Survivor by Jr. Irving E. Cox
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Survivor by Jr. Irving E. Cox is a science fiction short story written in the mid-20th century. It portrays an alien conquest by impersonal “gray men” and the stark, instinctive struggle for survival that strips humans of their comforts, illusions, and moral certainties. The story follows Vernon Randall Hume, a once-complacent lawyer, as he flees across a devastated landscape toward a mountain pass and a rumored refuge beyond a river. He hides
from mechanized patrols, scavenges a ransacked farmhouse, and crosses the desert, where fear and hunger harden into a predatory impulse—he kills small animals for sport, then bludgeons a gray sentry and takes his coat. Intercut scenes reveal a boy and his father tracing Hume’s path: they eat the food he thought he had saved and find the sentry’s gun he left behind. When the wounded Hume, now wearing the gray coat, nears the boy’s cave, the child—following his father’s instructions—mistakes him for the enemy and shoots him. Seeking safety, the boy then discovers his father crushed by treads at the river, and he himself is captured, netted, and caged by the invaders—an ending that mirrors the story’s bitter theme of roles reversed, with humans reduced to the studied creatures they once casually dominated. (This is an automatically generated summary.)
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About this eBook
| Author | Cox, Irving E., Jr., 1917-2001 |
|---|---|
| Illustrator | Giunta, John, 1920-1970 |
| Illustrator | Manso, Leo, 1914-1993 |
| Title | Survivor |
| Original Publication | New York: Stratford Novels Inc., 1953. |
| Series Title | Produced from Avon Science Fiction and Fantasy Reader, April 1953 (Vol. 1, no. 2). |
| Credits | Tom Trussel (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) |
| Language | English |
| LoC Class | PS: Language and Literatures: American and Canadian literature |
| Subject | Science fiction |
| Subject | Short stories |
| Subject | War stories |
| Subject | Survival -- Fiction |
| Subject | Fathers and sons -- Fiction |
| Subject | Human-alien encounters -- Fiction |
| Subject | Earth (Planet) -- Fiction |
| Category | Text |
| eBook-No. | 78911 |
| Release Date | Jun 21, 2026 |
| Copyright | Public domain in the USA. |
| Downloads | 1179 downloads in the last 30 days. |
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