This description doesn't really do the book justice. It's strange. (It was Delany's first serious attempt at blending SF with Lit Fic.)

The IMD is a measure of relative deprivation for small areas. Deciles are calculated by ranking local authorities’ IMD scores from most deprived to least deprived and dividing into 10 equal groups. These deciles range from most deprived 10% to the least deprived 10% of areas nationally. ↩ In the current pandemic that we are in, some people think that the masks are a good thing, some people think that they're not. My partner, when he goes out—I've been in for the last couple of weeks and haven't gone out at all—but he sees some people who are wearing masks and some who aren’t and is kind of confused by that. Reluctant Hero: The Kidd spends much of the latter parts of the book complaining that he's been turned into a hero of BellonaIt had been years since I’d first read Canetti’s essay, but the notion that I should reread it popped into my head while I was distractedly strolling through the crowded Hondori shopping district of Hiroshima. It’s difficult, of course, not to jam the coronavirus into every thought, and I couldn’t help but draw connections to the bombing of Hiroshima—and to a fleeting question that Canetti poses in this essay: “Is misfortune the thing that people have most in common?” Walking around Hiroshima today, with the scars of its past barely concealed to anyone looking for them, I noted the surreal and incongruous way the city still functions normally despite the threat of the virus. The city’s past—even the name, Hiroshima, evokes carnage and loss—seemed to offer a brief moment of perspective: bacteria, an invisible terror, feels somehow less threatening when reminded of this human atrocity, of our capacity to inflict destruction upon ourselves. Wilkinson P, Armstrong B, London M. (2001) Cold comfort: The social and environmental determinants of excess winter deaths in England, 1986-1996. Joseph Roundtree Foundation: London. Accessed 14 June 2017. ↩ Gunnery: Got it. So you wrote this book over a four year period between 1969 and 1973. What was happening both in the world and in your life that motivated you to write Dhalgren?

Across the whole of England in 2015, 4.2% of 16 to 18-year-olds were NEET, which is down from 6.1% in 2011 before the changes in legislation (figure 4). However, there are still inequalities between different groups of the population, with the proportion of NEETs living in the most deprived areas at 5.1% compared to 3.0% in the least deprived areas and little change in the absolute gap over time (figure 4).The Unreveal: All over the place. What happened to Bellona? What is the Kid's full name? What does Dhalgren mean? What are the optical chains actually? Even things that initially look like answers (such as the factory full of optical chains and red eye-caps) just raise more questions. On his way into Bellona, Kid meets a strange Asian woman who, after they make love, turns into a tree. This surreal opening begins Dhalgren’s conflicting realities: Are the novel’s strange events real, or are they the result of Kid’s delusional point of view?