Worse than Big Brother

The California novelist T.C. Boyle has often taken true stories and created alternative histories, from John Harvey Kellog and the birth of the breakfast cereal in The Road to Wellville to Alfred Kinsey and the creation of sexology in The Inner Circle. This might draw comparisons with James Ellroy, Boyle’s exact contemporary, except that where Ellroy aims at the very darkest version of a tabloid reality, Boyle takes a New Age perspective conveyed though whimsy and surrealism.

Ellroy, of course, was born in California while Boyle chose to live there. He is a native of the culture rather than the territory. This is a problem in The Terranauts, where the assumptions and aspirations of a group of scientists inside a giant geo-desic dome are left unexplained. Why would anyone compete for a chance to be imprisoned in a greenhouse for 24 months? Boyle takes it for granted that our desire for new worlds would lead us to accept a shoddy facsimile in the Arizona desert.

Boyle’s story is based on a real event that unfolded in parallel with the 1994 US World Cup. Maradona’s last great competition coincided with the soap opera of seven people locked inside the grandiosely entitled Biosphere 2 (so named because planet earth is Biosphere 1). This was long before the advent of documentary soaps like Big Brother and though there were limited opportunities to watch the Biosphere prisoners in real time, the world was gripped. Especially when the company went bankrupt with the team locked inside, while disgruntled staff vandalised an air lock, and everyone began arguing among themselves, before the whole thing was abandoned.

This was the summer of O.J. Simpson’s leisurely break for freedom along the California freeway, a time of madness that unfolded at a relaxed West Coast pace.