Author Language English | Country United States | |
Genre(s) Science fiction short story Published in Future Combined with Science Fiction Stories Publisher Columbia Publications Ltd. | ||
"Day of the Hunters" is a science fiction short story by American writer Isaac Asimov. It was published in the November 1950 issue of Future Combined with Science Fiction Stories, edited by Robert W. Lowndes, and reprinted in the 1975 collection Buy Jupiter and Other Stories. "Day of the Hunters" is based on "Big Game", a story written many years earlier that was unpublished and assumed to have been lost until discovered in the author's collected papers at Boston University.
Plot summary
A group of technicians in a bar meet whom they assume to be a drunken down-and-out. It slowly emerges that he is an ex-university professor who has not only built a time machine but has traveled back to the Mesozoic era to see for himself what happened to cause the extinction of the dinosaurs. He becomes more belligerent as he is teased and pressed, eventually revealing that by the time of his arrival, all the large dinosaurs had already been killed by small intelligent lizards armed with guns, who were systematically wiping out their own kind until there were none left to kill.