Why Biosphere 2 would have exerted a magnetic force on Boyle isn't hard to see. In his 15 previous novels, he has shown a deep and abiding interest in messy utopias, ecological fervor, grandiose guru figures, isolated, stranded lives, and, more generally, in ideas so overinflated that their only fate is to pop. Boyle drapes his novel with enough Christian symbolism; the project's founder, Jeremiah Reed, is called G.C., for God the Creator; his full-time aide and part-time lover Judy Forester is known as Judas; of Ramsay, Linda says, "he's the serpent"; and later in the novel, we meet an integral character named Eve. This suggests, or at least nods 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.