Sinking the Ark
Pages: 401
|Published: 26 Sep 2022
Description
Sinking the Ark tells the poignant story of a fictional “alternative” weekly in Portland, Oregon, the Rose City Ark, the newspaper of the city's counterculture. In 1974, the paper embarks on a bold to dispense with all hierarchy and embrace pure no more managing editor, no more assigned roles, no more under the new plan, every person will decide for themselves how to contribute to the paper. All important decisions will be made by everybody sitting down together and reaching consensus collectively. Can it work? Can the people of the Ark really put an issue on the stands once a week, every week, operating by these rules? Well, thereby hangs the tale. The novel follows the intertwining stories of six characters who find that romance, jealousy, sexual politics, personal quirks, and ideological impurities are just a few of the demons blocking the path to the perfect future. This is a coming-of-age novel set in a time between ages, an era historians have an era when the din of “the sixties” has faded away, but the roar of the “Reagan Revolution” has yet to sound. The Digital Age is just around the corner, but no one can see around corners; at the Rose City Ark , even the headlines are pressed out by hand, artisan-style. What Sval, Marica, Zoe, Martha, Raoul, and George are bracing for is the epic global collapse of industrial civilization, after which “the world will be right back to tribal. ” In that hallowed future, they--the fortunate few who saw the apocalypse coming--will be the ones building the new and better world that will rise from the rubble of the old. That new and better world is, of course, nowhere to be seen today; but modern readers may well recognize the spirit of the Rose City Six and their friends as a feature of human life that is born anew with each new generation that enters its twenties.
