Day of the Hunters

"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 "Day of the Hunters" is based on "Big Game", a story written many years earlier that was unpublished and assumed to have been lost until discovered in the author's collected papers at Boston University.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 lizards had already been killed by small intelligent dinosaurs armed with guns, who were systematically wiping out their own kind until there were none left to kill.

Story notes

As in many of his stories, the author was influenced by the then-current fear of nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the USA, which might have resulted in another extinction event.

Stephen Baxter's Evolution published in 2002 contains a more sophisticated version of the same sapient dinosaur hunter idea.

See also

• The Most Dangerous Game