A Boy and His Dog

A Boy and His Dog is a cycle of narratives by science fiction author Harlan Ellison. The cycle tells the story of a boy (Vic) and his uniquely telepathic dog (Blood), who work together as a team in the post-apocalyptic world.

Ellison began the cycle with the 1969 short story of the same title, published in New Worlds, and expanded and revised the tale to novella length for his story collection The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World the same year. The cycle begins chronologically with Eggsucker, which chronicles the early years of the association between the young loner Vic and his brilliant, telepathic dog, Blood. Ellison's expanded novella of A Boy and His Dog was the basis of a film adaptation in 1974, the science fiction film of the same name, directed by L. Q. Jones, which was controversial for alleged sexism; the movie script included lines which were not in Ellison's original stories and which authors such as Joanna Russ found to be objectionable. Ellison disavows the film's misogynistic conclusion.

Ellison bookended the original story with two others in the same world, in Vic and Blood: The Chronicles of a Boy and His Dog (St. Martin's Press, 1988), a three-story graphic novel collection illustrated by Richard Corben, who also illustrated for this collection two other short stories featuring Vic and Blood: Eggsucker (a prequel to A Boy and His Dog, first published in Thomas Durward, ed, The Ariel Book of Fantasy Volume Two,1977) and an entirely new story Run, Spot, Run. The latter story appears in its text version for the first time in Vic and Blood, along with its graphic novel adaptation. Ellison's introduction to the collection explains that 1969′s A Boy and His Dog is part of a larger novel that he has been writing for over 30 years and that story is finished, but the last, longest part is written as a screenplay with no current plans for production.

Ellison considered as late as 2003 that he would combine the three stories (possibly with additional material) to create a novel with the proposed title of Blood's a Rover (not to be confused with the Chad Oliver story or the James Ellroy novel Blood's a Rover). While Blood's a Rover has not appeared as of 2012, the graphic novel's Ellison/Corben edition has been reprinted as Vic and Blood: The Continuing Adventures of a Boy and His Dog.