Eight thousand humans are desperately seeking to reach a new home away from mineral-depleted Earth. An evil empire, the Gern, is on the verge of enslaving the human race, and the new colony, hidden from the Gern, will provide much needed resources to perhaps halt the coldly calculating colossus that is the Empire.

En route, the ship is attacked and boarded. Half of the colonists are taken as Acceptables to be enslaved, and the other half are Rejects, abandoned with almost no supplies on a brutally harsh world that threatens to wipe them out in a few short weeks. Deadly beasts that move with lightning reflexes and unearthly speed, mini ice ages, scorching summers that last for years and an almost utter lack of useful resources hound the survivors and their generations of descendants as they strive to adapt and build a future where they can leave the planet and retake their lost home from the Gern.

A gripping novella by Tom Godwin, The Survivors is a brilliant tale about the indomitability of the human spirit in the face of impossible odds.

Note: reprinted in The Cold Equations and Other Stories

Also published as Space Prison