“Blood’s a Rover: Harlan Ellison’s Waiting”, Michael Hemmingson2008-11 (Sci-Fi)⁠:

Along with the mythical third volume of Dangerous Visions, one of the longest awaited sf novels in the genre’s history is Blood’s a Rover, Harlan Ellison’s novelization of his 1969 Nebula Award-winning novella, “A Boy and His Dog”,

…In his introduction to Vic and Blood 2000, Ellison writes that “A Boy and His Dog” is actually the mid-section “of an intended 150,000-word novel” (pg5). Ellison’s forte has always been the short form, the screenplay and teleplay. Although he wrote a handful of non-sf novels at the beginning of his career (Web of the City 1958; Spider Kiss 1961; The Juvies 1961), from the 1970s to the present his longest works have been novellas—“All the Lies that Are My Life” (1980_44ya); “Mephisto in Onyx” (1994_30ya)—and he has not produced any novel.

…In the early 1980s, Ace Books announced it would publish Blood’s a Rover. I remember being excited by this news; I was 14 and an Ellison fan. I asked my mother to pre-order the book as a birthday present. She did, but months later received a letter from Ace stating that the book would not be coming out. As I would later learn, Ellison never turned in a manuscript, although he spent the advance. In exchange for not paying back the advance, Ellison allowed Ace to re-issue a number of his out-of-print collections and early novels: 13 books in all in exchange for the non-existent novel’s advance.

…The question lingers: when will the world read the complete adventures of Vic and Blood, a novel now 5 decades in the making? Will my deeply disappointed 14-year-old self ever read the book that never arrived? Ellison claims that he has finished Blood’s a Rover but that “the final, longest section is in screenplay form—and they’re bidding here in Hollywood, once again, for the feature film and TV rights—and one of these days before I go through that final door, I’ll translate it into elegant prose, and the full novel will appear” (Vic and Blood pg5). This was written on March 23, 2003. The waiting continues. [No novel was ever written by Ellison. The screenplay, however, did exist, having been written in 1977 for a possible two-hour NBC pilot TV movie, and was ultimately published in 2018.]