Raymond E. Feist - shark officially jumped?

Cafe Society
1

Or just my personal shark?

Background: I love love LOVE the guy’s early work. Silverthorn was the first “big” book I ever read - I was about 7. Prince of the Blood was the first book I ever bought myself (not counting book fairs at school).

I wanted to be Jimmy the Hand. I wanted to be the Warlord. I bought every one of his books the day it came out (well, in the UK, which I imagine was generally several months after the US release).

Then something strange happened. Shadow of a Dark Queen came out. New characters, new adventure, new place (on the same world). I didn’t like it much at first, but I kept reading. Sure enough, the same old characters were there. Arutha, Jimmy/James, Gamina, Pug, Nakor and so on.

New enemy? No, same old enemy, with a new plan.

Unfortunately, the Serpentwar series is where things got ugly. The “same old enemy” was sort of the same old enemy, but with someone bigger behind it. Not the Valheru, but a demon. As it turned out, the demon had someone behind him.

That’s my problem. Every time Midkemia needed a freshening of its storylines, Feist went bigger. The timeline of bigger baddies went something like so, starting with Magician:

Tsurani < Macros sort of behind them < Valheru (forcing Macros to close the rift) > Nighthawks(step down rather than up, I know) < Moredhel < Murmandamus < Pantathians < Valheru < the Nameless One/Nalar (although this doesn’t get revealed until way after the actual events of the books.

We are now taking a sort of sideways and upward step to the Dasati, and is at this point that I am finally considering giving up the chase, because it seems like there will always be a stronger, more evil enemy behind each previous one, and at some point the idea of mortals battling these foes just sounds silly.

Am I alone in these?

2

Is there a new release that I don’t know about that you’re referring to specifically?

I’ve read probably 90% of his works, and aside from sometimes not being able to remember what happened to who in which series or one-off, I still enjoy his work and his various over-lapping/entangled 'verses.

3

Not really. I’ve had this feeling for a few years, but it’s really been coming on strong with the Conclave of Shadows trilogy (King of Foxes, etc.) and Flight of the Nighthawks, which appears to be the first of a whole new series.

4

I agree. Magician is my all time favourite book. I loved the whole Riftwar and Empire series, Serpentwar started to get bogged down, the Krondor series was a travesty and the Darkwar series is getting too repetitive. I’ll probably read Wrath of a Mad God to finish off this series, but I don’t know if I’ll stay for the whole saga.

By the way, the 4th and 5th big enemies are codenamed Demonwar and Godswar :eek:, so the pattern seems set to continue. After that Midkemia is done with.

5

I liked everything up till Exile’s Return, then when I picked up Flight of the Nighthawks, I saw that he had pretty much recycled the “two humble country boys who grow up to be mighty heros” plot he used in the Serpentwar Saga books, so I lost interest.

6

As the plots got bigger, the characters became less important. The later books are really an entirely different animal.

I still enjoy the latest books. I think it’s still fun exploring new parts of the world (and, now that they’ve pretty much exhausted at least Triagia and Novindus on Midkemia, new worlds entirely*). But they really aren’t the same. And I’m honestly getting tired of Pug.

*Ignoring, of course, that the Dasati world is Midkemia.

7

Ray is over 60 and very rich. I don’t think there is an author in history who got better under those circumstances. :slight_smile:

8

I think he jumped the shark after Magician. And I didn’t even like Magician that much.

9

Sounds exactly like GI Joe to me. :stuck_out_tongue:

But I know what you mean.

10

I ate up Magician when it was given to me by a friend from school when I was 11 or so, and then proceeded to plow my way through the rest of his stuff as soon as it came out.

No idea how much of my initial enjoyment was due to my age. If it is any indication, I also enjoyed the Chronicles of Narnia when I was even younger (my parents read it to me the first time), but probably only because I was raised without the influence of religion, and the Christian symbolism and such carried no impact with me beyond any other plot device of a childrens story.

11

I was about 20 or so when I first read Magician. I liked all the Milamber/Pug stuff, but the Tomas/Valheru story seemed unnecessarily mystifyingly complicated, so I ended up skipping a lot of it, and it didn’t seem to affect enjoying the other plot much at all.

When I read Silverthorn, I was aghast at how by-the-numbers bog-standard it was, and how my favourite characters were marginalised. And then Darkness at Sethanon was a slight improvement. Everything I’ve read of his since has been pretty ordinary, really, so I gave up long ago.

To each their own, I suppose.