Biosphere 2 is an engineering marvel created to better understand how natural environments create habitable conditions for human sustainability. It is located twenty minutes north of Tucson, Arizona.
Picture the largest greenhouse you can imagine. It consists of 6,500 windows and 7,200.000 cubic feet of sealed glass. It is sealed from the earth below by a 500 ton welded stainless steel liner. I was in awe.
Two missions were created in the nineties. Small teams were locked inside the large structure to study the five natural biosystems and agricultural areas. This confined environment led to a number of complex situations.
In other words – the human drama rose to the surface. Members of the teams split into groups. Anger and distrust bubbled up. I suspect the situation was like an early version of the TV show ‘Survivor’. After all the millions of dollars poured into the experiment, the main issue ended up being ‘the people’.
People and their visions, people and their feelings, people and their ability to create or destroy relationships.
That’s why I’m drawn to writing fiction. I can take aspects of lives around me, books that I’ve read, movies I’ve seen and my day-to-day thoughts and stir them all together in one big stew. It’s all part of the complex web of creating new characters.
Why do you like to write fiction?
I heard about that experiment — and how people didn’t get along at the end. Makes you wonder what’s happening on the space station. As you say it really provides thought for a novel. In your novel you could make things much worse with a strong negative leader and much better with a positive one.
You write YA Jodie, why not place a teen novel into a setting like this and see if they get along better than the adults do. They wouldn’t carry as much baggage we all seem to have. But…would you need a vampire or werewolf to lighten up the story? Could be fun. Hummm…
Re Mimi’s idea of setting a teen novel in an isolated setting – sounds like Lord of the Flies with supernatural predators.
Could be interesting, but I bet it wouldn’t be any nicer than the adult version. Or maybe, given a threat from outside the tribe, the people would pull together better…
Hm. Stories just bubble up all over the place, don’t they?