harlan ellison the beast that shouted love

Many thanks to the publisher for providing a copy for review. None of the newer stories have quite the impact of the original shocking story, although they are interesting for someone who is familiar with the original story. The final selection is a screenplay (Blood’s A Rover) which features a strong female rover, smart, feisty, tough, wholly unlike the controversial role of women in the original story. Two additional short stories, one (Eggsucker) taking place as a prologue perhaps to A Boy and His Dog and one as an epilogue (Run Sot Run) are narrated through Blood’s voice, not Vic’s and give a rather unique perspective. The story is also a product of the Sixties, juxtaposing the freedom of the surface (albeit a world of savagery, casual rape, and starvation) with life beneath the surface where middle class squares lived, surviving without sunlight in artificial crops and phoniness.Īpparently over the years, Ellison has also penned additional chapters to the story, and this volume collects all four Vic and Blood stories together in one volume in chronological order.

It was all bullshit down there fat, happy liars, turning their fat, happy faces away from the real trouble.” She didn’t know what friends meant, because down there in that phony Topeka nobody was really friends. “She didn’t know what it was to trust somebody like Blood so much that he was a part of you. The relationship between these two is at the heart of the story, particularly when a young woman comes between the two: Vic and Blood were one such partnership with Blood having the brains and Vic being little more than a dumb teenager barely smart enough to survive without the smarts and instincts of his canine partner. There were also solos who traveled without gang protection, dependent on their dog partners. The dogs were necessary to sniff out radiation monsters and to find females who were quite scarce. A Boy and His Dog postulated a savage survival universe where the earth’s surface was populated by teenage rover gangs and their telepathic dogs. Long before all the modern fantasies about a post-apocalyptic world, such a theme was extraordinarily popular in fifties and sixties science fiction with the idea being that there would be an atomic war and few survivors fending for themselves. A Boy And His Dog was one of the great classic shorts of late sixties science fiction and it’s shock value put Harlan Ellison on the map.

Harlan ellison the beast that shouted love