I was sitting there at work the other day minding my own business when a colleague asked to look at the book on my desk. I said sure and he picked up Jimmy and the Night Crawler while remarking that Raymond E Feist had been one of his childhood favourite authors for one book.
"Magician?" I guessed.
"Yeah. I think there were two others but they never made much impression. Something to do with Darkness?"
Feist did indeed write two others, and some more beyond that. He wrote 30 books in the Riftwar Cycle. But in my experience, if someone's talking about one of his books, 90% of the time its Magician. And more than half of those times, the speaker will say he didn't care for any of the other books.
Now that I stop to think about that, it looks like a pretty interesting phenomena. Most times, people are fans of an author rather than a specific book. They look the writing style, the characters, the imagination, and so on and so on, and stick with the author for a long time. Certainly, plenty of people did with Feist. You don't get to write a 30 book series if people don't buy it. But there's a very vocal element that didn't and that's unusual.
Why?
Magician and its two immediate sequels, Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon (see, he remembered a little) are very different beasts. The latter two are quest fantasies with sprinklings of politics; its very easy to see that Midkemia started life as a D&D campaign world. Magician by comparison is arguably the most 'everything and the kitchen sink' type book in fantasy. It's possibly the epitome of epic fantasy - how else do you describe a book that spans nine years and two worlds - and features some of the most over the top ideas I've yet to see in the book. Yes, some of these elements survive in the sequels, but they're pale echoes.
Is the answer then that you can take the same writing style and get vastly different results based on the ideas used? Maybe.
Or maybe the answer is that if you sell the fans something in Book 1 and something else in Book 2, you have issues. And Feist definitely did that. I've already illustrated some of that above; another factor is that Pug and Tomas, the heroes of Book 1, are mostly sidelined as Arutha becomes more of a focus. He was kind of a main character in Magician but his story was far less eyecatching. Judging from some interviews, it feels like Arutha was always meant to be the main character of Magician but Pug took over the show as the agent/publisher felt it needed someone more relatable.
And Pug the keep orphan is very relatable. He's Harry Potter before Harry Potter existed, except instead of (understandable) anger issues he brought an inquisitive empathy to the table. He's by turn prodigiously insightful and very slow, like most normal people, and has a cracker of an arc that ends with him in a far more adult place than most of fantasy's heroes. The only bad thing about that is it that it didn't really lend itself to a sequel, hence the disconnect.
Maybe the lesson - or one of the lessons - to take away from this is that there's an appetite for hugely epic stories that are told in only one story. Magician stands almost alone in conventional Epic Fantasy for this; success has bred no imitators here. The only things I can think of close to it is Adrian Selby's Snakewood and David Gemmell's Sword in the Storm.
But then again, perhaps I am thinking of this all the wrong way. Because while I think there are lessons in terms of what sells and what doesn't here, that's a subject that can bog down new writers. New writers (like myself) should be encouraged to strive, to dream, to invent wildly and see what is good.
And here Magician provides a wonderful lesson. The incredibly ambitious and imaginative first novel lives on as a classic, a book people remember decades after. The safe genre stories don't.
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