogg, Alfred Kinsey and Frank Lloyd Wright); isolated, stranded lives ("San Miguel"); and, more generally, in ideas so overinflated that their only fate is to pop. As Barbara Kingsolver once wrote of Boyle's fiction: "His disparate characters inevitably get twisted, often grotesquely, around a persistent longing for a reconstructed world." As reconstructed worlds go, you don't get much more literal than a biosphere in the desert. The novel is divided into four sections - "Pre-Closure," then years one and two of "Closure" and finally "Re-entry" - and narrated by three Terranauts. When we meet them they're jockeying to be selected for the mission, which only two of them are: Dawn Chapman, the 29-year-old "manager of domestic animals" and resident naïf, and Ramsay Roothoorp, the project's communications officer and unofficial Lothario. The third narrator, Linda Ryu, Dawn's ostensible best friend, is excluded from the mission and consigned to support staff because, by her wounded reckoning, "I'm Asian....And I'm fat." Her bitterness, like the back-stabbing it foments, cuts a corrosive streak through the novel, a chemical burn of resentment. "Screw them," she says of her fellow Terranauts and the mission's leaders, "if they think they can look down their noses at me." The word "screw" has another connotation, and Linda, like most everyone else on the E2 project, engages its full spectrum. Ramsay, for instance, is fixated on mostly one thing: "the irresistible fantasy of sex under glass." From the novel's opening scenes, when Dawn's final interview with the project's management begins and ends with questions about her sex life, this is Boyle's fixation too - the erotic potential of men and women thrown together in a locked environment, utopia as a wet dream. Even Linda, the disgruntled outcast, falls prey to this pelvic tingle: "But they're stuck," she says to Dawn's boyfriend on the outside, after she's slept with him. "I mean, don't you find that fascinating? Or sexy? Or whatever?" For this reader, the answer tilted less toward sexy and more toward whatever. There's erotic potential anywhere humans are stranded or sequestered: the Downton Abbey estate, a remote scientific base camp, Gilligan's Island. The overlay of glass, steel and messianic zeal doesn't necessarily heighten the sexual tension; pheasant under glass, after all, is still just pheasant. And the sex, for that matter, isn't all that sexy - the couplings never rise above the level of drab workplace affairs, despite a few wan declarations of love that get scattered about. One of Ramsay's justifications for his constant tumescence goes like this: "You want a space colony? You can fill it with all the species you can manage to net, trap or dig up and you can balance out the O^sub 2^/CO^sub 2^ ratio to a nice clean earth-friendly 20.9 percent to 0.03 percent, but if the humans don't mate, don't reproduce, what good is it?" It's probably for the best that Ramsay keeps this to himself; it's a belly-flop of a seduction line. Boyle drapes his novel with enough Christian symbolism - the project's founder, Jeremiah Reed, is called G.C., for God the Creator; his full-time aide and part-time lover Judy Forester is known as Judas; of Ramsay, Linda says, "he's the serpent"; and late in the novel we meet an integral character named Eve - to suggest, or at least nod toward, a pious allegory: the Augustinian notion that libido was what spoiled the Garden of Eden, just as, in a sense, it makes a big hot mess of the E2 mission. But Boyle is too agile and feisty a thinker to hew to this line. The search for Eden (or any utopia) is essentially comic because every vision of Eden is a private fantasy, a fingerprint of desires. Humanity, for Boyle, never suffered a fall; we've always been this petty and cutthroat and grubby and absurd. And as "The Terranauts" makes clear, wherever we go - so long as we're trapped together, in this atmosphere or any other - we always will be. 'If the humans don't mate, don't reproduce, what good is it?' JONATHAN MILES is the author of the novels "Dear American Airlines" and "Want Not."