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Book Entry · Fantasy
Pug, an orphan keep-boy at Crydee, is taken as apprentice by the magician Kulgan; his friend Tomas dreams of soldiering. Both get their wishes in the worst way when a rift in space-time opens and the Tsurani — a Kelewanese empire of bronze, honour politics and house warfare, fantasy's answer to feudal Japan via Tekumel — invade Midkemia for its metal. The Riftwar takes Pug from slavery in the enemy's world to mastery of two magics, while Tomas inherits the armour (and appetites) of a dead Dragon Lord. Split in two for later editions (Apprentice and Master), it remains the great two-worlds epic: a war where the reader is eventually rooting for both sides.
One of the bestselling fantasy debuts of its decade and a permanent fixture of starter lists; it launched the thirty-volume Riftwar Cycle and demonstrated the gaming-table-to-bookshop pipeline a generation early.
Feist's decades-spanning saga of Midkemia and Kelewan, joined by a rift in space-time: the magician Pug, the Tsurani invasion and thirty volumes of consequences.
In the Guide from The Riftwar Cycle:
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The genre's great pre-broadband metaverse epic — VR worldbuilding at a scale not attempted again until the streaming era, and a visible influence on everything from the Matrix sequels' discourse to Ready Player One's premise (done with far more ambition here).
The Elenium demonstrated the Eddings machine ran just as well with older protagonists and darker church politics — and its weary knight-errant prefigured a generation of middle-aged fantasy leads.
The launch of the genre's bestselling post-Tolkien saga (ninety-plus million copies): for the 1990s, this was what 'epic fantasy' meant, and Amazon's 2021 series renewed the franchise for another generation.