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Magician was published in 1982, expanded in 1992, and has been in print ever since. It launched a series of connected novels that now spans thirty-odd books across multiple trilogies, all set in the same world. That degree of longevity doesn’t happen by accident. The original novel earned it.
What’s It About?
Pug is a kitchen boy in the castle of Crydee, on the western frontier of the Kingdom of the Isles. He has an aptitude for magic — a natural Talent that the local magician Kulgan attempts to train, without quite the expected results. When a rift opens in space and an army from the alien world of Kelewan pours through, Pug’s life — and the Kingdom’s — is overturned completely.
The novel covers roughly fifteen years of Pug’s life, from adolescence through to early adulthood, and the scope is accordingly enormous for a single book. It’s simultaneously a coming-of-age story, a war epic, and a first-contact narrative — two cultures with fundamentally different approaches to magic and governance discovering each other through the worst possible introduction.
The Scale
One of Magician’s most distinctive qualities is its ambition. Feist covers ground that most authors would spread across a trilogy within a single volume. Characters age, wars begin and end, political situations shift. The pace is sometimes breathless and occasionally thin as a result — certain events that deserve more space are compressed — but the overall effect is of genuine epic scope delivered with unusual economy.
For readers used to 800-page single volumes that cover a few months of story, Magician can feel almost disorienting in how much it covers. It’s bracing rather than frustrating once you adjust.
Pug
Pug is a classic fantasy protagonist in the best sense — talented but not preternaturally so, driven by love and loyalty as much as ambition, capable of genuine mistakes. His magic develops in unexpected directions because of who he is rather than who he’s been told to be, and that specificity is what distinguishes him from more generic chosen-one templates.
His friendship with Tomas — the soldier’s son who ends up on a parallel extraordinary journey — is the emotional backbone of the novel, and the divergence of their paths is handled with real feeling.
The Tsurani
The alien invaders from Kelewan are one of Feist’s great achievements. Rather than simple antagonists, the Tsurani are revealed as a complex culture with their own honour codes, their own politics, their own internal struggles. The second half of the novel includes substantial sections from the Tsurani perspective, and the gradual mutual comprehension between the two worlds is more interesting than the initial conflict.
This is the seed of the Riftwar Saga’s best quality — the recognition that interesting fantasy requires interesting antagonists, not just imposing ones.
The Riftwar Series
Magician is the first book in the Riftwar Saga, which continues with Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon. After that, Feist expanded the world significantly across multiple further trilogies. The first three books are the essential core; everything after is optional and variable in quality.
Read Magician first, in the expanded 1992 edition if you can find it.
Rating: 4.5/5
Rated 4.6 Stars on Amazon. Buy Magician here.
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