![]() In ‘Sirius’ (1944) Olaf Stapledon envisages a dog raised to levels of human intelligence by scientific interventions, with poignantly tragic consequences. There’s the wise ‘Blood’, who forms a supportively telepathic partnership with Vic in Harlan Ellison’s post-apocalypse “A Boy And His Dog” ( ‘New Worlds’ no.189, April 1969). There are movies, and re-imagined remakes of movies exploring that possibility.īut dogs? Dogs feature in SF with some frequency. ![]() Otherwise, the most obvious world-inheritors are other hominid species. Those bets that have not gone to machines or artificial-intelligences have gone to insects who, although individually incapable of all that opposable-thumbs stuff, use a kind of hive-mind specialisation that enables them to achieve things collectively. Science Fiction has frequently ruminated on who or what will inherit the world once the human race has shuffled off to extinction. ![]() When it comes to a species replacing human beings in some conjectural future-history, this puts them at a distinct disadvantage. Which means they can’t grasp, handle or shape objects. ![]() Dogs, like cats, do not have opposable thumbs. ![]()
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