Dmitri Bilenkin (1933–1987) was an eminent Soviet science fiction and science writer, reportedly proud of his enormous black beard, who joined the geology faculty of Moscow State University in the late 1950s. Subsequently he participated in several geological expeditions across remote areas of the Soviet Union, including Siberia. In 1959, Bilenkin became a science fiction writer, working on Komsomolskaya pravda’s editorial staff and later at Vokrug sveta (Around the World) magazine. His story collections include The Surf of Mars (1967), Smuggled Night (1971), Intelligence Test (1974), and The Snows of Olympus (1980). He also wrote a popular science book titled The Argument Over the Mysterious Planet. He was a member of the Union of Writers of the USSR from 1975, and a member of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1963. In 1988, Bilenkin was posthumously awarded the Ivan Yefremov Prize.
Bilenkin’s stories have been translated into several languages, including English, German, French, and Japanese. In the United States, most of his works in translation appeared in anthologies published by Macmillan in the 1980s—including his story “The Surf of Mars,” which appeared in World’s Spring (1981), edited by Vladimir Gakov, and was considered a classic at the time. Bilenkin, together with Anatoly Agranovsky, Yaroslav Golovanov, V. N. Komarov, and the artist Pavel Bunin used the collective pseudonym Pavel Bagryak. Together they wrote a cycle of detective stories and a novel titled Blue Man.
“Where Two Paths Cross” (1973), retranslated for this volume, was selected by the Strugatsky brothers for their 1984 anthology Aliens, Travelers, and Other Strangers. This superior alien contact story, at times darkly absurd, charts the misunderstandings and assumptions made by both humans and aliens on a distant planet. As with other fiction in this volume, most notably the selection by Ursula K. Le Guin, the ecological underpinnings in this story about alien life and the environment seem ever more relevant today.