Dogs
Entry updated 22 April 2024. Tagged: Theme.
The domestic dog may perhaps seem less science-fictional than the Cat, lacking the feline's aloofness and suggestion of the Alien; but humanity's traditional companion inevitably features in much sf. Indeed dogs are the Secret Masters of the world in "Into Your Tent I'll Creep" (September 1957 Astounding) by Eric Frank Russell, and the dog-human bond ultimately proves stronger than human-human attraction in Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog" (April 1969 New Worlds), in which the protagonist's dog is Telepathic; the latter story was filmed as A Boy and His Dog (1975) directed by L Q Jones.
Future roles for dogs of course include that of Spaceship crew member, as in "Propagandist" (August 1947 Astounding) by Murray Leinster and others; in Eric Frank Russell's "Allamagoosa" (May 1955 Astounding) the ship's dog Peaslake is expected to deal with "alien rodents" and sniff out "dangers not visible to human eyes". Although we learn little of their activities, the spacefaring future military of Robert A Heinlein's Starship Troopers (October-November 1959 F&SF as "Starship Soldier"; 1959) includes the K-9 Corps of talking "neodogs" closely bonded with their human partners or handlers. Less comfortably, the Psionic Radio Officer of the Starship in A Bertram Chandler's The Rim of Space (1961) amplifies his powers using a dog Brain in a Box. As in the past and present, future pets double as guards or fighters, like Chomir the massive "Askanam arena hound" in more than one tale of James H Schmitz's Telzey Amberdon: "Goblin Night" (April 1965 Analog) pits Chomir against a formidable Alien Monster, with a distinction made between such naturally evolved apex predators and dogs bred by humans to outmatch them. In Roger Zelazny's This Immortal (October-November 1965 F&SF as "... And Call Me Conrad"; exp 1966), the hero's pet Bortan is a huge armour-plated Mutant but still a dog at heart. Philip E High's Invader on My Back (1968) features "rogs", Robot dogs created as substitute pets but reprogrammed by criminals to hunt and kill. The Utopian US town Precipice in John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider (1975) deploys large-headed, Genetically Engineered dogs for defence, childcare, and approval (or otherwise) of newcomers to the community. In Lois McMaster Bujold's World of the Five Gods: Penric episode The Prisoner of Limnos (2017 ebook), a convent-cum-Prison is guarded by many small dogs trained to raise an outcry if a man should enter this women-only enclave.
Scientific experimentation on dogs features in The Plague Dogs (1977) by Richard Adams, with a powerfully conveyed anti-vivisection message; and in Lives of the Monster Dogs (1997) by Kirsten Bakis, with its not entirely successful attempt at Uplift. In another tale of uplift, Alexander Crawford's "The Experiment" (December 1913 Short Stories), the dog is presented as a victim tormented by the curse of sentience.
Memorable Uplifted dogs or post-dogs include the experimental subject of Mikhail Bulgakov's Satire Sobachye Serdste (written 1925; trans as Heart of a Dog 1968), whose uplift is eventually reversed; the sympathetic but ultimately doomed title character of Olaf Stapledon's Sirius: A Fantasy of Love and Discord (1944); the gentle animals who inherit the Earth in later episodes of Clifford D Simak's City (fixup 1952); the radiantly loving D'Joan who becomes a martyred saint of the Underpeople in Cordwainer Smith's "The Dead Lady of Clown Town" (August 1964 Galaxy); Terry Pratchett's Gaspode the Wonder Dog in Moving Pictures (1990), whose Intelligence and power of speech derive from magical fallout but who is an otherwise realistically doggy comic character with welcome reappearances in later Discworld books; and Michael Swanwick's future con-man Surplus in the Darger and Surplus tales opening with "The Dog Said Bow-Wow" (October/November 2001 Asimov's).
Chimerical mixes of dog and human (or superhuman) feature in various stories. A Scientist's brain is transferred to a pet dog in Robert Sheckley's "The Body" (January 1956 Galaxy), with the implication that the urges of the canine body are overcoming the human mind. In Dogsbody (1975) by Diana Wynne Jones, the mind or soul of the Dog Star Sirius is wrongfully punished by Identity Transfer into the body of a terrestrial dog, a difficult position from which to seek vindication. The unspeakable Martians in Mars Attacks! (1996) directed by Tim Burton surgically swap the heads of a woman and her pet Chihuahua. In Alastair Reynolds's Diamond Dogs (2001), human penetration of a mathematically booby-trapped alien Labyrinth requires progressive physical transformations, ultimately to dog-like form.
Sf/fantasy productions centrally featuring dogs include The Shaggy Dog (1959) directed by Charles Barton, with a magical transformation of teenager to Old English Sheepdog [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]; Man Dog (1972), written by Peter Dickinson (whom see for details) and novelized as Mandog (1972) by Lois Lamplugh; Digby, the Biggest Dog in the World (1973) directed by Joseph McGrath, whose title character grows to enormous size (see Great and Small); various Doctor Who (1963-current) storylines featuring the Robot dog K9 or K-9, first introduced in 1977; Sherlock Hound (1984-1985); Rex the Runt (1998-2001); Courage the Cowardly Dog (1999-2002); and Dogs in Space (2021-current). Barf the "mawg" – half man, half dog – in Mel Brooks's Spaceballs (1987) spoofs Chewbacca the Wookiee from Star Wars (1977). In the Red Dwarf (1988-current) episode "Parallel Universe" (11 October 1988), the male crew of the titular Spaceship meet their mostly female counterparts in a Parallel World and the ultra-cool evolved humanoid Cat is dismayed to find not an equally soignée catwoman but a friendly and very scruffy humanoid dog.
In Comics, Superman has long had a caped dog companion with similar Superpowers to his own: Krypto, introduced in 1955 as a companion to the teenaged Superboy and later straying, as it were, into adult adventures. Batman was occasionally accompanied by a suitably masked Bat-Hound in the 1950s and 1960s. The Justice League-based animated series Super Friends (1973) features the irritating Wonder Dog. Three-eyed though otherwise nonfantastic dogs appear regularly in Nathan W Pyle's strip Strange Planet (2019-current).
Some authors with entries in this encyclopedia took up the challenge of writing from a dog's viewpoint, this canine articulacy more often than not being the sole vein of Fantastika in such narratives. Walter Emanuel's A Dog Day or The Angel in the House (1902) is simply the diary of a dog. Buck in Jack London's The Call of the Wild (1903) is abducted, suffers many privations as a sled dog in the Klondike, and at last escapes to join and become leader of a wolf pack, the stuff of legend. Franz Kafka's "Forschungen eines Hundes" ["Investigations of a Dog"] (in Beim Bau der Chinesischen Mauer: Ungedruckte Erzählungen und Prosa aus Dem Nachlas, coll 1931; trans as The Great Wall of China and Other Pieces 1933) offers a surreal-seeming description of the contemporary world distorted by the dog narrator's inability to perceive humans (see Perception) or refusal to acknowledge their existence: small lap-dogs evidently being carried are seen as "soaring dogs" who levitate. Rudyard Kipling's "Thy Servant a Dog": Told by Boots (coll of linked stories 1930 chap; exp vt "Thy Servant a Dog" and Other Dog Stories 1933), though arguably over-sentimental, is remarkable for its canine-viewpoint intensity (inevitably including hatred of the Cat). Virginia Woolf's Flush: The Biography of a Dog (1933) is engagingly told by Elizabeth Barrett Browning's eponymous spaniel. Roger Zelazny's cheerfully eclectic fantasy A Night in the Lonesome October (1993) is narrated by Jack the Ripper's dog Snuff.
Yet other dog-related tales include The Dog Beneath the Skin; Or, Where is Francis?: A Play in Three Acts (1935) by W H Auden and Christopher Isherwood, with the human Francis literally disguised as a dog; Carol Emshwiller's Carmen Dog (1988), featuring many transformations of women into dogs and vice-versa; Nancy Kress's Dogs (2008), in which dogs worldwide turn feral; and Kevin Brooks's Dogchild (2018), whose protagonist has been raised Mowgli-like by wild dogs.
Regarding the undomesticated relatives of dogs, the presence of wolves in Fantastika is dominated by the Werewolf theme. Foxes with their proverbial cunning make occasional appearances, as in the children's classic The Midnight Folk (1927) by John Masefield [see The Encyclopedia of Fantasy under links below]. A trench-coated talking fox is the astute private eye in J P Martin's Uncle and His Detective (1966); a barely more realistic one outwits all human opposition in Roald Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox (1970), filmed as Fantastic Mr Fox (2009) directed by Wes Anderson; and Reynard the engineered fox/human hybrid is the political mastermind of John Crowley's Beasts (1976).
In the real world, the first dog sent into space was Laika (a Moscow stray) aboard the Soviet Sputnik 2 mission in November 1957; she did not survive. The Sony Aibo Robot Dog was given a Japanese Seiun Award in 2000 as best nonfiction of the year. [DRL]
further reading
- Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois, editors. Dogtales! (New York: Ace Books, 1988) [anth: Magic Tales: pb/Hiro Kimura]
- Mary Wickizer Burgess and Robert Reginald, editors. The Dog Megapack: 25 Curly Canine Tales, Old and New (Rockville, Maryland: Wildside Press/Borgo Press, 2013) with Robert Reginald [anth: ebook: Megapack: na/]
links
previous versions of this entry