Magician by Raymond Feist

One of my all-time favorite epic fantasies that isn't Tolkien has always been Feist's Riftwar Saga. I've always seen it published in four volumes: Magician: Apprentice, Magician: Master, Silverthorn and A Darkness at Sethanon. Each varies in length from about 325 printed pages to ~430 printed pages, probably averaging a little north of 350. The size a typical fantasy novel would be in the 80s and 90s before Robert Jordan starting writing books that crept up to and eventually passed 1,000 pages in length. But the two volumes of Magician were actually originally published as a single volume, and it somehow was about 550 or so pages. Must have been smaller type. I guess the market wasn't quite ready for that.

I just finished, recently, re-reading the two Magician books. I originally bought the 1980s versions, before the "director's cut" became the only kind you could get (although the cover art I've attached is from said "director's cuts". I've actually always preferred them; when I first read the director's cuts, after my original copies got lost in someone else's move and he accidentally took them with him, I thought some of the added text, cut and expanded scenes that had been restored, etc. actually felt kind of clunky and I preferred the "original" edited version. But that's really neither here nor there; the differences aren't really all that big. I got on used marketplaces to replace my copies with the same printing that I'd originally had, so I read the edited 80s version of the book. A few things come to mind:

• It's certainly epic in scope, with one of the main point of view, in fact the main point of view character becoming a powerful magic-user who can toss around spells that make him a fantasy superhero of sorts. As well, the cross-dimensional war waged between Midkemia; a fairly typical D&D-ish or Tolkienish fantasy world and Kelewan, which was belatedly admitted to have been Tekumel of the Empire of the Petal Throne product with the serial numbers slightly sanded off being a perfect example of the epic scope. 
• That said, few major characters are non-human; there's a handful of D&D-like elves and dwarfs, but they are also minor supporting characters. The Saga is remarkably humano-centric by today's standards, and remarkably traditional in most respects by today's standards too. Probably a big part of the reason that I like it, of course.
• In addition to the prevalence of normal human characters, as opposed to magic-users or other magical characters of any type, the story is surprisingly swashbucklery. Much of it, especially with regards to the plot-lines that follow characters like Arutha, one of the main point of view characters, or later, Martin Longbow, etc. would not feel very out of place in a historical fiction swashbuckling adventure as written by Rafael Sabatini or someone like that. Ivanhoe and The Black Arrow were deliberately written to reflect a more Medieval language in style, but otherwise are very good swashbucklers, whereas Sabatini's works usually take place a bit later. But still, the similarities were striking to me. Reminded me again of why I like the kinds of games that I do, rather than "dungeon-crawls." Even High Fantasy, to say nothing of more sword & sorcery style stories, benefit from being more swashbucklery adventure rather than the bizarre story of D&D. Sneaking around doing intrigue in Krondor, or the military stuff is very traditional, and not overtly fantastic at all. The fantasy stands out more for being more restrained.
• It's well done in the sense that it doesn't overdo POV characters, a major problem for some of the epic fantasies that have come more recently. Other than a handful of moments with Martin, Macros or a few others for some very specific scenes, if I remember correctly, we get Pug, Tomas and Arutha as point of view characters, and they're the only ones that really count. In the next two volumes, we add Jimmy the Hand and maybe a scene or two with Locky. That's it. There's really no reason to have much more than that. This is a big epic fantasy, four volumes long, and while they're shorter than some of today's fantasies, Feist himself estimates that all of the volumes in the entire larger Riftwar Cycle (not Saga, which are just the first four books) is about 135,000 words. That's still plenty of words. In fact, I still find after all these years that that's about the ideal size for a fantasy novel. 
• Magician, if it were a single volume, which it's not in my printing but which it was previously, stands alone. Sure, sure; it was later expanded into the "Riftwar Saga" and while I like the next two volumes a lot, Magician was obviously written without necessarily any reference to them. It ends on a satisfying conclusion, and if you just stopped there, it'd be sufficient.

I've also read, many years ago, the Empire trilogy set on Kelewan and co-written (I've always wondered exactly what that means) by Janny Wurts, and the two-book Krondor's Sons series, which are really two separate one-shots. When I tried to read the first book of the next part of the saga, the Serpentwar Saga, I couldn't get into it for whatever reason. None of the characters or locations were familiar, and I was busy with a young family and grad school at the time, and I just stopped there. But considering how much I like the original Riftwar Saga, I've always kind of been tempted to try again. Sadly, my public library doesn't seem to have any of these titles anymore. At the time, they were relatively newly published, but now they've been out for decades. But I'm thinking about gradually acquiring them on the used market and, well, trying again.