Who are we? Where are we? Why are we?
American author T.C. Boyle wants ‘definitive answers’ to these big questions – luckily for us he writes wonderful books in his attempt to find the answers.
AMERICAN writer T.C. Boyle has published 15 novels and over a hundred short stories in the last three decades.
His works oscillate between zany and serious and contemporary and historical, and he has a particular penchant for megalomaniacs and environmental themes.
They’ve won numerous awards, including the PEN/Faulkner award, the Prix Médicis étranger (in France), and the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement from the Los Angeles Times.
Boyle, 68, is based in Santa Barbara, California where, until last year, he taught at the University of Southern California. He recently took the time to talk to us about his writing and his most recent novel, The Terranauts (Ecco).
The story is a fictional reworking of the Biosphere 2 experiment that took place in the United States in the early 1990s. A team of people were sealed inside a self-contained environment for two years with the ambitious goal of becoming entirely self-sustaining to the point of even producing their own oxygen via the plants housed inside. What could possibly go wrong? Boyle takes the idea and runs with it in a poignant and often hilarious novel (see review below, “Living in a bottle”).
The following is an excerpt from our interview.
The Terranauts is a little different from your previous novels. For a start, there are three narrators and stylistically, it seems more informal, essentially conversational in tone. How conscious or intuitive was that choice?
Everything in my fiction is organic, purely, and it happens in the moment.
That said, of course, I do have certain structural ideas at the outset of a project, and here it came to me that having these three chatty first-person narrators would make this story about a hermetic life much more intimate than if I’d employed a more usual narrative structure.
In your 1995 novel The Tortilla
Curtain you took a close look at social divisions within American society. Using the same lens, The
Terranauts could be read as an examination of an exclusionary, white, middle-class bubble. Was that a conscious metaphor?
I very much like your take on the notion of exclusiveness here. All this money – US$150mil 1990 dollars and $10mil a year in operating costs – to keep eight white, middle-class Americans isolated from the hurts of the larger world.
What would a space colony look like? What will happen to the rest of us when the environment – if you’ll excuse the expression – turns to shit?
Do you hope to influence readers by writing around environmental issues, or are you simply expounding your world-view?
I am exploring issues of biology, ecology and metaphysics for my own health and enlightenment. I really do want definitive answers to these questions: Who are we? Where are we? Why are we?
Having obviously spent time thinking through possible scenarios and pitfalls in this type of closed system, do you have any advice for entrepreneur and futurist Elon Musk and his planned Martian settlements?
Try strenuously to preserve what has evolved here over billions of years, because it is all but impossible to recreate it.
Environmentalists say, “Save the Planet!” Well, the planet will save itself, at least for three and a half billion years more. It is our species which needs saving, as we are destroying the conditions which allowed us to emerge in the first place.
You have a new collection of short stories coming out called The Relive Box And Other Stories
– can you tell us about that?
This volume consists of 12 new stories, in varying modes, many of which concern environmental themes, as, for instance, “The Fugitive”, which also appeared in The New Yorker in the past year, and deals with the ethics of incarcerating