The Dogscape is a postapocalyptic world of a most unusual sort. Postapocalyptic worlds—worlds where life goes on among the shattered detritus of a fallen civilization—have been popular for years. Often, the old world was destroyed by nuclear war, but not always. It could be biological war, or an unprecedented natural disaster, or alien invasion, or zombies, or even donuts.

In the Dogscape, the world was destroyed by dog.

Well, sort of. Maybe. It's not really clear what caused the Dogscapocalypse. But whatever it was, its effects were certainly unique among postapocalyptic settings. In the Dogscape, the world is covered by dog. Not dogs, precisely, and not exactly a dog, either. The world is covered with—or perhaps replaced by—a continuous mass of dogflesh, with eyes, tails and limbs protruding at random from the canine terrain. In places branching "trees" of dog matter and other deformed structures extend above the furry expanse. It's possible to dig through the dogs, but they quickly grow back.

In 1937, the radio program Lights Out broadcast an episode called "Chicken Heart", about, well, a chicken heart that grew and engulfed the world; the episode gained some fame when comedian Bill Cosby mentioned it in one of his routines. The Dogscape is somewhat reminiscent of the state of the world at the end of "Chicken Heart"—though probably not inspired by it—with the chicken heart replaced by dog. But there's another important difference: in "Chicken Heart", it's implied that the chicken heart absorbed and replaced all other life. In the Dogscape, however, humans still persist, eating dogmeat and "fetal puppyfruits" and drinking milk that exudes from occasional "Mothermounds".

A blog simply called "DogScape" provides a good introduction to the setting, but this isn't where it originated; it merely collects some of the earliest Dogscape stories. The creation of the Dogscape began with a forum thread on comedy website Something Awful entitled "the dog flotilla drifts aimlessly about the river" (NSFW), which developed into a collection of original apocalpytic flash fiction involving dogs. Though there were other evocative posts in the thread that may be worth reading, it was a post by a user called "Ferrinus", a narrative of a solitary survivor in a bleak, organic "dogscape", that really caught on. There and at 4chan and elsewhere, other users began adding their own tales of the Dogscape, as it spread far beyond its initial few-paragraph post and developed in several sometimes contradictory directions. Several blogs were written expanding on the Dogscape with new stories. Dogscape mods were conceived for the popular game Minecraft, and one was proposed (though apparently not actually created) for Dwarf Fortress.

The unlikely result of an unassuming forum post that went viral, the Dogscape developed without any central directing authority. So it's not exactly a coherent, centrally planned setting; the various snippets that have been written about it don't all mesh, and some of them contradict each other. At at least one forum an attempt is being made (or was being made; it doesn't seem to have updated since September) to firm up and expand the setting into a consistent "Dogscape Mythos", but in my opinion it's a little misguided in its approach; it adds other "Biomass Entities" besides the Dogscape itself, but part of what made the Dogscape as originally presented unique and intriguing was that, inexplicably, it was just dogs. The Fishwater, Horsemass, Reptilx and their ilk may be interesting creations in their own right, but I don't think they belong in the Dogscape.

I'll end this description of the Dogscape by reproducing the second story ever written about the Dogscape, by the author of the original; this post seldom if ever seems to make its way into any of the Dogscape compilations, perhaps because its feel isn't thought to entirely mesh with the succeeding development of the setting, but it may still merit being remembered. Punctuation and capitalization are as in the original post:

"surf's up!" i cry, before grabbing my surfboard and running into the dogsea. full-grown canines, packed tightly together, make up the solid ground of the dogscape, but the bodies of water are huge rolling masses of tiny puppies, light, soft, and unconnected in such a way as to allow one to stride or even swim through them. i ford through the tiny, yipping creatures, grinning with anticipation at the massive puppywave that only now begins to crest, and hop up on my board to ride it back to shore, laughing and whooping all the while. the stars went out long ago