Looking for books with powerful mages

crpgnut said:

Master of the Five Magics and Secret of the Sixth Magic by Lyndon Hardy. This book went into deep detail of the magic system and explained magic in a totally logical way. It was a pretty good read too.

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Unfortunately the author, Lyndon Hardy, is not known in our local library.
Raymond Feist is pretty good too and I read all the novels from Terry Goodkind too.

L.E. Modesitt, Jr. has written some good series featuring heavy magic use.

The Magic of Recluse, and The Soprano Sorceress, are both good.

Yep, I love the Recluce novels. Soprano Sorceress didn't grab me as much. I think I read the first two books in the series. I liked the characters but wasn't impressed with the magic/music system.

Of course some dummy, namely myself, did not realize you had listed the Recluse novels in your original post hehe. Have you read any of Modesitt's SF books? Some of those are very interesting-like the Timediver books.

Have you ready anything by Trudi Canavan, Jennifer Fallon, Carol Berg or Marha Wells? I like some of their stuff. I am just brainstorming hehe.

I've read some of everybody but Marha Wells. What can you tell me about those books?

Martha Wells. Fairly good stuff, but didn't knock me off my feet. I think it was "Element of Fire" that I read.

I usually go to this site to research authors:

http://www.fantasticfiction.co.uk/w/martha-wells/

It usually has all their books listed, with links to amazon, etc.

Here are some of my suggestions for magic-heavy books :

- Elantris, by Brandon Sanderson (the author who was chosen to finish the Wheel of Time series, btw) : This one is about a city of powerful magic-users that was mysteriously cursed some years before the beginning of the story. The magic system is central to the plot, as some of the main characters try to figure out how it works and what went wrong with it.
- The Runelords series by David Farland : This one has a unique style of magic where people transfers various attributes, like strength and intelligence, to each other. Some of the characters end up really powerful this way.
- The Witches of Eileanan series by Kate Forsyth : There's lot of magic in those books about a world ruled by witches. In fact, in all my suggestions, these are the ones that best matches what you asked for. There's also a sequel series called Rhiannon's Ride, which I also recommend.

The Children of Amarid, as mentionned by Corwin, is a good choice as well, and so is Feist Riftwar novels.

However, while I usually enjoy Weis & Hickman novels, I disliked the Darksword series, especially the last book. It's been a while, so I don't really remember why, just that I hated it.

Funny you mention the Black Jewels trilogy, since I'm actually reading it these days. It's decent, but I don't like it much personnaly. Now half-way into the third and last book, I'm slowly warming up to it, but I don't think I'll read more of Anne Bishop books after this one.

I often wish I could invent something new - and place my mark in the history of fantasy literature, too.

But I don't know if I might ever succeed ... Too many things have alkready been thought, and it is far, far too easy, almost kind of a sport, to accuse a new writer of not being original enough ...

I might just be one of a million thousands writers with not enough ideas - original ideas - to be noticed.

I'm really puzzled on how they manage to do it ...

Woah, thanks to this thread I browsed a bit and found out that there's actually a new Midkemia cycle out by now. Guess I should pick up reading again, haven't really done that in quite some time.

I think I could reccomend George RR Martin a song of ice and fire series. It doesn't start out so magic heavy but when you get to book three a lot of magic stuff starts to happen. There is some undead stuff also, but overall especially the first two books in this series is of very high quality. The drawback might be that it is not finished yet.

I do love one thing very much about his books that you don't see much of in other books though, he is not afraid to kill of his characters. If a character finds himself tricked against impossible odds, he'll not manage a cliché escape but just die instead!

SoIaF? Magic? Not really... it's more like LotR, where magic is special, but relatively rare. Mysterious so to speak, but overall very down to earth.

Of course, that's what makes the series so great, but it's not one I'd think of when reading the thread title.

Absolutely hated Martin's stuff. I like to associate with characters and him killing off people just made me give up. Different doesn't mean better It'd be like killing Pug after you've read 10 chapters of a book devoted to him.

@Dantre, is Forsyth the one who is in love with old English/Irish? I couldn't stand that. I wanted to read those books but couldn't get past her love of using obscure language so prominently. I'm easily irritated

Thanks for the link, Loburian!

Well, since other people are suggesting books without heavy magic use, One more author I will mention is David Gemmell. I love everything he has done.

crpgnut said:

@Dantre, is Forsyth the one who is in love with old English/Irish? I couldn't stand that. I wanted to read those books but couldn't get past her love of using obscure language so prominently. I'm easily irritated

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She does use such language, but because of the way characters spoke it, it still felt like natural dialogue (to me anyway). Also, it makes sense they speak like that considering theirs origins (I won't spoil it, even though it's not a major point in the story, just part of the lore). Of course, english not being my primary language, I'm more forgiving of that kind of things . If you can't stand it, well so be it.

Loburian said:

Well, since other people are suggesting books without heavy magic use, One more author I will mention is David Gemmell. I love everything he has done.

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Excellent author! Not appropriate for this thread, as you say, but definitely a great one. Supposedly the 3rd Troy book is being finished by his wife, IIRC.

SoIaF? Magic? Not really... it's more like LotR

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Well after Melisande got into the book I found there is more and more magic ? and a bunch of other mages also entered the stage including that priest who raises the dead ( But necromancy was not stated as a preferance by the author that's true). if you can't stand characters being killed off it is definetely not a book for crpgnut though.

It'd be like killing Pug after you've read 10 chapters of a book devoted to him.

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However what you said about Pug, Feist also kills of many of his old classic characters in his books these days, I was very sad to see some of them go.

GothicGothicness said:

However what you said about Pug, Feist also kills of many of his old classic characters in his books these days, I was very sad to see some of them go.

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Well at least most of those characters were old, etc. in Feists's books.

Another I thought of is Ian Irvine' Three Worlds Cycle.

Irvine's books are good, but I wouldn't really call them magic heavy.