Inaugurating this month’s The Future Is Now: The Birth Of Afro-Futurism & The Death Of Dystopia, we have Samuel R. Delany’s landmark apocalyptic 1975 novel about an amnesiac drifter passing through a fictional Midwestern town isolated from the rest of the world in the wake of an unnamed catastrophe.

Bellona was once a thriving city of over two million, but after a disaster, the population has been reduced to about 1,000 residents who live lawlessly – gangs roam the streets at night and violent death has become a trivial occurrence. Enter ‘The Kidd’, a one-shoed vagabond who has lost his memory and must now navigate the forsaken hellscape.

Written in an experimental circular style meant to invoke a Möbius strip, dripping with lysergic prose-poetry and teeming with Delany’s high-art Sci-Fi signatures, Dhalgren is a sprawling epic about uncertainty and ambiguity, dealing with issues such as mixed-racial identity, racial hierarchy, sexuality, and the experiential nature of language through the fractured and fragmented scope of memory loss.

Delany, an outcast gay, black writer imbues every page with the precarity and unfamiliarity he doubtlessly felt in the predominantly-white sci-fi genre. Delany uniquely blends a ‘scientific’ magical realism with aspiration technologies in a constantly shifting dystopian setting, garnering early recognition as a visionary of New Black Futures.

WRITE BRAIN TV is proud to present this stunning masterwork of science fiction by the high priest of Afrofuturism!