A Boy and His Dog

A Boy and His Dog is a science fiction novella by Harlan Ellison, first published in 1969 in his collection The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World. It began as a short story in the magazine New Worlds and was expanded to novella length for that volume. Over the following decades it became the core of a larger cycle that Ellison kept building, with a prequel, later stories, and a graphic novel illustrated by Richard Corben.

The story unfolds in an alternate timeline that diverged when the assassination of President John F. Kennedy failed. In that world, progress centers on robotics, animal intelligence and telepathy rather than the space race, and the Cold War escalates into a conventional third world war, followed by a truce and, eventually, a massive nuclear conflict around 2007. Civilization is almost wiped out, and the surface of the Earth becomes an irradiated wasteland where, by 2024, the survivors fight over what remains. The surviving population is mostly male, and the fallout has produced terrifying mutations.

The protagonist is Vic, a fifteen-year-old with no formal schooling and little sense of ethics, who roams the desert of the former American Southwest in search of food and sex. He is accompanied by Blood, a telepathic, well-read and misanthropic dog whose genetic engineering leaves him unable to forage for himself. Together they steal to survive, dodging gangs and mutants in a relationship of mutual need that is often strained. Their search leads them to Downunder, an underground society whose city of Topeka mocks 1950s rural innocence in a surreal way, and which is suffering a fertility crisis. Vic is recruited to father children, but his escape with Quilla June, the young woman who first drew him there, leads to a bitter ending that raises the question of what love really is.

The novella won the Nebula Award for Best Novella in 1969 and was nominated for the Hugo the following year. In 1975 L. Q. Jones adapted it into a film with the same title. The film was well received by critics and science fiction fans but was not a commercial success, and it drew controversy for sexist elements in dialogue added to the script that were absent from the original, a change Ellison later disowned.