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Magician's End - Final Midkemia Novel


Adept Havelock

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I'm surprised there's no thread for this yet so I thought I'd make one. Well it's over, after 30 novels spread over 4 decades the Midkemia series is finished. A surprisingly good novel his best for 10 years (I realise this faint praise given how terrible the last few Feist books have been). There were some poor moments however, the constant need to bring back the dead characters for the finale, the 'surprise' ending for the conDoin brothers and well quite a lot of other bad parts. All is forgiven however as it gave an enjoyable ending to Pug's and Tomas' story.

This thread is more about the ending of the Midkemia Saga then the quality of the final novel though. Magician remains one of my favourite ever novels, that I still reread every few years. A great plot, two interesting worlds and characters that you care about. Every time I read it I forget how many plot lines it has running through it (Pug's and Tomas' tales, the siege of Crydee, the rescue of the princess in Krondor, the madness of the king, looming civil war, Black Guys attempted Coup, the political wrangling in Kelewan, the peace process, the elves and the Dwarves, Macros' manipulation, etc...). The fact that Feist never got close to the quality of novel again is disappointing to say the least. Not that he didn't have only one good book, I also enjoyed 'The King's Buccaneers', 'Shadow of a Dark Queen' and the 'Empire Trilogy' though they still weren't anywhere near as good as Magician.

Anyway my thanks to Feist for years of joy, along with a bit of relief its over given the low quality of books from the last decade.

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I am glad to hear that Feist has been able to come out with a better quality work. I hope that he is enjoying a personal as well as a professional renaissance.

Like yourself, I truly enjoyed the Magician and Empire works, which I found captivating as a young reader as they came out. His later works, and indeed his personal life, suffered thereafter, and it was a pity to see that early promise unfulfilled.

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Magician remains one of my all-time favourites. As does the Empire trilogy, which was probably the first fantasy series I ever read. I've read a few of the other Midkemia books, but I didn't realise there were 30 of these. None that I've read lived up to the standards set by Magician.

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Yeah, I really loved Magician and the Empire Trilogy when I was younger and enjoyed several of the other books but lost interest at Talon of the Silver Hawk I think. I'd quite like to read the ending in a vague way but I'm not sure I want to read several books I'm fairly confident won't be very good, a shame they went down hill. I might reread Magician or Daughter of the Empire for old times sake though.

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Reading it now. Having a really tough time caring about the non-Pug parts...

I know; they do drag.

Annoyingly I actually quite enjoyed the conDoin princes and Ty when they were first introduced. They were doing new things for the series, travelling to the university, being trained as Kingdom Intelligence Operatives etc. However in the last couple of books they just began to tread the same old ground that Feist has done many times before; rescue a princess from under the nose of a usurper to the throne, defend Crydee from a large invading army, hell they even had their father die pointlessly before the end of the war. By the time Magician's End started you already knew exactly where the story was heading and so lost all interest in that part of the story.

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I know; they do drag.

Annoyingly I actually quite enjoyed the conDoin princes and Ty when they were first introduced. They were doing new things for the series, travelling to the university, being trained as Kingdom Intelligence Operatives etc. However in the last couple of books they just began to tread the same old ground that Feist has done many times before; rescue a princess from under the nose of a usurper to the throne, defend Crydee from a large invading army, hell they even had their father die pointlessly before the end of the war. By the time Magician's End started you already knew exactly where the story was heading and so lost all interest in that part of the story.

Just finished it on a plane.. :/ I guess once you've had GRRM, you never go back..

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  • 2 weeks later...

Feist's next novel King of Ashes will be released in March 2014.

I’ll never say never, as the old saying goes. I may come back to Midkemia one day. Right now I’m at work on The King Of Ashes, which is the first volume of a new series The War Of Five Crowns that’s about a completely different world with different rules of magic, different politics, and very different characters. I can say no more. Although as we’re talking about George RR Martin, I will say that you’ll get an idea of what Five Crowns is about if I tell you it’s a little bit like Game Of Thrones with show tunes.

http://www.sfx.co.uk...eist-interview/

What is Raymond E. Feist up to next when it comes to your writing career? Will you try out a new genre or still be kicking and screaming after fantasy?

Fantasy it is until I win the lotto then I can try my hand at that police procedure novel or western, or space opera science fiction. I may toss in a wild card, like another Faerie Tale, a contemporary fantasy. But the next project is called King of Ashes, book one of a trilogy I'm calling The War of Five Crowns (subject to change).

http://www.examiner....-magician-s-end

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  • 2 weeks later...

Magicians End was ok. The best Feist novel since Exile's Return (for what that's worth). The ending is a bit too spelled out - we didn't need the 'Pug' nickname, the 'happy' bit was enough.

Re the new series, I'm of two minds. On one hand if he's as enthusiastic as he was at the start of the Riftwar, then it could be good. On the other hand, he admits he's writing fantasy for the money. And saying he was inspired by GRRM while calling the series War of the Five Crowns is a bit obvious. If he's ripping off GRRM while on autopilot writing mode, it will be shit.

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Magicians End was ok. The best Feist novel since Exile's Return (for what that's worth). The ending is a bit too spelled out - we didn't need the 'Pug' nickname, the 'happy' bit was enough.

Re the new series, I'm of two minds. On one hand if he's as enthusiastic as he was at the start of the Riftwar, then it could be good. On the other hand, he admits he's writing fantasy for the money. And saying he was inspired by GRRM while calling the series War of the Five Crowns is a bit obvious. If he's ripping off GRRM while on autopilot writing mode, it will be shit.

LOL, yeah, with the title it's almost like he's hoping some newbie will accidentally buy it thinking it's ASOIAF.
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  • 3 months later...

http://harpervoyagerbooks.com/2013/10/10/brand-new-series-for-raymond-feist/

Jane Johnson, Publishing Director at HarperVoyager, has acquired world rights for six new novels from Sunday Times bestselling author Raymond E. Feist.

This deal will start a stunning new epic fantasy series, THE WAR OF FIVE CROWNS, which will draw influences from medieval history and Arthurian legend. HarperVoyager will publish the first in that series, KING OF ASHES, in May 2014.

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Blurb for King of Ashes:

A bitter war engulfs five Greater Realms after four brother kingdoms violate the ancient Covenant. Ithrace, the Kingdom of Flames, is destroyed by battle, ending an ancient balance of power.

As a Free Lord of Osean, Daylon Dumarch owes allegiance to no king, but knows it is unwise to betray any of them. So when an infant hidden in his pavilion is discovered, he knows instantly that the child is the missing heir of the slain king of Ithrace - and decides to use that knowledge to his advantage. A cunning and patient man, Daylon keeps the baby's existence secret, sending him to be raised on the Island Kingdom of Coaltachin, the Kingdom of Night, where the most powerful and lethal soldiers - the Nocusara, the Hidden Warriors - are trained.

Years later, a young man named Declan earns his Masters standing as a smith. Blessed with intelligence and skill, he unlocks the secret to forging King's Steel, the apex of a weapon maker's art shared by only a few. Yet this precious knowledge is also deadly, and Declan is forced to leave his home to safeguard his life. Landing in Lord Daylon's provinces, he hopes to start anew.

Soon, two young men - the rightful heir to a throne and an exiled smith - will discover their fates entwined . . . and that the War of Five Crowns has never truly ended.

http://www.harpercollinscatalogs.com/harper/516_2780_313637393438.htm#readmore

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  • 4 weeks later...

I picked up a copy of Midkemia: The Chronicles of Pug. It's a nicely-illustrated companion book to the series, though it doesn't appear to be as 'worldbuilding'-centred as I'd hoped. Instead, it's a series of flashbacks and accounts of all five Riftwars, including an expanded account of what happened after the end of Magician's End. Each account features more information on the locations and elements that appeared in the related novel, including some nice maps of places like Sorcerer's Isle, Stardock, Queg and so on, but there isn't a huge amount of info here that wasn't in the novels. Towards the end, when it brings in a lot more info about places such as the Keshian Confederacy, it gets a bit more interesting. Beyond that, the only real new info is from the most detailed maps of southern Kesh and the Northlands we've seen so far.



It's also totally Midkemia-centric; there's nothing on Kelewan at all.


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Midkemia: The Chronicles of Pug by Raymond E. Feist and Stephen Abrams

Earlier this year, Raymond E. Feist concluded his Riftwar Cycle of epic fantasy novels. The sequence that began in 1982 with the publication of Magician concluded with Magician's End, resulting in a massive series consisting of thirty novels spread over ten sub-series. Six of the novels were co-written with other authors, but the rest are solely by Feist. However, it's less well-known that the world of Midkemia is not Feist's creation, instead being conceived by Stephen Abrams. Abrams and Feist attended the University of San Diego together in the 1970s and Abrams created the world for use in roleplaying games. Feist later (with Abrams's permission) used the setting for his novels, fleshing it out further.

Thirty-five years later, Feist and Abrams have regrouped to deliver a companion book to The Riftwar Cycle, featuring maps, artwork and further information on the world of Midkemia not given out in the novels. Whilst I haven't followed the later Riftwar novels (I bowed out after the quite amazingly boring Talon the Silver Hawk), I did enjoy the early ones and particularly liked the worldbuilding (haphazard as it was) depicted in the books and the spin-off computer games (Betrayal at Krondor and Return to Krondor), so I was looking forward to seeing that background fleshed out.

I was disappointed. As a companion book, Midkemia: The Chronicles of Pug is sorely lacking in almost every department. The first thing that grates is a lack of proof-reading: the book is riddled with spelling errors on both the maps and in the text (Shamata is frequently rendered as 'Shomata', whilst 'Murmandamus' is spelt in several different ways depending on the writer's whim of the moment). The maps are pretty, but difficult to use. The fonts render many names difficult to read and the artist seems to frequently get bored and only fill in the trees around the edges of the forests, making it look like Midkemia's woodlands are all plains surrounded by a ring of trees. Also - though this is a long-standing problem from the book maps as well - the mountains are depicted as quite ludicrously-sized given the scale used. The continent of Novindus continues to look like a small island instead of a huge landmass. There is also a discrepancy between the size of the Empire of Great Kesh on the maps and its reported size in the books (several times that of the Kingdom, whilst the maps show it as roughly the same size), and contradictory statements in the book which say that Kesh is sparsely-populated with the cities separated by vast gulfs of wasteland, whilst the novels report that Kesh has many times the population of the Kingdom. There's also the problem of the maps featuring locations that don't actually exist when the map was supposedly made: Port Vykor (or Vikor, as the maps never seem to agree on a spelling), founded after Rage of a Demon King, is shown on maps pre-dating Magician, more than fifty years earlier. Oh yes, and there's supposed to be two world maps of Midkemia, showing the state of the world at the start of Magician and after Magician's End (both visible on various fansites promoting the book) but only one of the two world maps is actually in the book. The other one seems to have simply been forgotten. This is made more amusing by the surviving book having 'MAP II (2)' written on it with 'MAP I (1)' nowhere to be found (in the UK first edition, it should be noted; the US edition and later editions may have fixed this).

Then there's the actual text itself. Those expecting a book which talks about geography, history, society, customs, cultures and so on like previous fantasy companion books (like The World of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, The World of Shannara and next year's World of Ice and Fire) will be in for disappointment. The text is a fairly basic plot summary of the events of The Riftwar Cycle. Sidebars and illustrations show there is some potential in this approach: a map of Sorcerer's Isle appears at the relevant point in the text, followed by maps of the Sunset Islands when they first appear and so on. Occasionally the summary of plot elements the reader is probably already familiar with is interrupted by a little bit of background information on politics or culture, but such moments are rare and fleeting. The depth and usefulness of the plot summary amusingly mirrors the general consensus of the quality of the books: the events of Magician are covered in substantial depth, then Silverthorn through Rage of a Demon King in somewhat less detail, and then all of the books afterwards (which is almost two-thirds of them) are covered in just a few pages of confusingly repeated names and events which sound generic to the point of painfulness (having bailed out after Talon of the Silver Hawk, I see I'm not missing very much).

The book is accompanied by artwork from Steve Stone. These aren't actual illustrations, however, but rather stiff and unconvincing 'photo art' featuring posed models in front of CG backgrounds. Occasionally this is effective (Amos Trask's ship running the Straits of Darkness is pretty good) but most of the time it's awful, not helped by occasional re-use of the same model to depict completely different characters.

There are moments when the book comes to life: the opening couple of chapters feel more inspired and some of the maps expanding on the somewhat-confused geography of Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon are genuinely useful. Occasional bursts of background material hint at much more interesting detail. Getting 'canon' maps of the Keshian Confederacy and the full Empire is also gratifying (though it turns out they are pretty much the same as the ones that have been available on the Elvandar website for many years). But ultimately this is a companion book which tells us almost nothing about the history, chronology, societies and cultures of the world it's named after, which is a baffling choice.

Midkemia: The Chronicles of Pug (**) is a disappointing volume, featuring almost none of the information that I suspect readers will really be interested in or expecting. Instead, it's an unproofed plot summary of books they've already read, interspersed with bad artwork, ill-detailed maps and an astonishing number of spelling mistakes. There are a few, scant interesting nuggets of new information to be found and some maps that helpfully clarify confusing descriptions in the books, but beyond that this book is not really that useful. One for die-hard fans and completists only. The book is available now in the UK and USA.
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  • 5 months later...

Finished the series yesterday. Feeling obliged to post because it was this thread, which I randomly noticed last year, that actually reminded me of the RIftwar series, which I had abandoned back in ~2005 after finishing the Krondor books. That triggered some research and procurement of the remaining books, starting from the Conclave of Shadows and finally ending with Magician's End.



Now about the books ...



Feist was never my favourite author, mainly because of his writing style. Most of his books have this feeling of going really slow during the first 30-70% and then suddenly speeding up to a grand finale. I find this pacing a bit unejoyable, especially while I was cruising through the books. The other nitpick is how he describes things ... I get the feeling he either has a bad editor or was simply too stubborn and left in a lot of irritating things. In Magician's End there was a scene where in the span of several sentences the word "silently" was used about 5 times. I don't usually fret over such things, but at times it was just too much.



Worldbuilding was always Feist's strong side. From the very beginning I liked the scope of his world and universe. In retrospect, he went even further than I imagined he'd dare and it was a pleasant surprise. One thing that I would've liked seeing is the exploration of the higher realms earlier in the series - we got a lot of hints and later on, interactions, with the lower realms, but the only time we saw anything of the higher ones was in the epilogue of ACI. The reason I say this is because I very much enjoyed the books that ventured into the second and fifth planes, with PoV characters of those realms. Also Rider's epilogue.



The continuity of the series was sometimes choppy - the gaps between some books were much larger than others and the new/leftover characters ratio was ever so erratic. Especially during the Chaoswar trilogy I found it difficult to empathize with the new characters (mainly the boys from Crydee), as I was simply more interested in how the whole universe-war would resolve itself to care about some Kingdom conflict, important as it might be. I was also rather disappointed as to how some of the older characters were left hanging at the end - Amaranta and Gulamendes (spellings?) especially. They ended up doing little in the final conflict, despite the several-books' build-up of how awesome a demonmasters they were.



The ending was well written and quite melancholic, which I found appropriate for a series that span over such a long period of time (both in the books and irl). I also liked the vague foreshadowing that not all is well with the universe - rather, the conflict is eternal and new heroes would have to pick up the struggle in ages to come. This whole symbolism is vaguely reminiscent of WoT, tho on a very different scope and scale.


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Finished the series yesterday. Feeling obliged to post ... on a very different scope and scale.

You have accurately summarized my own experience of reading Feist. He was a master world-builder, and he needed a strong editor or collaborator.

The best examples of this were the Daughter/Servant/Mistress of Empire books with Janny Wurts, which were a cut above everything else he produced. If you have read her work, it was easy to imagine that the excellent world and story came from Feist, while the details and characterizations came from her.

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