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.Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards for best novelFour travelers come to the ringworld. . .Louis Wu:human and old; bored with having lived too fully for far too many years. Seeking a challenge, and all too capable of handling it.Nessus:a trembling coward, a puppeteer with a built-in survival pattern of nonviolence. Except that this particular puppeteer is insane.Teela Brown:human; a wide-eyed youngster with no allegiances, no experience, no abilities. And all the luck in the world.Speaker-To-Animals:kzin; large, orange-furred, and carnivorous. And one of the most savage life-forms known in the galaxy.Why did these disparate individuals come together? How could they possibly function together?And where, in the name of anything sane, were they headed?