The first time the term “doggo” was ever used was by Ralph Milne Farley in “The Radio Man” (aka “An Earthman on Venus” in reprints), a novel published in the pulp mag Argosy in 1924.

Ralph Milne Farley is the pen name of Roger Sherman Hoar, who was actually a state senator and former assistant attorney general for Massachusetts. He also liked to write scifi adventure for pulp mags. Hoar wrote a kind of John Carter of Mars esque planetary romance about a guy sent to Venus, only to find it is ruled by two species of insects: one of which were giant ants, and the other of which were beautiful winged butterfly like people. The latter species produces a gorgeous bug girl that he marries at the end.

Radio was basically magic in the 1920s, a high-tech job everyone thought was cool: in fact, one of the premiere Adventure pulp stories was about a radio operator for the US Navy, as impossibly banal as that sounds to us today. Ralph Milne Farley made his hero a super-jacked radio enthusiast who finds a way to use radio to teleport himself to Venus.

Incredibly, “The Radio Man” got several sequels…few of which are read today, since the John Carter of Mars imitation planetary romance novel is basically as dead a genre as the Ruritanian romance, or the “stone age past life regression novel” popular in the 1900s.

The first friend that Myles Cabot makes on Venus is a giant ant that he calls “Doggo,” because the ant’s big, plaintive eyes remind him of a friendly dog. Doggo would appear throughout the series as Myles Cabot’s best friend, especially since Myles uses his radio skills to communicate with Doggo via his antennae.

Unfortunately, in none of the 6 Radio Man novels did Myles Cabot call Doggo a “Pupper.”