THE TERRANAUTS

Fiction

Off the grid

THE TERRANAUTS

T. C. Boyle

508 pp. Harper Collins

Reviewed by Marty Carlock

Can a self-sustaining biosphere be created on, say, Mars to enable human beings to live on an alien planet? Theorists think so. A couple of decades ago an attempt to perform this experiment actually took place in the Arizona desert; it was called Biosphere2. Although a crew stayed inside for two years, they cheated on several crucial levels, such as importing outside oxygen.

T. Coraghessan Boyle, one of our more prolific and entertaining contemporary novelists, satirizes the experiment in The Terranauts. In his fecund imagination, another mission is undertaken (with snide references to the actual, failed one). Boyle has no problem visualizing the probabilities as eight “Terranauts” attempt to survive for two years in an artificial environment.

E2 (E1 is the actual Earth, outside) is carefully planned: Its three acres comprise five biomes – rain forest, ocean, desert, savanna and marsh. The ocean is actually a water feature about the size of a football field, with synthetic wave action – but it has a beach. E2 is eight stories high, carefully designed with two-level apartments for each crew member. Its trucked-in soil hosts 3,800 species, including animals. For the previous two and a half years, crew aspirants have planted, stocked and cultivated the habitat, and now it is theoretically ready to support eight human beings without input from the outside.

In an elaborate ceremony to mark the entry of the Terranauts into their artificial world, their spokesman intones, “Call it science-theater. Call it a dramatization of ecological principles under the guiding cosmology of Gaia, in which E1, the original world in which we were all born and nurtured, could be viewed as a living organism negotiating the heavy cosmic seas.”

A master of descriptive prose, Boyle makes it look so effortless you don’t realize how good it is. 

There was a dense green living aura to the air inside that was utterly unlike the stingy air of the desert surrounding us…You smelled mold, spores, damp earth, process, the ants and termites and microbes in the soil breaking things down even as the fronds of the banana trees loomed overhead and the palms reached to the sun-shot lattice of the sky. It was air you could taste…And over it all, the great roar of the fans and blowers of the technosphere that kept it all going…running steadily as a heartbeat day and night.

Like astronauts, the crew for E2 is chosen through rigorous, competitive selection. It’s necessary to have specialists; Richard is the doctor, T.T. can do emergency dentistry, Gretchen is a wildlife expert and veterinarian. The narrator Dawn, nicknamed Eos or E., is in charge of domestic animals and must milk the goats, tend the ducks, chickens and pigs, oversee the weeding. Ramsay, another narrator, is communications officer, charged with spinning the mission for the press. Ramsay is fanatic about maintaining the isolation of E2. “Nothing in; nothing out” is the sworn motto of the Terranauts. A previous experiment failed when one of the crew crushed a finger and exited for treatment. Ramsay is contemptuous: “What’s a finger?” in terms of failure, he muses. He’s sure he would suck it up and remain inside, no matter the consequences.

There’s a third narrator outside, Linda Ryu, an overqualified applicant who bitterly believes she wasn’t chosen for the E2 crew because she’s Asian. She’s supposed to be Dawn’s best friend, but she’s crazed with jealousy when Dawn is chosen for the E2 crew and she isn’t. 

The crew’s determination is severely tested when its power fails. Yes – although there is solar power, this “independent” system depends on the local grid, backed up by generators out in E1. As the temperature rises and heat stroke threatens the crew, they divide into factions, half voting to abandon the mission, half committed to maintaining the sealed exit even if they die inside.

Less dramatic divisions occur. The food is limited to begin with, strictly doled out, and it becomes more precious as time goes on. When winter comes, with diminished daylight, the crew begins to starve. Camaraderie dwindles; food theft creates distrust, duplicity, and spying on one another.

Inevitably, sexual adventures create rifts. Ramsay sleeps with Gretchen, regrets it, and is thereafter stalked by his momentary partner. Ramsay and the geeky Gyro both hit on Dawn, Gyro offering M&Ms he smuggled in before closure; Ramsay producing pot. It’s a suitable interval afterward that Dawn discovers she’s pregnant.

Disaster looms: Will Dawn try to give birth inside – which means, for public relations purposes, Dawn and Ramsay must marry? Will she destroy the mission and break the seal to have the baby outside? Or will Richard perform an abortion?

Boyle tells such a good story you hardly stop to notice what a surreptitiously sarcastic take this is on contemporary society.

Once a journalist chasing facts for The Boston Globe, Marty Carlock finds it’s more fun to make things up. Her short fiction has appeared in a dozen-plus journals and quarterly publications. She’s author of A Guide to Public Art in Greater Boston and several unpublished novels. She sometimes writes for Sculpture and Landscape Architecture magazines.