Casual Shorts & the ISFdb Top Short Fiction # 48: A Boy and His Dog by Harlan Ellison

Ellison, Harlan. "A Boy and His Dog." New Worlds #189, April 1969.

This article is part of my attempt to read all the 155 stories currently (as of 1 November 2022) on the ISFdb's Top Short Fiction list. Please see the introduction and list of stories here. I am encouraging readers to rate the stories and books they have read on the ISFdb.

ISFdb Rating:   8.70/10

My Rating:        7/10

"I was out with Blood, my dog."

In a post-apocalyptic USA, survivors attempt to maintain some semblance of civilization. Most humans live above ground, in the ruins and radiation-filled remains of urban America, where society is anarchical and survivors either band together to run a small piece of the post-apocalyptic world, or who wander by themselves as "solos." The other option is to live underground, where life is frozen in a recreation of an idyllic 1950s neighbourhood. As few women remain, most live in the underground communities, leaving the men above to search longingly for sex. Prior to the war, dogs were scientifically enhanced to become telepathic. "A Boy and His Dog" focuses on Vic, a fifteen year-old "solo" who wanders with his dog Blood in search of women and food. Their arrangement is that Blood, through his enhanced senses, seeks women for Vic, who in turn keeps the dog well fed. This particular evening, at the ramshackle cinema waiting for the skin flick to begin, Blood senses a woman in the room, and Vic gets embroiled both with the other men who want the woman, and with the underground community from which she is seeking respite.

I won't give much more away.

This is a very divisive story, and I believe many who dislike Harlan Ellison do so partly as a result of "A Boy and His Dog." The younger me enjoyed Ellison's work more than the older me, but while I did not like this story as much as I did when I was a teen, I did genuinely enjoy it upon re-reading it a couple of week ago. Much maligned for its misogyny and dislikeable characters, these are actually important elements in the world Ellison has envisioned. I don't read the story as a statement on women, but as a consequence on all who live in this post-apocalyptic society. That the characters are unlikeable (detestable, to be more accurate) is a reflection of the world in which they inhabit, and in which many of them were born. The post nuclear society is the germ of the story, and from where the characters stem.

To be clear, I do not find myself rooting for Vic and Blood. In this respect I understand the hatred the story receives, since Ellison does seem to want readers to have a certain amount of empathy for them. Vic is entirely amoral, a serial rapist and cold-blooded killer, and his relationship with the dog, the ability for him to achieve this bond, which is the heart of the story, is supposed to redeem him to some degree, but to me it does not. I see the relationship as part of the survival aspect of the duo, that the two are bound together for a basic need that keeps them going. For Blood it is simply food, whereas for the teen Vic the desire for sex is his only driving point, and without it life would not be worth living. Their tribulations in the two societies and their bond with each other do not earn my sympathies and instead I hope that they fail. They do not fail, and we can only imagine the kind of world that will emerge from this post-apocalyptic society.