A powerful,
affecting and hilarious deep-dive into human behavior in an intimate and epic story of science, society, sex, and survival, set in the early
1990s, from one of the greatest American novelists today
It is 1994, and in the desert near Tillman, Arizona, forty miles from
Tucson, a grand experiment involving the future of humanity is underway. As climate change threatens the earth, eight scientists, four men and
four women dubbed the “Terranauts,” have been selected to live under
glass in E2, a prototype of a possible off-earth colony. Their sealed,
three-acre compound comprises five biomes — rainforest, savanna, desert,
ocean and marsh — and enough wildlife, water, and vegetation to sustain
them.
Closely monitored by an all-seeing Mission Control, this
New Eden is the brainchild of eco-visionary Jeremiah Reed, aka G.C. — “God the Creator” — for whom the project is both an adventure in scientific
discovery and a momentous publicity stunt. In addition to their roles as medics, farmers, biologists, and survivalists, his young, strapping
Terranauts must impress watchful visitors and a skeptical media curious
to see if E2’s environment will somehow be compromised, forcing the
Ecosphere’s seal to be broken — and ending the mission in failure. As the
Terranauts face increased scrutiny and a host of disasters, both natural and of their own making, their mantra: “Nothing in, nothing out,”
becomes a dangerously ferocious rallying cry.
Told through three
distinct narrators — Dawn Chapman, the mission’s pretty young ecologist;
Linda Ryu, her bitter, scheming best friend passed over for E2; and
Ramsay Roothorp, E2’s sexually irrepressible Wildman — The Terranauts
brings to life an electrifying, pressured world in which connected lives are uncontrollably pushed to the breaking point. With characteristic
humor and acerbic wit, T. C. Boyle indelibly inhabits the perspectives
of the various players in this survivalist game, probing their
motivations and illuminating their integrity and fragility to illustrate the inherent fallibility of human nature itself.
