Eight people four men, four women locked in a paradise under glass for two years. No one and nothing is allowed in or out. The world is watching.

In 2016, this sounds like the setup for a no-holds-barred reality show. But in the early 1990s, Biosphere 2 was a real and at least somewhat scientific venture. Built by an idealistic team including inventor John Allen and billionaire backer Ed Bass, the glassed-in enclosure held five biomes, allowing eight adults to subsist on the agricultural output and oxygen within. The concept: to create a totally self-sufficient, enclosed biosphere in which humans could survive without external intervention for two years. (Next stop: colonies on Mars!)

In reality, the project fell short of its lofty goals. Just 12 days into the experiment, one crew member had to leave for several hours for emergency medical treatment beyond the capacity of the teams lone doctor. By the second year, oxygen and other supplies were being sent in with relative frequency. A second team sent in for another two-year mission only lasted a few months before the whole organization dissolved.

Author T.C. Boyle wanted a do-over. Boyle, whos previously taken on health sanitariums (The Road to Wellville), utopian communes (Drop City), sex research (The Inner Circle) and more, has a penchant for exploring odd corners of recent history, so the Biosphere debacle was a logical choice and he had a vision for it.

I wanted a kind of revisionist way, he told The Huffington Post in a phone conversation about his new novel, The Terranauts, where Ramsay Roothorp says, you know, I would kill somebody rather than break closure. I mean, what if they were on Mars?

In Boyles take, rakish bad boy Ramsay, along with fellow Terranaut Dawn Chapman and support crew member Linda Ryu, narrates a fictional Biospheresque mission, Ecosphere 2. No mere need for antibiotics or an oxygen infusion will scuttle the mission in The Terranauts, a mission to which the three narrators profess a cultish devotion. The human appetites of the crew, however, might be more of a problem. Dawn, beautiful and high-minded, throws herself into her role inside the enclosure. Meanwhile, her best friend, Linda, nurses a growing bitterness that she was passed over for the final eight sent inside. And Ramsay? Hes not ready to be celibate for two years just because hes locked away from all but four of the worlds women.

As the narrative winds on, food runs perilously low, morale flags, and Boyle leaves readers questioning what hope we can take from these experiments in enclosed living for our own swiftly heating planet. In a chat about The Terranauts, Boyle spoke with HuffPost about cults, climate change, and the horrors of living in a tightly closed system: