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Donald Westlake (1933-2008) eventually became very successful as a writer of mysteries and crime fiction; but he occasionally wrote in the SF genre as well, especially early in his career. Originally published in a pulp magazine in 1961, this mediocre and shallow story was one of those journeyman efforts. I recently downloaded it as a Kindle freebie, in the mistaken belief that it might be a story I'd read and liked in the early 60s. The latter story was actually "The Gentle Vultures" (1957) by Isaac Asimov. (That one can be read online for free at , and my five-star review is here: /review/show... .) What initially mislead me was the great similarity in premise: both tales are set mainly on the Moon, roughly in the author's present, with an alien species (who do this routinely, on a lot of worlds) impatiently waiting there for the Earthlings to hurry up and have their nuclear war, so the aliens can take over the planet. That, plus the vulture reference here which otherwise lacks a context, "Why should people hate vultures. After all a vulture never kills anyone" leads me to conclude that Westlake's story is a deliberate rip-off of Asimov's.

It is, however, a much shorter and very inferior rip-off, lacking the texture, sociological and psychological insight and philosophical depth that gives Asimov's work its emotional impact and thought-provoking quality. Where Asimov's aliens are primates with some affinity to us, Westlake's are apparently wholly alien (they have tentacles, for instance --and in this story, they just thrive in a highly radioactive environment, unlike Asimov's Hurrians); there's no meditation on competitive vs. cooperative instinct here, and very little in the way of culture-building or emotional engagement of the reader with the characters. I actually debated whether it was worth reviewing; but I usually review everything I read, negative reviews can be as useful to readers as positive ones (and it did inspire me to actually track down the Asimov story!), so I've gone ahead and written this review. :-)