Conceived by the Strugatsky brothers, but never put to paper, the novel “The White Queen” was supposed to describe the adventures of Maxim Kammerer in the Island Empire. According to the authors, Kammerer, aka the White Queen, investigated the circumstances of the death of Lev Abalkin’s personal doctor Tristan and In the process of his searches, he discovered the true structure of the cruel world of the Island Empire, where, behind two circles of hell, there was located the true world of Midday, which could not exist without protective circles that accommodated scum of all stripes. The novel “The Black Queen” is an attempt to write your own version of the ordeal Maxim Kammerer in the monstrous world of the Island Empire. Old heroes in new guise and with new names in a world recreated by metagom Toivo Glumov and populated by those he once loved and hated. A world created by a metagom either for his own entertainment, or to search for a recipe for producing Happiness on a cosmic scale, and not on a single Earth of the 22nd–23rd centuries.