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This is not an ordinary sf novel, nor a graphic novel, nor a conventional illustrated novel. Chiang, design director for the most recent Star Wars films, paints like a scion of N. C. Wyeth, Vincent Di Fate, Maxfield Parrish, and Arthur Rackham. Muscular heroes and monsters, dramatic angles and deep foci, glowing color, and wraithlike figures of malevolence are everywhere in his visual complements to a story that he invented and then asked Card, one of the best and most honored contemporary sf and fantasy authors, to write down. That story--of a world that alien robots, once allies of the planet's human natives, are striving to purge of all carbon-based life, only to be thwarted by a reborn human champion--resembles the Star Wars saga in being a myth of restoration, of getting an old dream (liberty and cooperation?) back on track.