The Phoenix Project Epub To Mobi
Tanesha Prately
Traitor, the last book in The Change series, written with Rachel Manija Brown, is finished. We have a target pub date in October of 2024. First we are relaunching the previous three, newly edited and with new covers, beginning in July.
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BVC (which offers its e-books in mobi and epub formats) was formed by a bunch of writers as a cooperative publishing effort. Books offered cross all genres, from science fiction to romance to historical to mainstream. We function as editors, copyeditors, formatters, cover artists, and site maintainers for one another. 90% of the proceeds go to the authors! That means that the author actually earns most of the money you pay, instead of publishers and big venues like Amazon, B&N, and iTunes.
Phoenix, Arizona, seems designed to keep you perpetually indoors. After landing in the frigidly air-conditioned airport, I rent a car, a laughably sporty 2014 Ford Fiesta. The rental agent demonstrated how to blast its AC before I got in.
In 1970, Soleri scouted and bought 860 acres of empty land 70 miles outside Phoenix and started to build, planning out a home for 5,000 residents on the slant of a hill overlooking a mesa. He built foundations and walls out of concrete, digging molds out of the desert ground. Slowly, the city grew.
Finally, if a permanent position opens up, an initiate can get a paid job. Payment takes many forms, from literal salary to free rent and discounted meals at the cafe. The nearest grocery store is miles away by car, one of the less utopian aspects of Arcosanti.
The city in the Arizona desert is not a true utopia. Its hippie-like idealism and lack of adequate funding or governance make it difficult to believe the project will ever be completed. Arcosanti still relies heavily on the outside world for its existence, in the form of imported food and the income from selling the bells, which, as traditional and creative as the instruments are, are still a resolutely capitalist commercial enterprise. Yet it provides a communal home for a handful of residents, allowing teaching to continue.
Arcosanti provides a paradoxical lesson. The city shows that dreams, no matter how outlandish, can become reality given enough tenacity and charisma. But traveling there in the post-Soleri era makes it clear that dreams also require constant upkeep and sacrifice to persist. The towers and arches are castles made of sand that seem destined to sink back into the desert.
Kyle Chayka is a freelance writer on culture and technology who lives in Brooklyn. He has contributed to publications including the New Yorker and The New Republic, and is the author of an e-book, The Printed Gun.
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