A Boy and His Dog

A Boy and His Dog is a cycle of narratives by author Harlan Ellison. The cycle tells the story of a boy (Vic) and his telepathic dog (Blood), who work together as a team to survive in the post-apocalyptic world after a nuclear war. The original 1969 novella was adapted into the 1975 film A Boy and His Dog directed by L.Q. Jones. Both the story and the film were well received by critics and science fiction fans, but the movie was not successful commercially. The original novella was followed by short stories and a graphic novel.

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 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 "Run, Spot, Run" (which was originally published in "Amazing Stories", in 1980). 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, the graphic novel's Ellison/Corben edition has been reprinted as Vic and Blood: The Continuing Adventures of a Boy and His Dog.

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