The book is a series of inter-related stories that give increasingly more detail on the nature and purpose of the rugs and why the universe has tens of thousands of planets solely devoted to making such a thing, each thinking they are the only one.
Meanwhile, a distant space station near a black hole continues to serve as a delivery point for all the hair carpets, which come from not only one world, but more than ten thousand.
Only an ancient palace remains and, within it, a captive former king kept alive by artificial means is forced to watch the destruction of his world.
The original German novel won the 1996 Deutscher Science Fiction Preis as well as the Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire for foreign-language novel in 2001.
Writing in Emerald City, Cheryl Morgan called it "a fine example of traditional sociological science fiction, if rather unusually structured.