Prisoners of Power - Planned Sequel

Planned Sequel

According to Boris Strugatsky's later reminiscences, the Strugatsky brothers were planning to write a sequel to Inhabited Island. However, following the death of Arkady Strugatsky, the surviving brother felt that he could not bring himself to write the novel. The novel would have been named "White Ferz" ("Белый Ферзь"). Ferz - the Russian term for Queen in chess, which has male gender in Russian. The novel would have followed the story of the infiltration of Maxim Kammerer, now a progressor, into the heart of the Island Empire.

The Island Empire would have been shown as consisting of several social "circles". While the outer circle represents a fascist militaristic society, the middle circle is a peaceful liberal society, and the inner core is a highly developed harmonic society of intellectuals, similar to the Noon Universe Earth. A special social apparatus directs each citizen of the Empire according to his personality to the circle where he belongs.

The book would have shown that this cruel social selection of the Island Empire is the more (or even the only) realistic way for a social utopia to exist, and by contrast would doubt if the Noon Universe's Earth is realistically possible, so much so that it is actually suggested to Maxim by one of the leaders of the Inner Circle (when he finally makes contact with them) that his "Earth" is really an imaginary world, some literary invention that is impossible to have existed in the real world (serving as the authors' final judgement upon their own creation).