Riftwar, what have i let myself in for?

[BigFatCoward]

So, i just recently got around to starting these books thinking it was a nice simple trilogy, but no, it appears there are about 4,000 books in the series.  i'm quite enjoying it so far (up to the start of book 3). 

The question is, can i stop after book 3 with a satisfactory conclusion, and if not, is it worth continuing to the (hopefully not) bitter end?

[Free Northman Reborn]

The good story ends after Book 3. Thereafter it is a shallow money making scheme, admitted to by Feist himself, to help him out of the financial hole that his divorce left him in.

[Darth Richard II]

Books 4 and 5 are decent. Then FOR THE LOVE OF GOD STOP.

[Hereward]

Stop at 3. Four and five are OK, but only that.

[Werthead]

Magician can be read as a good stand-alone. It does a lot of fantasy tropes different and it's fun, although the enthusiasm often outweighs the prose. The two sequels (Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon) are so-so. They were supposed to be one book, which you can tell from the weirdly similar openings. They are quite important in the grand scheme of things.

You then have Prince of the Blood and The King's Buccaneer, which are both reasonably good (better than 2 and 3, not as good as Magician).

Feist's masterwork, and his required reading, is The Empire Trilogy, which he co-wrote with Janny Wurts. It runs alongside and slightly after Magician, so you can read it anywhere you like. I'd suggest between Prince of the Blood and The King's Buccaneer.

After that you have the four-volume Serpentwar Saga, which starts off really well, peaks with the battle scenes in Rage of a Demon King, which are hands-down Feist's best, and then falls off a cliff with the completely pointless fourth book, Shards of a Broken Crown, which simply should not exist. It's a totally pointless novel.

After that you can safely ignore the rest of the series. The only other book worth reading after that point is Honoured Enemy, which was actually written by William Forstchen. It's set behind the lines during the events of Magician and it's a really good, Dirty Dozen-style military fantasy.

[williamjm]

A Darkness At Sethanon does have a fairly conclusive ending and the later books are starting to focus onto the next generation of characters, so it would be a reasonable place to stop.

I read up to Into A Dark Realm, which if you're just counting the 'main' Riftwar books would be 12th in the series but decided not to continue any further after that, and in retrospect I should probably have stopped after the 8th book Rage of a Demon King which I'd say was the last good book. The later books occasionally had decent moments but the new characters weren't as interesting as the old ones and Feist seemed to completely stop caring about continuity so the identities of the Midkemian Royal Family seemed to change every book.

I'd agree with Wert that the Empire trilogy and Honoured Enemy were much better than most of Feist's solo work.

[Free Northman Reborn]

10 minutes ago, williamjm said:

A Darkness At Sethanon does have a fairly conclusive ending and the later books are starting to focus onto the next generation of characters, so it would be a reasonable place to stop.

I read up to Into A Dark Realm, which if you're just counting the 'main' Riftwar books would be 12th in the series but decided not to continue any further after that, and in retrospect I should probably have stopped after the 8th book Rage of a Demon King which I'd say was the last good book. The later books occasionally had decent moments but the new characters weren't as interesting as the old ones and Feist seemed to completely stop caring about continuity so the identities of the Midkemian Royal Family seemed to change every book.

I'd agree with Wert that the Empire trilogy and Honoured Enemy were much better than most of Feist's solo work.

To be fair, I was still heavily invested in the series up to the end of Shards of  Broken Crown. I enjoyed the Hall of Worlds concept, and Pug's battles against the Demon Lords. But it was clear by then that the series was running out of steam.

I guess what bothered me most was the ease with which Feist discarded old characters, almost like chucking them on a scrap heap once he dreamed up a new character to focus on. There was no sentimentality there. Just a commercial focus on selling more books with a fresh concept.

To me Pug is really the only glue that holds it all together. And I would have kept reading just to learn his eventual fate. Except I got that from a wikipedia summary or some such web page, so didn't bother with the last few books.

[stonebender]

Haven't read Feist but I can relate to the "4,000 books" complaint in general.  At the moment anything more than a trilogy is really daunting to me for some reason.     

[Derfel Cadarn]

I preferred Honoured Enemy when it was called Sharpe's Rifles...

 

i'm re-reading the series.  Pretty much concur with the above.  Continuity takes a dive during the Serpentwar Saga.  A toddler never ages.  A prince gets younger.  Another character must have been a child groom.  A character relates an incident (from a video game) that never happens in the later prequel novelisation.

 

It gets worse later.  The royal family changes with every book; a king's family vanish from existence, then later so does he.  As does an empress.

A dwarf's name changes midbook!  In the penultimate book hardcover, a first draft chapter is accidently included, leading to a character being in two places at once.

 

 

[Hereward]

Good point about the Empire series. I liked that and need to do a reread.

[Argonath Diver]

I recently re-read the Riftwar series, as I loved Feist's work when I was a teenager. I had the intention to get through the Serpentwar again. I didn't bother after I completed the Riftwar set. His continuity is just absurd. I kept looking at the map, and reading single paragraphs that basically said "And then this other army traveled super far in 2 days", then other characters take weeks to travel what looks like a fifth the distance. I knew I wasn't going to go back to them and find GRRM levels of complex plotting, but so many illogical things happened that they eventually trumped my legitimate enjoyment of the characters. 

When I'm home for the holidays, I plan on digging through the old boxes of books packed away in my folks' attic. I know the Empire trilogy is in there somewhere, and those books were just awesome.

[Wilbur]

3 hours ago, Werthead said:

Magician can be read as a good stand-alone. It does a lot of fantasy tropes different and it's fun, although the enthusiasm often outweighs the prose. The two sequels (Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon) are so-so. They were supposed to be one book, which you can tell from the weirdly similar openings. They are quite important in the grand scheme of things.

...Feist's masterwork, and his required reading, is The Empire Trilogy, which he co-wrote with Janny Wurts. It runs alongside and slightly after Magician, so you can read it anywhere you like. I'd suggest between Prince of the Blood and The King's Buccaneer...

This would be my advice as well.  Feist was really writing some interesting and novel stuff in the first three books, and his world-building was way above average.

Then in collaboration with Janny Wurts, the two of them wrote their best books every in The Empire Trilogy, which I think of as a strong contender for the most interesting fantasy post-Tolkien in the 20th Century.  Certainly the world-building was far outside the norm for the 80s and 90s fantasy genre.

Unfortunately Feist had some sad personal issues, and his editors seriously failed to execute even the simple tasks of the role in his subsequent books.  There really isn't much need to use your valuable time much beyond this point in his bibliography.

The only exception to this is a series of hard-to-find short stories or vignettes that he wrote in the 80s that also take place in the Midkemian milieu.  It is actually easier to find these in audio form today than in written form, although the sources all seem to be pirated.  If you can find the anthologies Legends and Legends II, those are the primary sources of the written versions of The Wood Boy and The Messenger, while I don't know the source of Profit and the Grey Assassin.

[williamjm]

Has anyone read his non-Midkemia novel Faerie Tale? I have heard reasonable things about it in the past, and it was written relatively early in his career which is usually a good sign with Feist.

[Darth Richard II]

38 minutes ago, williamjm said:

Has anyone read his non-Midkemia novel Faerie Tale? I have heard reasonable things about it in the past, and it was written relatively early in his career which is usually a good sign with Feist.

Well, I read it back in 92ish and it's still the scariest goddamn thing I've ever read. No idea how well it holds up.

[Calibandar]

8 hours ago, williamjm said:

Has anyone read his non-Midkemia novel Faerie Tale? I have heard reasonable things about it in the past, and it was written relatively early in his career which is usually a good sign with Feist.

Haven't read it, though it is on the shelf.

I see it pop up frequently on "best of humans vs Fairyland" type fantasy lists.

[Hereward]

Yes, I read it in the early 1990s and enjoyed it, though the details are hazy, as is the case with most of that time period for some reason.

[kuenjato]

19 hours ago, Wilbur said:

 

Unfortunately Feist had some sad personal issues, and his editors seriously failed to execute even the simple tasks of the role in his subsequent books.  There really isn't much need to use your valuable time much beyond this point in his bibliography.

 

What were these issues?

I enjoyed the first 4, then stopped. I always considered it fairly Tolkien boilerplate with some interesting ideas thrown in that would be expanded upon by other authors -- Malazan, for example, feels like Riftwar on steroids.

[Darth Richard II]

12 hours ago, Calibandar said:

Haven't read it, though it is on the shelf.

I see it pop up frequently on "best of humans vs Fairyland" type fantasy lists.

Again its been a long time, but goddamn those fairies were creepy as fuck. I didn't sleep for like a week.

[williamjm]

2 hours ago, kuenjato said:

I enjoyed the first 4, then stopped. I always considered it fairly Tolkien boilerplate with some interesting ideas thrown in that would be expanded upon by other authors -- Malazan, for example, feels like Riftwar on steroids.

I think in some ways it was a bit of a stepping stone between the likes of Eddings and Brooks and some of the more recent Epic Fantasy authors. I think the Empire trilogy was maybe the first time I'd really encountered an epic fantasy novel with the sort of political intrigue between warring families and grey characters that GRRM would later perfect, and even if Magician has a fair amount of Tolkien inspiration it was relatively original for its time in its lack of a fight against a Dark Lord. Scott Lynch also said back when he used to post on this board that Feist was one of his inspirations, particularly the rogue using his wits to become a wealthy businessman plotline from Rise of a Merchant Prince.

[drawkcabi]

Riftwar is what got me into reading fantasy when I was 16. Before then I only read sci fi (Clarke, Asimov, Heinlein, Star Trek and Star Wars books).

I fell in love with it and I think it being my first real exposure to that type of fantasy was a large part of it (I knew of Tolkien, The Hobbit and some of the LOTR story but only because I watched - and loved - the Rankin/Bass animated movies many times, but I didn't even know about the Bakshi film, I only felt I was sure there was quite a bit more to the story between The Hobbit and ROTK that I was missing). But even if I only picked it up today I think I'd still really enjoy the best parts of it.

But yes, Wert has the right of it.

Magician (Apprentice and Master) Silverthorn, and A Darkness at Sethanon should be read. But even more than the latter two the Feist/Wurts Empire trilogy is very awesome. My paperback copies of those books are disintegrating from being reread so many times. I wish they were available on Kindle!

I also agree that Prince of the Blood and The Kings Buccaneer are very good standalones in the Riftwar universe and are fun reads. Don't get confused and think you should read the Krondor books (Betrayal, Nighthawks, Tear of the Gods) chronologically they come between Darkness at Sethanon and Prince of the Blood but were written much later and purely for cash grabbing and completely phoned in and unnecessary.

The Serpent War Saga, The first book is pretty good, but the second book, Rise of a Merchant Prince, is IMHO, up there with the best of the books, including the Empire ones. Makes the Serpentwar series worth it all just for that book.

The rest of the books aren't worth bothering with.