Many people are well aware of the warning novel “The Hour of the Ox” by the famous Soviet science fiction writer, scientist and thinker I.A. Efremova. But at the end of his life, Ivan Antonovich began work on another warning novel, “The Chalice of Poison.” There were many rumors surrounding this “last” work of Efremov. Someone said that the text of the novel was confiscated and destroyed by the KGB during a search of the writer’s apartment after his death. Someone argued that the novel remained in the planning stage and there were not even drafts of the text. What was Ivan Antonovich’s plan, which was never destined to see the light of day? Former Soviet dissident Grigory Dolgin, who personally knew I. Efremov, reports in his memoirs: “The cup of poison” was “poisonous hemlock juice from the cup of Socrates and a swift arrow Ahriman, as a link of times, to the poisoned noosphere of the Earth of the twentieth century." The main convoy of the “Chalice” was the debunking of the total disinformation of official propaganda. The propaganda machine of the “red country”, rapidly approaching the “white” one. In “The Chalice,” Efremov examined in detail the experiments in the Sukhumi monkey nursery, the fanaticism of Eichmann and Mengele, the ritual bowls of sake and the “divine wind” of the samurai, the “paradise” and the double-edged daggers of the assassins. Everything that is approaching a world deprived of the Great Dream. There were also versions that the plot of the unwritten novel began with how two spacemen on a distant planet find the “legacy” of a dead civilization - the same one mentioned in “The Hour of the Ox.” This is what Efremov himself said about his plan in an interview with the Romanian newspaper Scintea: “In this In the novel, I want to try to develop pictures of the poisoning of the noosphere, as V.I. Vernadsky said, of human society and, in fact, of the human brain with all kinds of evil, harmful, humiliating, defaming, deceiving influences - with the help of religion, the media, even medicine and sports. I want to say what needs to be done to cleanse the noosphere of the Earth, poisoned by ignorance, hatred, fear, mistrust, to show what needs to be done in order to destroy all phantoms that rape human nature, break his mind and will.”

So, my new novel is a tribute to the memory of Ivan Antonovich Efremov, whom I consider my literary teacher. In this novel, I decided to develop in my own way Efremov’s idea about the roots of evil that has been gnawing at humanity for as long as at least the last five thousand years, and which brought us in the 21st century to the edge of the abyss, where degradation and complete destruction await us. The novel “The Chalice of Poison” from the “Face the Sun” series takes the reader six years earlier than the events of the story “The Tooth of the Cobra”, returning to the previous heroes of the cycle. Humanity is trying to evaluate the path traveled through millennia, to understand its origins and choose the direction of future development. Earthly science is on the threshold of grandiose discoveries that promise unprecedented opportunities for every inhabitant of the Earth. In this book, I tried to combine and generalize the experience of various researchers of the alternative history of mankind and, based on ancient mythological texts, give my vision of the formation of civilization on Earth, show a picture of the origin and development of Homo sapiens, think about his place in this world. And also to reflect on the reasons for the terrifying injustice and burden of our existence, filled with grief, countless suffering, inequality and death - all that I.A. Efremov called the capacious definition of inferno.