Pierson's puppeteers, strange, three-legged, two-headed aliens, have discovered an immense structure in a hitherto unexplored part of the universe. Frightened of meeting the builders of such a structure, the puppeteers set about assembling a team consisting of two humans, a puppeteer and a kzin, an alien not unlike an eight-foot-tall, red-furred cat, to explore it. The artefact is a vast circular ribbon of matter, some 180 million miles across, with a sun at its centre - the Ringworld. But the expedition goes disastrously wrong when the ship crashlands and its motley crew faces a trek across thousands of miles of the Ringworld's surface.
The Orion Publishing Group is working with D&AD to find exciting new covers for selected Gollancz Space Opera books. This is one of those books. The designs will be chosen from work submitted by the most talented of today's art and design students. See the list of Gollancz Space Opera books included and find out how to enter the 2008 D&AD Global Student Awards