Conceived by the Strugatsky brothers, but never embodied on 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 White Queen, investigated the circumstances of the death of Leo Abalkin's personal doctor Tristan and, in the process of his searches, discovered the true device of the cruel world of the Island Empire, where behind two circles of hell was the true world of Half Day, which could not exist without security circles containing scum of all stripes. The novel "Black Queen" is an attempt to write his own version of the ordeals of Maxim Kammerer in the monstrous world of the Island Empire. Old heroes in a new guise and with new names in a world recreated by metagom Toivo Glumov and inhabited by those whom he once loved and hated. A world created by a metagom either for its own entertainment, or to search for a recipe for the production of Happiness on a cosmic scale, and not on a single Earth of the XXII-XXIII centuries.