Wired.com presents the Geek's Guide to the Galaxy. And here is your host, David Barr

Kirtley.

Hello and welcome to episode 228 of Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

Our guest today is T.C. Boyle.

He's the author of 15 novels, including The Road to Wellville, A Friend of the Earth,

Drop City, and the harder they come.

He's also written over a hundred short stories, which have been published in collections such as

After the Plague, Tooth and Claw, and Wild Child and other stories.

He's a distinguished professor of English Emeritus at the University of Southern California,

and for many years he taught a fiction workshop there that I was lucky enough to attend back in 2007.

And I'll be speaking with him today about his new novel the Terranots and now here's our

interview with T.C. Boyle. All right so we're here with T.C. Boyle welcome to the

show. Well David it's a pleasure to be with you. Okay, and so your new book is called The Terranauts, and it's loosely based on the real life story of Biosphere 2.

So tell us about Biosphere 2.

Well, this is a very happy accident for a writer to discover such wonderful material.

I am able to take the actual Biosphere 2 material, which is now in the historical record and then posit another

closure of the biosphere with fictional characters. So many will remember that in the early 90s, specifically 91 through 93, the Biosphere 2 experiment

began in the Arizona Desert. You had a glassed in closure of 3.15 acres which

contained a 3,800 species of plants and animals and five separate biomes. In it were four men and four women

volunteers who were called the Biospirians in my fictional account. I call them the pteronauts and the

object of this was to see if we could create a self-replicating biosphere to see if we could have a Mars colony or if the biosphere that we live

in and are talking in now should collapse, which it seems to be well on its way to doing well perhaps we could

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