When I first read Magician, I read it in the consolidated version that combined Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master and the way I see it, Pug is the true hero and the absolute main character of the novel, since the subtitles reflect his journey from being an orphan in a frontier town to becoming a magician’s apprentice to being a slave on an alien world and then eventually rising to mastery of his magics on that self-same alien world, when he eventually becomes the saviour of his world along with his many friends and adopted relatives. Full of exciting action, interesting characters, a really epic plot and a truly wonderful setting, Magician is a must-read massive novel as far as I’m concerned. Tomas and Pug experience some really extraordinary adventures in their rise to power and together they become embroiled in some really amazing and epic events that date back to thousands of years in their world’s past.

Magician is primarily the tale of two boyhood friends’ rise to power from extremely humble beginnings, one the son of kitchen servants to a frontier (but politically powerful) Duke, and the other an orphan with none to claim him. That was a really great time for me, because I was discovering so many great books one after the other, and there was something about the adventures of Pug and Tomas and their friends that really drew me in to this world that Feist had created. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and soon after Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman’s Dragonlance Chronicles.

When I started out reading epic fantasy/space opera back in freshman year of high school, it was one of the very first books I read, soon after J. Feist’s Magician remains, to this day, one of the finest examples of traditional epic fantasy that I’ve read.

Magician book series raymond e feist