**Today, Russian authors Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are counted among the best science fiction writers of the twentieth century.** In their Noon Universe novels, they imagined twenty-second-century Earth as a space-faring communist utopia, devoted to guiding the progress of civilization on alien worlds. But as the authors became increasingly disillusioned with life in the Soviet Union, their Noon Universe stories grew darker and more complex as well. *The Waves Extinguish the Wind* provides the epic conclusion to the Noon Universe saga, as eighty-nine-year-old Maxim Kammerer looks back at his most earth-shattering investigation, which brought an entire era of human civilization to an end. Searching for evidence that the mysterious alien Wanderers were interfering in Earth’s development, Kammerer and his young trainee Toivo Glumov discovered a deeper and more disturbing secret within humanity itself. **This new translation by Daniels Umanovskis joins updated editions of** Hard to Be a God **,** The Inhabited Island **, and** The Beetle in the Anthill **to bring the saga of the Noon Universe to its fitting end: a search for truth and answers in a universe that provides only questions.**