Yefremov's 1958 short story "The Heart of the Serpent" and the 1968 novel The Bull's Hour, which are set in the same universe some 200 years later, are considered its sequels.

Though the world described in the novel is intended to be ideal, there is an attempt to show a conflict and its resolution with a voluntary self-punishment of a scientist whose reckless experiment caused damage.

In the novel, several civilizations across our galaxy, including Earth, are united in the Great Circle, whose members exchange and relay scientific and cultural information.

Notably, faster-than-light travel or communication does not exist in the time portrayed in the book, and one of the minor plot lines examines a failed attempt to overcome this limitation.

One of the main plot lines follows the crew of the spacecraft Tantra led by Captain Erg Noor, dispatched to investigate the sudden radio silence of one of the nearby Great Circle planets.

The second major plot line follows Darr Veter, the director of the global space agency as he makes way for a successor and then attempt to find a new job for himself.

Nevertheless, the novel was a major milestone in Soviet science-fiction literature, which, in Stalin's era, had been much more short-sighted (never venturing more than a few decades into the future) and primarily focusing on technical inventions rather than social issues (the so-called "close-range science fiction [ru]").