Many aspects of housing can affect our health. The Decent Homes Standard is an assessment of multiple elements of a dwelling. In 2016 20% of dwellings in England (equates to 4.7 million homes) failed to meet the standard, down from 35% in 2006 [footnote 11]. The private rented sector had the largest proportion of dwellings not meeting the standard at 27%, compared with 20% of owner-occupied homes and 13% of social rented homes. 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?

Kid begins to write poetry in this notebook. These poems become the basis for Brass Orchids, a book published by Roger Calkins, the eccentric owner of the city’s newspaper, the Bellona Times. It 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. Is this flow of reflection, poetic prose and crazy action a continuous loop that keeps replaying in the Kid’s mind? It made me think a bit of the recent TV series, Legion, in which it’s hard to tell reality from mental distortion from time travel. Dhalgren resists any easy formula, but moment by moment it offers absorbing richness and dozens of well-drawn characters. The book follows one such Bellona resident, an unreliable narrator whose memory is so damaged he can't remember his own name, so he is known alternately as the Kid and Kidd. Kidd navigates the city with one shoe on his foot and a notebook in his hand. He meets roving bands of squatters called Scorpions, falls in and out of relationsips with men and women, and tries, but usually fails, to make sense of his strange surroundings. men and women and has sex with them, alone or in various combinations, but seems most connected emotionally to

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Hills J. (2012) Getting the measure of fuel poverty. Final report of the fuel poverty review: CASE Report 72. LSE: London. Accessed 14 June 2017. ↩ Dhalgren is a really weird book. The weirdest thing is that it was a bestselling cult classic. Now I love Delany, but I find it the most impenetrable and the second least likeable of his books. I tried to read it several times as a teenager and couldn’t understand it. I finally made it all the way through, and I’m pretty sure I’ve read it all the way through twice before, very much on the principle of “maybe I’m old enough for it now.” Well, maybe I am old enough for it now, because I didn’t have any trouble reading it this time. I think Delany has written much better books, but even minor Delany is worth the time. But if one Delany book had to be a bestselling classic, why this one? freelance article. He makes a living writing corporate marketing communications, which is a kind of 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.) It had happened in a lot of places, and every major city had a sprawling area that was like Bellona. I believe that's one reason the book was as popular as it was with people who were actually in cities because they saw areas of their city just falling apart. That hadn't happened for a long time. The cities themselves had gotten too large to allow things—imports, the way Jane Jacobs describes in her book, The Life and Death of American Cities (1961)—to come in, and there was no wilderness to take it over, so it remained urban ruin. Sometimes squatters moved in, which gave the impression that, possibly, a ghostly lumpen population survived there, but mostly it was uninhabitable . . .

Delany: I was in a whole lot of cities. There's a list of them at the end of the book, but mainly I was in San Francisco and New York. Educational attainment is linked to health behaviours and outcomes throughout a person’s life and varies considerably by socioeconomic position. The gap in the percentage of children achieving 5 GCSEs at A*-C between those living in the most deprived local authorities and those in the least deprived local authorities remains substantial.

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Gunnery: What kind of lessons do you think we can learn from science fiction about relating with each other and how to survive in the midst of a pandemic? Cutler DM, Lleras-Muney A. (2006) Education and health: evaluating theories and evidence. National Bureau of Economic Research: Cambridge, MA. Working paper 12352. ↩ I have never understood it. I have sometimes felt that I partially understood it, or that I was nearing In this chapter, the wider determinants are grouped under the following headings: the built and natural environment, education, income, work and the labour market, crime and social capital. This chapter provides an update to the Health Profile for England 2017 but also presents some additional analysis. Department for Education. (2017) Statutory framework for the early years foundation stage. Setting the standards for learning, development and care for children from birth to five. Accessed 14 June 2017. ↩

PHE and the Institute of Health Equity. (2014) Local action on health inequalities: Fuel poverty and cold-related health problems. Accessed 14 June 2017. ↩Gunnery: So you mentioned that you were in San Francisco and New York at the time that you were working on this. Another important aspect of both rented and owned housing is affordability. This influences where people live and work and affects the quality of housing, poverty, community cohesion, and time spent commuting [footnote 11]. The affordability of home ownership in England has worsened since 2013, when the ratio of median house price to median gross annual earnings was 6.8, it was 7.9 in 2017. Author Appeal: Samuel R. Delany is very fond of characters with "ugly" hands and bitten nails. Kidd has such hands. A strong local economy provides sufficient quantity and quality of employment opportunities for the population. On the whole, work is good for mental and physical health [footnote 24]. In addition to the health benefits associated with an adequate wage, work can provide valuable social interactions, a place to develop and practice skills, and a sense of social participation and cont