...the novel is less interested in forcing connections between fact and fiction than it is in exploring the ambition, hubris and heart of its characters ... With long, decadent lists, Boyle indulges in delicious prose ... In their efforts to adhere to the principle 'nothing in, nothing out,' the Terranauts challenge themselves to transcend their human appetites, and the struggle is worth our full attention.
...lapses into Boyle's trademark, sometimes maddening style, teeming with tangential inner monologues and hyperaware descriptiveness. They turn the novel's early, exposition-heavy chapters into an uphill climb ... Ultimately, though, Boyle navigates his well-worn territory with sensitivity and finesse. By the middle of the story, the team's web of power plays, personality tics, petty conflicts, grudges, crushes, and buried agendas is drawn taut. Even his excessive attention to detail makes sense ... eerily timely, despite being set over 20 years ago. Even more resonant is Boyle's witty yet poignant exploration of our attachment to the chunk of rock we call home.
...how a writer as exciting as Boyle could produce such a dull novel remains a mystery. As it drags on for more than 500 pages, The Terranauts inspires a sense of tedium that could only be matched by being trapped in a giant piece of Tupperware ... like watching The Bachelor: Terrarium Edition. The adolescent souls in these adult bodies are numbingly petty — and the novel offers no relief from their flat voices, their obvious confessions, their poisonous jealousy.
Boyle finds a deep vein of humor in their reactions to events extraordinary and mundane, sympathetic to their struggles but attuned to their foibles and shortcomings ... Dawn, Linda and Ramsay are all too human in their aspirations, disappointments and delusions, but some of the other Terranauts lack definition, flitting through the background but never truly engaging the reader as individuals. What works best in the book is the detail with which Boyle portrays the nitty-gritty of life inside an enclosed environment ... The Terranauts definitely has surprises in store for readers who stick with it, but like the project it describes, the narrative sometimes feels claustrophobic and extended past its optimum length.
If this seems like a description of an ecological soap opera, there’s some justification to that. For one thing, the habitat itself, described in considerable detail, upstages its inhabitants; for another, the feeling you get from all this person-on-person interaction – all this demonstration of personality – is of a lack of character ... Of course, their shallowness is the core of the comedy, and the book manipulates it to great if sour effect. Boyle is also a subtle manager of soap-like narrative ... Terranauts is funny, but not always in a way you can laugh at. Boyle’s dissections are far too accurate.
Boyle has clearly done his research, and many of the book’s furnishings are entirely convincing. Where he goes awry, oddly, is in his choice of a starting point for his characters. Even before they enter E2, they’re all so prone to thoughtless actions and petty squabbles that there’s not much of a pedestal for them to fall from ... The Terranauts touches on fascinating issues. It’s just that Boyle, with the characters he has cooked up, stacks the odds too heavily against E2’s success from the outset.
Boyle is a smart observer of human flaws, and there are moments when The Terranauts is a striking portrait of vanity and weakness. Yet while he’s a fluent, often exuberant writer, he’s certainly not an economical one ... Despite all Boyle’s efforts to make the novel seem a spiritually charged experience and a religious allegory, it feels like an upmarket soap opera. There’s too relentless a concern with which of the terranauts will pair off — and too much sprawling evocation of how and where they might do so.
...a less-than-riveting, yet psychologically interesting, read ... There is little to like about Boyle's three heroes, which is a calling card of his writing, as is the sharp prose and clever psychological insights ... The Terranauts is entertaining, just not captivating, which may be due to Boyle's choice of voice.
Boyle drapes his novel with enough Christian symbolism to suggest, or at least nod toward, a pious allegory: the Augustinian notion that libido was what spoiled the Garden of Eden, just as, in a sense, it makes a big hot mess of the E2 mission. But Boyle is too agile and feisty a thinker to hew to this line. The search for Eden (or any utopia) is essentially comic because every vision of Eden is a private fantasy, a fingerprint of desires. Humanity, for Boyle, never suffered a fall; we’ve always been this petty and cutthroat and grubby and absurd. And as The Terranauts makes clear, wherever we go — so long as we’re trapped together, in this atmosphere or any other — we always will be.
...intertwining narratives recall early reality television shows such as Road Rules and Big Brother, where everything is being recorded, revised, edited and shared. While entertaining, Boyle’s characters could have used more development and felt one-dimensional. Boyle’s descriptions of the biosphere are intriguing, but the reader wants more of them ... The Terranauts falls short of fully exploring these issues, instead focusing on the dysfunctional relationships of its characters, with moderate success.
[Boyle] has a better handle on some of the characters than he does on the others — Ryu frequently borders on caricature. Overall though they’re human beings: brave, lost and often annoying ... But as the novel wears on, Boyle’s purpose in telling their story starts to become opaque. He is at best ambivalent on whether there is any method to the Terranauts’ madness, and his ambivalence becomes less a point of subtlety than a hole in the middle of the novel ... you’ll leave this book wondering what exactly this whole grand experiment of Boyle’s, in all its beauty and ambition, was ever really about.
...a funny, sexy novel ... Mr. Boyle inhabits diverse characters better than anyone I know, and he does a great job here having two women — one a chosen terranaut, one a disappointed reject — and a randy male terranaut alternate narratives about the experiment ... I applaud his prose and his humor — any given 50 pages of The Terranauts is lively and entertaining — but the combined weight of 500-plus pages didn’t add up to a more satisfying experience, just a longer one ... The novel’s greater meaning seems to be, simply, 'people never change.' For me, that’s not enough to hang a novel on.
Boyle's focus is not science but the human effect of the experiment, the unforeseen romantic couplings and political machinations and barely suppressed resentments, a world not unlike the one on which the architects of Mission Two want to improve. Therein may lie Boyle's point, albeit a cynical one: You can create a self-sustaining, closed-off society anywhere in the solar system if you want to, but the seven deadly sins have an uncanny talent for finding the cracks and letting themselves in.
...less a closed-room gimmick of narrative limitation and more an absurdist drama that never forgets the reader’s lived experience, either. As the Terranauts inside the glass compound confront jealousy, disease, and rape culture, the novel makes a delightfully old-fashioned commentary about the soul of men and women: that their tragedies can’t be avoided by changing their environment alone. Boyle achieves all of this through pitch-perfect detail work ... The novel is a page-turner, and a strong one.
The Terranauts surges with surprise and complex irony, and Boyle has the rare ability to make human foibles both universal and character specific. Still, The Terranauts which is more than 500 pages long, flags at times and can be repetitive ... falls short of ranking with Boyle’s best works ... Still, on the whole Terranauts is a thought-provoking, witty and even wise examination of humanity under the glass.
