Five SFF books with dogs as key characters

Vanessa Armstrong is a book lover and writer with bylines at the LA Times, SYFY WIRE, StarTrek.com and other publications. She lives in Los Angeles with her dog Penny and her husband Jon.

At Tor.com Armstrong tagged five SFF books with dogs (and dog-adjacent individuals) as key characters," including:

Bumbersnoot the Mechanical Dog in The Finishing School series by Gail Carriger

If dogs and steampunk are two things you enjoy, then Bumbersnoot the mechanical dachshund from Gail Carriger’s Finishing School series will be right up your alley. This young adult series takes place in a school that’s located in a dirigible floating around a city set in a time period that’s the steampunk version of 1850s London. The main character is a girl named Sophorina, a student at the school who has a mechanimal named Bumbersnoot, a robot dog who eats coal and steamwhistles out warnings. Bumbersnoot is a reliable companion to Sophorina; he helps her out of more than a few pickles and even gets the chance to meet Queen Victoria at one point, making him a very special dog indeed.

Read about another entry on the list.

Etiquette & Espionage of The Finishing School series is among Feliza Casano's seventeen killer schoolgirls in fiction and Katherine Monasterio's four unique YA steampunk novels. The series is among Meghan Ball's ten top fictional educational institutions from SFF books.

--Marshal Zeringue