and got his first job as a metalworker in a local plant. Two years later, he became a lumberman and rafter in the construction sites of Russian Far North, then a geologist exploring the Ussuri region (Russian Far East) with its swampy coniferous forests, great rivers, and many places where, literally, the foot of man had never stepped before. Bright impressions of those journeys inspired his Saveliy Cycle, a series of short SF stories featuring a hunter from taiga who meets aliens and teaches the art of hunting to them. In 1964, Nikitin returned to Kharkiv and continued his series of temporary jobs, often low-skilled and involving hard physical work. He lingered in each one for hardly more than a year, mainly because of his wish to try something different. As he commented later in I am 65, his autobiography, “I've never had a job I hated to do. Furthermore, I knew that whatever I did was temporary, that my true destiny was great and my current job nothing but an adventure I'd like to recall someday.” During 1964–65, Nikitin completed his secondary education as an external student in an evening school and considered seriously his choice of full-time career. He picked sports, music, painting, and writing as the most promising options for the kind of person he was: an ambitious man of 25 with no higher education. By 1967, he achieved the master-of-sports rank in canoeing, first grades in boxing, sambo, track and field athletics, learned to play the violin, sold several cartoons to local magazines. Nikitin wrote his very first stories in 1965, just for fun. Those were humorous and very short: the shortest one only counted 28 words. All of them were purchased by Russian and Ukrainian magazines. In the next several years, Nikitin created many short SF stories (Saveliy Cycle, Makivchuck the Space Ranger Cycle, and many others) with the same distinctive features: new unusual subject, lively characters, fast-changing events, and striking end. In 1973, they were collected to make Nikitin's first book, The Man Who Changed the World, which was a noticeable success. Many stories were translated into foreign languages and published in the countries of Warsaw Pact. However, the author's earnings were not enough for living and supporting the family, so he retained his main occupation as a foundry worker till 1976. Nikitin's second book, Fire Worshippers, belongs to the genre of industrial novel,