There is no state structure, no institutionalized coercion, no police etc., yet the society's functioning is safeguarded by raising everyone as responsible individuals, with the guidance of a set of High Councils accepted by everyone in each particular field of activity.
Technologically advanced and highly secretive, the Wanderers are suspected of manipulating sentient beings throughout Noon Universe for their own purposes.
One of the controversial occupations in the Noon Universe is that of the progressors, agents embedded in less-advanced humanoid civilizations in order to accelerate their development or to resolve their problems.
These works by the Strugatsky brothers are set in the Noon Universe (listed chronologically): There are loose connections to early stories The Land of Crimson Clouds ("Страна багровых туч"), The Way to Amalthea ("Путь на Амальтею"), Space Apprentice ("Стажеры"), The Final Circle of Paradise (through Ivan Zhilin), Ispytanie SKIBR, Chastnye predpolozheniya, mainly through Bykov's family.
The Strugatsky brothers planned the book as a direct sequel of Prisoners of Power following the story of infiltration of the progressor Maxim Kammerer into the elite of the Island Empire.
[7] In the late 1990s, a series of fiction by notable Russian sci-fi writers, titled Time of Apprentices [ru], was published in Russia with an endorsement of Boris Strugatsky.
This re-release is notable being accompanied with introductory articles written by literary critics from the perspective of Noon Universe historians looking back on the events of the said novels several decades later, as well as with the excerpts of Boris Strugatsky's memoirs Comments on the Past [ru].
[1] In writing about the Noon Universe, the Strugatsky brothers have been argued to have created their own utopian ideology, or "amateur personal metaphysics", that is based on the primacy of science like more modern view of transhumanism.
[13] Critic Ezra Glinter described the Noon Universe as a socialist utopia in which humanity has survived its crises but still has problems to solve, and in which the conflict is between "the good and the better".