“The Terranauts” by T. C. Boyle

In the Arizona desert, eight scientists are selected for a grand experiment: living under glass in E2, a prototype of a possible off-earth colony. With wit and humor, this novel explores the fallibility of human behavior and the looming question of our future. Check out our Winter 2017 pick for the LARB Book Club: “The Terranauts” by T. C. Boyle.

November 18, 2017

The Terranauts was the winter 2017 LARB Book Club pick. To join the Book Club, where we put you in conversation with editors and members and send a copy of the selected title to your door, become a LARB Friend member today.

“Boyle is a genius at capturing social microcosms and excavating emotions simmering beneath the surface of contemporary America ... A gripping and revelatory tale.” — BBC Between the Lines

From one of America’s greatest living novelists, an epic story of science, society, sex, and survival; a deep-dive into human behavior and the question of our future

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 with five biomes—rainforest, savanna, desert, ocean, and marsh.

Closely monitored by an all-seeing Mission Control, this New Eden is both scientific project and momentous publicity stunt for ecovisionary Jeremiah Reed, aka G.C. — “God the Creator.” 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. 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 Roothoorp, 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.

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Thomas Coraghessan Boyle, also known as T. C. Boyle and T. Coraghessan Boyle (born December 2, 1948), is an American novelist and short story writer. Since the mid-1970s, he has published fourteen novels and more than 100 short stories. He won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1988, for his third novel, World’s End, which recounts 300 years in upstate New York.

He is a Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California.

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