Tony's Review of Dog Star

Dog Star is one of those short pieces that appears simple on the surface but settles into your mind over time. It is about an astronomer stationed on the Moon, a dream, and a dog named Laika, but it becomes much more than that. Clarke does not write to shock you. He writes to make you feel the weight of memory, loyalty, and the fragile threads that connect who we were to who we become.

The story begins with a man waking on the Moon. He hears his dog barking the same dog he left behind so many years ago on Earth. Laika’s voice jolts him awake, and instinct, not reasoning, drives him avoid a lunar quake. In that moment, the story turns on itself. The dog is long gone. There is no creature on the Moon. What wakes him is not a ghost or miracle, but something sharper: the echo of love and habit lodged deep in his mind.

Clarke lets the narrative unfold almost casually, but every detail carries emotional weight. We learn how the narrator found Laika abandoned by the roadside, trained her, and grew attached after she once saved them both from an earthquake. We see him rise to a career on the Moon, leaving her behind when he could not bring her with him. Laika dies shortly after his departure. Years later on the lunar base, her bark still lives in him.

The power of Dog Star lies in its emotional honesty. Clarke is best known for big ideas, extrapolating the future of humanity and science with precision. But here he uses those ideas as a backdrop for something quiet and human. There is no villain, no alien threat, no grand explosion. The real tension comes from inside the narrator’s own heart the part of him that refuses to let go of love even in the vacuum of space.

What resonates is the way Clarke anchors the fantastic in the familiar. A lunar quake is dangerous, but what matters most is that our protagonist can still be moved, still be shaken by the memory of a dog. The dream functions less as a literal warning and more as a testament to the subconscious mind’s reach. The narrator later rationalizes that what woke him was subconscious pattern recognition of the quake’s early tremors, not supernatural intervention.

That rational explanation, while Clarke’s preferred answer, does not diminish the emotional force of the moment.

The story also serves as a reminder that even in worlds shaped by science and reason, humanity remains bound to its past. Clarke does not dismiss emotion. He shows how deeply it is woven into our decision making, our survival instincts, and even our dreams.

Dog Star endures because it is a science fiction story without losing sight of the human heart. It recognizes that exploration and discovery matter, but so do memory and connection. In a genre that often looks forward, Clarke reminds us that we carry our past with us, even into the stars.