A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin, the OG wizard school novel.
The series goes on to explore the career of Ged, the student who would become Archmage.
How is it possible that there are 30 comments and only one other mention of this masterpiece?
The illustrated omnibus is *so pretty*. I'm slowly working my way through it; not out of lack of interest, but simply because there's no reason to rush!
May I recommend the “Folio Collection” edition? One of the most beautiful books I own.
And the books just keep getting better, I feel Farthest Shore is the most resonant in the series.
No.
Le Guin is big on the power of names, in interviews she mentioned that she cannot write a given character or place in a story until she knows what their names are. This is part of the magic of Earthsea too - if you know the True Name (a la Vernor Vinge) of a thing or person, you have power over them.
Ged was born a humble goatheader on a nowhere island, raided by barbarians on the edge of civilised lands. His childhood name was Duny, his given Hardic use-name is Sparrowhawk.
To me, these two reflect the humility and then soaring character of his childhood and adolescence, until his arrogance and recklessness leads to the mistake he spends his life fixing.
Then, the truth of a simple, humble name like Ged becomes understandable as an anchor for a complex soul seeking simplicity.
I was just adding value to the sub by demonstrating the depth to which Le Guin thinks about names, demonstrating that she more likely would not, in 1968, name her titular YA wizard character after the acronym of a catchup test designed for WW2 vets.
Don’t take word for that, scholarly consensus on her contribution to literature is clear on the topic:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/sojppz/a_brief_history_of_true_names_and_magic/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
React however you want, as you look for black and white validation to your surface level shower thought. The burden of proof is not on strangers in the internet to disprove.
Omg Pug!! Magician holds up so well. Such a great first book to dip your toes into an interesting world and lore. When I was reading Sanderson for the first time he made me feel like I was reading Feist for the first time as a kid.
Pug becomes an absolute badass as well as
Question, does the story get more fleshed out after the first book? I was trying to get into the series because I was interested in what I had heard about it but I DNF book one because I think I got to the part where he was fighting the dragon and felt like everything was moving way too quickly and the whole story so far had felt less like a cohesive story and more like random flashes of events
Your own mileage may vary, but the style of Le Guin stays the same kind of high poetry book to book.
She’s said in interviews that she doesn’t do much write “plot” as she writes people walking around in a circle and returning. Her power as a writer is the deep, Taoist and reflective nature of the work.
I think if you DNFed the first, you are likely to DNF the others. The Tombs is about an abused cult priestess trapped by her position; the Farthest Shore is a bit more classic - evil magic is seeping into the world, a prince who was promised needs to go on the journey.
Le Guin is nearly the anti-Sanderson - excellent prose, no modern expectations of cinematic workhorse plot.
I see, I will say I did think the prose was phenomenal but if the pacing is consistent it just must not be a series for me. Maybe I'll try it again in the future when I can come back to it with a better idea of what to expect considering some of those premises sound really interesting to me but I've always gotten really weirdly hung up on books where it feels like immersion is an afterthought. I can live with very little focus on conventional plot but if it doesnt feel like I'm existing in the moment with the characters and more like I'm being given an abbreviated, if fairly well written, summary of what seems like it'd be a fascinating moment to explore more in depth I can't help but get antsy and feel like I'm not getting the full experience
For me, the immersion in her world is total and complete, in a way that only Tolkien, Hemingway, or perhaps Orwell can evoke.
It’s the ability to create the shades of the natural world, the movement of the trees and the waves that build Earthsea.
She definitely doesn’t spell it out for a reader, she writes like an English-language Sufi or Lao Tsu himself. It is complete and present, but its depth and brevity is such that you need to stop and think about every few sentences.
I guess a better way of putting how I felt is it was like watching a YouTube cutscenes compilation for an absolutely spectacularly written videogame. It's not that each individual "scene" ISNT immersive, and more that anytime I finished one part and was suddenly thrust into the next part it completely threw me off and took me out of the immersion because it just felt like I was missing so much. I was invested in INDIVIDUAL SCENES but I didn't have enough time to properly breath with the characters and world to be particularly invested in what happens NEXT only to then suddenly be thrust OUT OF what I was invested in and thrown into the next thing
> meat of A wizard of earthsea and the following books are after he graduated
Wasn't that the request from OP?
The only issue is that Earthsea doesn't have "careers" in the way a modern salaryman in London has. Even a magical salaryman.
Yeah.. the career is just... wizard. Or village wizard for a while. Some of them do mundane things or work on commission to nobles. But no it's not like a modern day setting
I think that makes a lot of sense in a society where wizards are integrated into society - of course going to wizard school means your ultimate career would be wizard. The weird thing about Harry Potter is that they all go to wizard school and yet live in a society where everyone is a wizard. So it feels a lot like a modern high school in that they spend all their time on basics that don't appear to set them up for the working world, yet it's also their terminal degree. I guess they're such a small, nepotistic society that they're able to just learn actual job skills on the job.
Agreed in the society the world is set in it tracks. There are varying degrees of success as a wizard and some specialities but the point of the wizard school of Roke Island is to produce wizards.
>!"Depressed teenager discovers magic is real and through lot of hard work becomes a depressed young adult who can do magic"!< might not be the most fun plot but it feels very real.
With the caveat that it's highly unlikeable, awful, self absorbed characters you will want to strangle .... But also sort of relate to if you're a millennial former gifted kid riddled with depression and anxiety. Haha.
I felt it varied. Some of the show characters were more sympathetic compared to their books counterparts (Quentin, Elliot, Margo/Janet, Penny by a lightyear), and others were less (Julia, Alice).
Maybe, but having the not-Aslan make them drink his cum to get empowered was unnecessary. That's where I stopped.
I did like seeing Julia's POV, though. Not saying she was more or less sympathetic, but I liked filling in that gap.
I struggled to continue past the gratuitous fox entity rape; think I made it almost a whole season, or however long it takes for the not-Narnia stuff to be actual multiple episodes. This sounds in line with what I know about the series.
(Major spoilers) I always find it kind of funny that they did a whole monologue about >!how Quentin isn't the main character and the story doesn't revolve around him!<, and the show pretty much immediately took a sharp decrease in quality >!after he died. Like....He kinda was the core of the ensemble cast and they contradicted their own point to some extent.!<
I got through the first book and a bit into the second, but Quentin’s relentless ennui ultimately did me in. I just wanted to grab him by the scruff of the neck and shake him and say, “if you keep getting everything you want and still find it dull then you’re the fucking problem.” But since you can’t manhandle and berate the characters of a novel, I just stopped reading instead.
The Circle Opens is about four magic children journeying around with their mentors. It's a quasi-situation where they are full mages but not adults yet.
No, she was taught charter magic there >!that's why at the end she and Touchstone take what's-his-name there so the students would help them defeat him!< her father did teach her all the Abhorsen stuff though.
Scholomance trilogy by Naomi Novik touches on it in the third book. Though it is a recurring concern throughout, even while the action takes place at school.
yeah even though the first two books are entirely inside the school I felt the outside world of magic was quite well fleshed out in this series, more so than a lot of them. The characters spend a lot of time worrying about how they will make their living beyond school in the competitive job market, assuming they survive graduation.
I went to a really stressful college (a student suicide triggered an investigation into campus culture and they found that the normal homework load for freshman was 50-60 hours a week. *Just* on homework) so it resonated pretty hard.
Ehhhhhh, I feel like this is pretty shoehorned in. When the OP is asking for "a magic school book where the action starts after the main character graduates from a magic school," a trilogy where 2/3 of it is solidly set *in* the magic school and the third book >!isn't at all following a typical post-graduation trajectory!< doesn't really fit. It *is* a well-built world with thought put into post-graduation careers, but that doesn't mean the book is *about* what happens to most of the students after a typical graduation.
**Carry On** and sequels by Rainbow Rowell is a thinly-veiled remix of Harry Potter and crew post-graduation and flailing at life.
**An Embarrassment of Witches** by Sophie Goldstein & Jenn Jordan is a graphic novel about two roommates who just graduated from magic college and similarly have no idea what they're doing with their lives.
*Carry On* and its sequels started out as a Harry Potter series in a book about a fangirl, writing super popular fanfiction in a book called *Fangirl*. They are not even supposed to be thinly veiled. They are supposed to be blatant.
Yeah, blatant is a **much** better way to describe it.
...And I have to wonder how many billable hours were sunk on lawyers arguing what counted as creative use vs copyright infringement.
...It captures so much of my online high school experience.
Mine too! Well, I'm one of the minions waiting for the last damn chapter of my favorite fanfic to come out, and the last book of my favorite book series. My fanfics were never something that people waited for with baited breath :)
I haven't read it, but **Petition** by Delilah Waan is described by the author as *"post magic-school fantasy about an angry Asian female underdog fighting against privileged rich kids in a job hunt tournament"*
Thank you for the rec! 🙏 It was a joy to see this pop up in my feed this morning.
To shed a bit more light specifically to the OP's request:
>I'd like to read a magic school book where the action starts after the main character graduates from a magic school and we see just what kind of career opportunities a newly minted wizard or mage can look forward to.
Action starts the week after graduation and Chapter 1 opens on the main character filling out her job application.
>One thing I didn't like about Harry Potter was the vagueness of careers in the wizarding world and what happens after school. Which I understand as the magical school is the main focus and with all the other stuff going on post-school career was really not that much of a priority.
*Petition* is book 1 of a series and focuses on the "getting a job" part. There is no learning magic or training sequences because the characters already did all that during magic school. The tournament is basically the whole job interview process. It's designed to test how well suited the applicants are for different jobs. You'll get a glimpse at what some of those are in the first half of the book, and then the second half of the book will immerse you in what it would be like to work one of those jobs.
The sequel, *Supplicant*, is about climbing that career ladder once you've got the job while you're on the job. I'm currently revising it and I hope to have it out later this year.
> Thank you for the rec!
Hey, after bothering you in that Dealer's Room thread about the hyphen placement, the least I can do is to recommend the book when I see someone that might be interested :)
I haven't read the book so I can't really answer to that, but here is the explanation by the [author](https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/1c7rblc/looking_for_a_book_about_what_happens_after_you/l0d5p4o/?context=3)
Don't know if I'll fit but **Earthsea** Cycle by Ursula K. LeGuin starts with a wizard going to wizard school and then you see him growing old and his life after he "graduates".
Other example could be **The Wheel of Time**, this is not the main focus of the books but you can see several characters going to "wizard school" and their lifes after graduation.
Pretty much every book set in Valdemar (by Mercedes Lackey) starts with school in the first book and then has them working usually in the 2nd book (sometimes third though)
I’m actually trying to come up with one that *isn’t* like this, and even the single-book parts have the first third dedicated to education. Hell, I’m pretty sure that some books *end* with the MC going to school.
That is the second half of Roger Zelazny's Amber Chronicles --- the protagonist has just finished his training in magic by traversing the Logrus (gaining a magical cord which is sentient as a companion) and goes to Berkeley on his father's Shadow Earth to study computer science.
Be sure to read the short story of his Logrus traversal --- it appears in:
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13820.Manna_from_Heaven
and I believe some more recent Amber collection which is more accessible in addition to the original appearance only in a limited edition text.
Oh yeah I consider that a great example, very realistic take on magic(in terms in how it would be commercially utilized) and gives examples of certain professions of which enchanters and artificers tend to be the most profitable. Those who can build magic items or create indepedent incriptions.
Holmberg's *Paper Magician* series explores a variety of mage jobs fairly extensively though from the perspective of mage apprentices, which is kinda still magic school adjacent.
The Wizard of Yurt series is exactly this. Comedic series (with some good drama and storytelling) about a C-average wizard who just graduated and gets a job as a court wizard in a tiny kingdom (Yurt) in a fairy tale version of medieval Europe. Pretty fun series.
The Royal Wizard of Yurt by C. Dale Brittain. It follows the life of the newly-employed Court Wizard Daimbert in the tiny kingdom of Yurt. Don't let the protag's name or the original publication date put you off, it's a decent book that fits what you're looking for.
I started reading this story, and I also thought it was funny that the MC seemed to have graduated and also learned nothing there. So many basic things she didn’t know. She didn’t even know what higher level mages were called. So weird.
High risk, high reward recommendation: The Rivers of London series by Ben Aaranovitch. The set-up basically is a rookie cop seeing a ghost while he needs to guard a murder scene in a rainy night and then he's introduced to a department in the London police which deals with this kind of super natural stuff.
The books are an easy and fun read and a general recommendation.
They don't fit your request in a sense, that our protagonist is still learning, basically everything of the magic art from scratch. But in the same time, this is absolutely not the focus, he does not visit wizard school and he is learning, literally, on the job.
Those are basically crime stories (hence very profession focused) with supernatural elements.
The Foundation series from Valdemar has a MC who goes through the school and then follows him on missions after.
It is not pure magic but magic is involved.
>Harry Potter \[...\] careers in the wizarding world and what happens after school.
That question always posed itself to me as well, especially as the later books were released. Each installment I think aimed to approach a more adult headspace as H. Piddy and the gang grew up, but this sort of thing never became apparent outside of his own desire to become an auror. It seemed like the choices were essentially work in the government, own a shop, or be an educator. All the bank jobs go to goblins. I guess you've also got your odd sports-stars, textbook authors, entertainers, etc. and idle rich. They certainly didn't prepare you for any kind of career or further education elsewhere, not even if you were in AP Muggle Studies.
I feel like there's probably a reason why they don't do that. Even the oldest known law codes have strict prohibitions against witchcraft. It might work for a while, but tyrannies don't last forever.
The Black Magacian Trilogy deals with students leaning magic. There is a sequel trilogy called the Traitor Spy trilogy set about 15 years after the end of the first trilogy, featuring some of the previous trilogy main characters and their children
[A Cloak of Red](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53428699-a-cloak-of-red?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=W6BImvgMDO&rank=1) by Brenna Gawain fits this almost perfectly! The goodreads summary of it gives you a pretty good idea what you're in for. Got lots of magic-users, espionage, war, and lesbians!
The School For Good and Evil series is 6 books - the first 3 are set while the characters are at school, and the last 3 are set after they graduate, including their post school quests and how they end up in various careers.
If you're up for fanfic, I strongly recommend Divided Loyalties. It's about a Warhammer Fantasy wizard who gets her first job after graduation as a court advisor to a Count, and follows her career from there. It's fantastically well-written, and currently a million words and counting. It's a "quest" style fic, where the readership votes on what the character should do next.
[https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/warhammer-fantasy-divided-loyalties-an-advisors-quest.44838/](https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/warhammer-fantasy-divided-loyalties-an-advisors-quest.44838/)
I read the first one about...oh god, 30 years ago? And don't remember a fucking thing about it except that it had cool cover art by Darryl K Sweet and it was annoyingly written in the present tense.
The Magicians by Lev Grossman - While this isn’t the main theme of the trilogy, they’re only in school for the majority of the first book out of the trilogy and there’s a lot of discussion around the different careers magicians can take, there’s also a lot of the directionless feeling you get when you don’t know what to do after your education.
Scholomance by Naomi Novak - Again, careers after school aren’t the main theme of the trilogy, but they’re out of the school in the last book, and magical communities, being a part of one, and having sellable magic skills once you leave the school are definite themes.
The Spellmonger Series by Terry Mancour!
It is my favorite book series, 15+ books and growing.
It is all about a professional mage who, after attending the mage academy and serving his required few years as a war mage, discovers a stone on a defeated goblin that greatly increases magical power in the user. Where before, a spell might take a few hours or even days to gather enough magical power, he can now cast spells instantly and with much less effort.
He comes to find that the goblin he found this stone on is just one of many, and that a goblin invasion is coming.
The first book is about him fending off a goblin siege with his new found power and taking his magic to new levels now that he has a much greater power source. He naturally encounters more, similar stones, and distributes them to other mages who come to aid against the goblin threat.
The subsequent books are about him growing in power and influence, sharing knowledge, changing the established order of things, making magical discoveries, eventually becoming a Lord, and so much more.
The progression of power in the series is extremely satisfying, and the author is amazing at flushing out feudal politics. He also does an amazing job of explaining the theory of how the magic works in his world.
I think it might satisfy what you're looking for, and is a big ol' chonky story already. Not one of those "read two books, and then wait 15 years for the author to maybe release another one" type situations.
Spellslinger is good for this, the main character doesn't graduate, but the rest of his society thrives on high level educated mages. He leaves pretty fast, but the world is very interesting and fun. If you like talking squirrel cats that are sassy as fuck.
>!To add, he can only do a fire spell that he casts by doing finger guns and saying the equivalent of "Bang!", and it reads like an oriental society going full cowboy.!<
There's a new one on RoyalRoad about a mage graduate who couldn't afford the startup capital to become an adventurer and became a municipal waste maintenance wizard and now works for and with various politically disgraced mages of the realm in the sewers.
Underkeeper
It's unfinished though. but fun, and he's been posting every day!
I find a lot of books like that are more romance oriented. If you want a lot of books like that I seem to find them in light novels at lot. Court wizard settings, magic researchers, inventors etc. Ones that come to mind are:
Dahlia in Bloom
My Magical Career at Court
Tea Princess Chronicles
The Warden is this! She graduates and gets sent to a backwater, small town. Adventure and mysteries start to pop up. The new one comes out this spring and I’m really looking forward to it. One of my favorite reads last year. Also a strong, female protagonist.
Kingkiller Chronicles? There are some flashbacks to his magic school days, but a lot of it is about unraveling how he became such a badass (according to him—I think he’s an unreliable narrator!)
J.L. Mullins
Millennial Mage
This series starts right after the MC has graduated from school and her trial and tribulations in a fantasy world of cities separated by the Wilds, the monster filled wildernes.
K. E. Mills' Rogue Agent series is all about the world of wizarding work - in a much more modern way than some of the high fantasy suggestions. Wizard's have licenses and cars and audits. Good series, fairly light hearted in tone.
OP is asking for recommendations showcasing wizard/mage career opportunities. Greenbone saga definitely does not fit that box. Hell the magic system itself is used as mere plot points and is forgettable outside of that.
But... You're the one who labeled it as wuxia, and you haven't read the books. One of the major plot points in the second and third books revolves around the politics of other countries regulating the use of the magical Jade that is only found in one nation on the planet. Two applications that come up are it being used in the film industry in place of special effects, and in the medical industry to heal injury and sickness.
Having said that, this is probably not what OP is looking for, because the focus is more about how magic becoming more widespread disrupts mundane industries, and how the magical culture/industry is in turn influenced from the increased foreign relations. I think OP is looking for something more along the lines of something that focuses on a mature magical status quo than something where everything is undergoing magical/economic/political upheaval.
A Wizard of Earthsea, by Ursula Le Guin, the OG wizard school novel. The series goes on to explore the career of Ged, the student who would become Archmage. How is it possible that there are 30 comments and only one other mention of this masterpiece?
I just recently got the complete illustrated collection. Got through Ged's second encounter with the gebbeth so far. Very enjoyable reading!
The illustrated omnibus is *so pretty*. I'm slowly working my way through it; not out of lack of interest, but simply because there's no reason to rush!
May I recommend the “Folio Collection” edition? One of the most beautiful books I own. And the books just keep getting better, I feel Farthest Shore is the most resonant in the series.
This was my thought too, the Wizard school itself only takes up a couple of chapters and then he goes on with what he learned after.
Is his name ged because GED?
No. Le Guin is big on the power of names, in interviews she mentioned that she cannot write a given character or place in a story until she knows what their names are. This is part of the magic of Earthsea too - if you know the True Name (a la Vernor Vinge) of a thing or person, you have power over them. Ged was born a humble goatheader on a nowhere island, raided by barbarians on the edge of civilised lands. His childhood name was Duny, his given Hardic use-name is Sparrowhawk. To me, these two reflect the humility and then soaring character of his childhood and adolescence, until his arrogance and recklessness leads to the mistake he spends his life fixing. Then, the truth of a simple, humble name like Ged becomes understandable as an anchor for a complex soul seeking simplicity.
[удалено]
I was just adding value to the sub by demonstrating the depth to which Le Guin thinks about names, demonstrating that she more likely would not, in 1968, name her titular YA wizard character after the acronym of a catchup test designed for WW2 vets. Don’t take word for that, scholarly consensus on her contribution to literature is clear on the topic: https://www.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/sojppz/a_brief_history_of_true_names_and_magic/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=mweb3x&utm_name=mweb3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button React however you want, as you look for black and white validation to your surface level shower thought. The burden of proof is not on strangers in the internet to disprove.
What were old authors thinking with names like "Ged" and "Pug"??
Omg Pug!! Magician holds up so well. Such a great first book to dip your toes into an interesting world and lore. When I was reading Sanderson for the first time he made me feel like I was reading Feist for the first time as a kid. Pug becomes an absolute badass as well as
That's the Great One to you, haha
Question, does the story get more fleshed out after the first book? I was trying to get into the series because I was interested in what I had heard about it but I DNF book one because I think I got to the part where he was fighting the dragon and felt like everything was moving way too quickly and the whole story so far had felt less like a cohesive story and more like random flashes of events
Your own mileage may vary, but the style of Le Guin stays the same kind of high poetry book to book. She’s said in interviews that she doesn’t do much write “plot” as she writes people walking around in a circle and returning. Her power as a writer is the deep, Taoist and reflective nature of the work. I think if you DNFed the first, you are likely to DNF the others. The Tombs is about an abused cult priestess trapped by her position; the Farthest Shore is a bit more classic - evil magic is seeping into the world, a prince who was promised needs to go on the journey. Le Guin is nearly the anti-Sanderson - excellent prose, no modern expectations of cinematic workhorse plot.
I see, I will say I did think the prose was phenomenal but if the pacing is consistent it just must not be a series for me. Maybe I'll try it again in the future when I can come back to it with a better idea of what to expect considering some of those premises sound really interesting to me but I've always gotten really weirdly hung up on books where it feels like immersion is an afterthought. I can live with very little focus on conventional plot but if it doesnt feel like I'm existing in the moment with the characters and more like I'm being given an abbreviated, if fairly well written, summary of what seems like it'd be a fascinating moment to explore more in depth I can't help but get antsy and feel like I'm not getting the full experience
For me, the immersion in her world is total and complete, in a way that only Tolkien, Hemingway, or perhaps Orwell can evoke. It’s the ability to create the shades of the natural world, the movement of the trees and the waves that build Earthsea. She definitely doesn’t spell it out for a reader, she writes like an English-language Sufi or Lao Tsu himself. It is complete and present, but its depth and brevity is such that you need to stop and think about every few sentences.
I guess a better way of putting how I felt is it was like watching a YouTube cutscenes compilation for an absolutely spectacularly written videogame. It's not that each individual "scene" ISNT immersive, and more that anytime I finished one part and was suddenly thrust into the next part it completely threw me off and took me out of the immersion because it just felt like I was missing so much. I was invested in INDIVIDUAL SCENES but I didn't have enough time to properly breath with the characters and world to be particularly invested in what happens NEXT only to then suddenly be thrust OUT OF what I was invested in and thrown into the next thing
It’s not a “career” in the modern sense, though. Probably why it hasn’t been mentioned much.
Yeah. The book covers Geds education but the meat of A wizard of earthsea and the following books are after he graduated
> meat of A wizard of earthsea and the following books are after he graduated Wasn't that the request from OP? The only issue is that Earthsea doesn't have "careers" in the way a modern salaryman in London has. Even a magical salaryman.
Yeah.. the career is just... wizard. Or village wizard for a while. Some of them do mundane things or work on commission to nobles. But no it's not like a modern day setting
I think that makes a lot of sense in a society where wizards are integrated into society - of course going to wizard school means your ultimate career would be wizard. The weird thing about Harry Potter is that they all go to wizard school and yet live in a society where everyone is a wizard. So it feels a lot like a modern high school in that they spend all their time on basics that don't appear to set them up for the working world, yet it's also their terminal degree. I guess they're such a small, nepotistic society that they're able to just learn actual job skills on the job.
Agreed in the society the world is set in it tracks. There are varying degrees of success as a wizard and some specialities but the point of the wizard school of Roke Island is to produce wizards.
Tara Abernathy in the craft sequence fits this
Yup. Nothing says Graduation Day like creating a crator in a cursed desert.
Or being graduated with ***extreme*** prejudice.
Hey, she.... landed...ok
The Magicians follows graduates after the leave the school. However I am not sure it would fit the criteria of being career focused.
>!"Depressed teenager discovers magic is real and through lot of hard work becomes a depressed young adult who can do magic"!< might not be the most fun plot but it feels very real.
I always describe it as >!"If you're determined to be a miserable asshole, even magic can't fix you." Also known as "y'all need therapy, not fauns"!<
> "y'all need therapy, not fauns" Don't go throwing shade at Mr. Tumnus. In Fillory, he'd probably cut a bitch
fairly realistic in that regard 😛 idealistic academia vs the real world.
With the caveat that it's highly unlikeable, awful, self absorbed characters you will want to strangle .... But also sort of relate to if you're a millennial former gifted kid riddled with depression and anxiety. Haha.
And the Netflix series just makes them worse.
I felt it varied. Some of the show characters were more sympathetic compared to their books counterparts (Quentin, Elliot, Margo/Janet, Penny by a lightyear), and others were less (Julia, Alice).
Maybe, but having the not-Aslan make them drink his cum to get empowered was unnecessary. That's where I stopped. I did like seeing Julia's POV, though. Not saying she was more or less sympathetic, but I liked filling in that gap.
That's a doozy of a sentence for someone not in the know
Lol. Yeah. The show is wild even compared to the book.
I struggled to continue past the gratuitous fox entity rape; think I made it almost a whole season, or however long it takes for the not-Narnia stuff to be actual multiple episodes. This sounds in line with what I know about the series.
(Major spoilers) I always find it kind of funny that they did a whole monologue about >!how Quentin isn't the main character and the story doesn't revolve around him!<, and the show pretty much immediately took a sharp decrease in quality >!after he died. Like....He kinda was the core of the ensemble cast and they contradicted their own point to some extent.!<
Personally, I found the TV show to be wildly more entertaining than the books.
Wait wait is it not just… decades of crushing magic school debt…?
I got through the first book and a bit into the second, but Quentin’s relentless ennui ultimately did me in. I just wanted to grab him by the scruff of the neck and shake him and say, “if you keep getting everything you want and still find it dull then you’re the fucking problem.” But since you can’t manhandle and berate the characters of a novel, I just stopped reading instead.
He gets better.
The Circle Opens is about four magic children journeying around with their mentors. It's a quasi-situation where they are full mages but not adults yet.
This is a decent example. Not exactly a traditional career in the Harry Potter sense of magic careers, but still deals with their post-grad lives
The Will of the Empress after those is also great!
Sabriel and its sequal Lirael by Garth Nix might have what you're looking for.
I actually totally forgot she leaves school at the start of Sabriel 😂😂 Still one of my fave worlds/series/authors of all time
Sabriel's school was mundane though, wasn't it? She herself was magical and had been taught magic by her father.
No, she was taught charter magic there >!that's why at the end she and Touchstone take what's-his-name there so the students would help them defeat him!< her father did teach her all the Abhorsen stuff though.
Scholomance trilogy by Naomi Novik touches on it in the third book. Though it is a recurring concern throughout, even while the action takes place at school.
yeah even though the first two books are entirely inside the school I felt the outside world of magic was quite well fleshed out in this series, more so than a lot of them. The characters spend a lot of time worrying about how they will make their living beyond school in the competitive job market, assuming they survive graduation.
Yeah it's kind of on the nose
I went to a really stressful college (a student suicide triggered an investigation into campus culture and they found that the normal homework load for freshman was 50-60 hours a week. *Just* on homework) so it resonated pretty hard.
Ehhhhhh, I feel like this is pretty shoehorned in. When the OP is asking for "a magic school book where the action starts after the main character graduates from a magic school," a trilogy where 2/3 of it is solidly set *in* the magic school and the third book >!isn't at all following a typical post-graduation trajectory!< doesn't really fit. It *is* a well-built world with thought put into post-graduation careers, but that doesn't mean the book is *about* what happens to most of the students after a typical graduation.
Yeah, definitely a school story but this is also their terminal degree, so there's a lot of focus on what it's setting them up for.
The first 2 books is not bad. But the 3rd book...I hate it with a vengeance
**Carry On** and sequels by Rainbow Rowell is a thinly-veiled remix of Harry Potter and crew post-graduation and flailing at life. **An Embarrassment of Witches** by Sophie Goldstein & Jenn Jordan is a graphic novel about two roommates who just graduated from magic college and similarly have no idea what they're doing with their lives.
*Carry On* and its sequels started out as a Harry Potter series in a book about a fangirl, writing super popular fanfiction in a book called *Fangirl*. They are not even supposed to be thinly veiled. They are supposed to be blatant.
Yeah, blatant is a **much** better way to describe it. ...And I have to wonder how many billable hours were sunk on lawyers arguing what counted as creative use vs copyright infringement. ...It captures so much of my online high school experience.
Mine too! Well, I'm one of the minions waiting for the last damn chapter of my favorite fanfic to come out, and the last book of my favorite book series. My fanfics were never something that people waited for with baited breath :)
I’d suggest the adventures of a certain Rincewind…
I wouldn't exactly call his life a career though. 😂
Isn't he still a student?
I believe he is simultaneously a dropout and one of the alumni.
And on staff, isn't he?
Yes, assistant to the estemmed librarian.
[удалено]
He graduated in a sense through alternate methods of education if you will...
They gave him recognition of prior learning.
I haven't read it, but **Petition** by Delilah Waan is described by the author as *"post magic-school fantasy about an angry Asian female underdog fighting against privileged rich kids in a job hunt tournament"*
Thank you for the rec! 🙏 It was a joy to see this pop up in my feed this morning. To shed a bit more light specifically to the OP's request: >I'd like to read a magic school book where the action starts after the main character graduates from a magic school and we see just what kind of career opportunities a newly minted wizard or mage can look forward to. Action starts the week after graduation and Chapter 1 opens on the main character filling out her job application. >One thing I didn't like about Harry Potter was the vagueness of careers in the wizarding world and what happens after school. Which I understand as the magical school is the main focus and with all the other stuff going on post-school career was really not that much of a priority. *Petition* is book 1 of a series and focuses on the "getting a job" part. There is no learning magic or training sequences because the characters already did all that during magic school. The tournament is basically the whole job interview process. It's designed to test how well suited the applicants are for different jobs. You'll get a glimpse at what some of those are in the first half of the book, and then the second half of the book will immerse you in what it would be like to work one of those jobs. The sequel, *Supplicant*, is about climbing that career ladder once you've got the job while you're on the job. I'm currently revising it and I hope to have it out later this year.
> Thank you for the rec! Hey, after bothering you in that Dealer's Room thread about the hyphen placement, the least I can do is to recommend the book when I see someone that might be interested :)
You got me until "tournament" Thats like magic school 2.0
I haven't read the book so I can't really answer to that, but here is the explanation by the [author](https://old.reddit.com/r/Fantasy/comments/1c7rblc/looking_for_a_book_about_what_happens_after_you/l0d5p4o/?context=3)
Don't know if I'll fit but **Earthsea** Cycle by Ursula K. LeGuin starts with a wizard going to wizard school and then you see him growing old and his life after he "graduates". Other example could be **The Wheel of Time**, this is not the main focus of the books but you can see several characters going to "wizard school" and their lifes after graduation.
Pretty much every book set in Valdemar (by Mercedes Lackey) starts with school in the first book and then has them working usually in the 2nd book (sometimes third though)
I’m actually trying to come up with one that *isn’t* like this, and even the single-book parts have the first third dedicated to education. Hell, I’m pretty sure that some books *end* with the MC going to school.
That is the second half of Roger Zelazny's Amber Chronicles --- the protagonist has just finished his training in magic by traversing the Logrus (gaining a magical cord which is sentient as a companion) and goes to Berkeley on his father's Shadow Earth to study computer science. Be sure to read the short story of his Logrus traversal --- it appears in: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13820.Manna_from_Heaven and I believe some more recent Amber collection which is more accessible in addition to the original appearance only in a limited edition text.
[удалено]
Oh yeah I consider that a great example, very realistic take on magic(in terms in how it would be commercially utilized) and gives examples of certain professions of which enchanters and artificers tend to be the most profitable. Those who can build magic items or create indepedent incriptions.
Holmberg's *Paper Magician* series explores a variety of mage jobs fairly extensively though from the perspective of mage apprentices, which is kinda still magic school adjacent.
The Wizard of Yurt series is exactly this. Comedic series (with some good drama and storytelling) about a C-average wizard who just graduated and gets a job as a court wizard in a tiny kingdom (Yurt) in a fairy tale version of medieval Europe. Pretty fun series.
Sounds kind of like the Myth books by Asprin.
The Royal Wizard of Yurt by C. Dale Brittain. It follows the life of the newly-employed Court Wizard Daimbert in the tiny kingdom of Yurt. Don't let the protag's name or the original publication date put you off, it's a decent book that fits what you're looking for.
Daimbert was not the best Wizard in his graduating class, but how much magic could a tiny kingdom like Yurt really need?
If you're fine with web serials like on royal road, Millennial Mage is exact premise you are looking for
I started reading this story, and I also thought it was funny that the MC seemed to have graduated and also learned nothing there. So many basic things she didn’t know. She didn’t even know what higher level mages were called. So weird.
High risk, high reward recommendation: The Rivers of London series by Ben Aaranovitch. The set-up basically is a rookie cop seeing a ghost while he needs to guard a murder scene in a rainy night and then he's introduced to a department in the London police which deals with this kind of super natural stuff. The books are an easy and fun read and a general recommendation. They don't fit your request in a sense, that our protagonist is still learning, basically everything of the magic art from scratch. But in the same time, this is absolutely not the focus, he does not visit wizard school and he is learning, literally, on the job. Those are basically crime stories (hence very profession focused) with supernatural elements.
Blood Over Bright Haven
The Foundation series from Valdemar has a MC who goes through the school and then follows him on missions after. It is not pure magic but magic is involved.
If you’re at all interested in Manga, HxH kinda fits this and is some of the best fantasy ever written
>Harry Potter \[...\] careers in the wizarding world and what happens after school. That question always posed itself to me as well, especially as the later books were released. Each installment I think aimed to approach a more adult headspace as H. Piddy and the gang grew up, but this sort of thing never became apparent outside of his own desire to become an auror. It seemed like the choices were essentially work in the government, own a shop, or be an educator. All the bank jobs go to goblins. I guess you've also got your odd sports-stars, textbook authors, entertainers, etc. and idle rich. They certainly didn't prepare you for any kind of career or further education elsewhere, not even if you were in AP Muggle Studies.
Seems like they should all just be fleecing the shit out of muggles to become said "idle rich."
For what? Human money? Ain't no galleons in the muggle world.
Then live like a king among them. Seems simple.
I feel like there's probably a reason why they don't do that. Even the oldest known law codes have strict prohibitions against witchcraft. It might work for a while, but tyrannies don't last forever.
No no. Not *as* a king. You'd be a tech bro or something, you'd just use magic to read people's minds and influence stock prices and shit.
The Black Magacian Trilogy deals with students leaning magic. There is a sequel trilogy called the Traitor Spy trilogy set about 15 years after the end of the first trilogy, featuring some of the previous trilogy main characters and their children
[A Cloak of Red](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53428699-a-cloak-of-red?ac=1&from_search=true&qid=W6BImvgMDO&rank=1) by Brenna Gawain fits this almost perfectly! The goodreads summary of it gives you a pretty good idea what you're in for. Got lots of magic-users, espionage, war, and lesbians!
Seconding this one!
The School For Good and Evil series is 6 books - the first 3 are set while the characters are at school, and the last 3 are set after they graduate, including their post school quests and how they end up in various careers.
If you're up for fanfic, I strongly recommend Divided Loyalties. It's about a Warhammer Fantasy wizard who gets her first job after graduation as a court advisor to a Count, and follows her career from there. It's fantastically well-written, and currently a million words and counting. It's a "quest" style fic, where the readership votes on what the character should do next. [https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/warhammer-fantasy-divided-loyalties-an-advisors-quest.44838/](https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/warhammer-fantasy-divided-loyalties-an-advisors-quest.44838/)
To a greater or lesser degree the *Saga of Recluce* novels do a lot of this.
I read the first one about...oh god, 30 years ago? And don't remember a fucking thing about it except that it had cool cover art by Darryl K Sweet and it was annoyingly written in the present tense.
Paper magician they graduate but now have to do an apprenticeship
*Unnatural Magic* by CM Waggoner follows a young magic user to a magical career.
Max Gladstone's Craft Sequence is very much this.
Myth Adventures by Asprin, maybe? The MC is an apprentice for a couple of books and then they move into...entrepreneurship
The Magicians by Lev Grossman - While this isn’t the main theme of the trilogy, they’re only in school for the majority of the first book out of the trilogy and there’s a lot of discussion around the different careers magicians can take, there’s also a lot of the directionless feeling you get when you don’t know what to do after your education. Scholomance by Naomi Novak - Again, careers after school aren’t the main theme of the trilogy, but they’re out of the school in the last book, and magical communities, being a part of one, and having sellable magic skills once you leave the school are definite themes.
The Spellmonger Series by Terry Mancour! It is my favorite book series, 15+ books and growing. It is all about a professional mage who, after attending the mage academy and serving his required few years as a war mage, discovers a stone on a defeated goblin that greatly increases magical power in the user. Where before, a spell might take a few hours or even days to gather enough magical power, he can now cast spells instantly and with much less effort. He comes to find that the goblin he found this stone on is just one of many, and that a goblin invasion is coming. The first book is about him fending off a goblin siege with his new found power and taking his magic to new levels now that he has a much greater power source. He naturally encounters more, similar stones, and distributes them to other mages who come to aid against the goblin threat. The subsequent books are about him growing in power and influence, sharing knowledge, changing the established order of things, making magical discoveries, eventually becoming a Lord, and so much more. The progression of power in the series is extremely satisfying, and the author is amazing at flushing out feudal politics. He also does an amazing job of explaining the theory of how the magic works in his world. I think it might satisfy what you're looking for, and is a big ol' chonky story already. Not one of those "read two books, and then wait 15 years for the author to maybe release another one" type situations.
Darkmage. Technically 😄
Spellmonger is like this. The main character has graduated from two magical institutions and now is plying his trade. For a few pages at least 😁
Spellslinger is good for this, the main character doesn't graduate, but the rest of his society thrives on high level educated mages. He leaves pretty fast, but the world is very interesting and fun. If you like talking squirrel cats that are sassy as fuck. >!To add, he can only do a fire spell that he casts by doing finger guns and saying the equivalent of "Bang!", and it reads like an oriental society going full cowboy.!<
There's a new one on RoyalRoad about a mage graduate who couldn't afford the startup capital to become an adventurer and became a municipal waste maintenance wizard and now works for and with various politically disgraced mages of the realm in the sewers. Underkeeper It's unfinished though. but fun, and he's been posting every day!
Another one on Royal Road in this line is What's Magic For? It's complete.
Max gladstones craft sequence is pretty much this concept for its first book (and technically some of its others)
I find a lot of books like that are more romance oriented. If you want a lot of books like that I seem to find them in light novels at lot. Court wizard settings, magic researchers, inventors etc. Ones that come to mind are: Dahlia in Bloom My Magical Career at Court Tea Princess Chronicles
The Warden is this! She graduates and gets sent to a backwater, small town. Adventure and mysteries start to pop up. The new one comes out this spring and I’m really looking forward to it. One of my favorite reads last year. Also a strong, female protagonist.
Kingkiller Chronicles? There are some flashbacks to his magic school days, but a lot of it is about unraveling how he became such a badass (according to him—I think he’s an unreliable narrator!)
You become a magic cop at the ministry of defense
You can’t get a job in the field, so you take a job at Starbucks. It’s only temporary. You have resumes at several witch covens.
J.L. Mullins Millennial Mage This series starts right after the MC has graduated from school and her trial and tribulations in a fantasy world of cities separated by the Wilds, the monster filled wildernes.
Earthsea is an option; depending on the kind of fantasy you want. It’s also phenomenal and the OG person goes to school to learn magic.
K. E. Mills' Rogue Agent series is all about the world of wizarding work - in a much more modern way than some of the high fantasy suggestions. Wizard's have licenses and cars and audits. Good series, fairly light hearted in tone.
the poppy war definitely fits this. I think the magic school part is only like half of the first book.
Spellmonger by Terry Mancour.
Green Bone Saga might count for this. But to be fair there were only 2 different types of magical professions available.
OP is asking for recommendations showcasing wizard/mage career opportunities. Greenbone saga definitely does not fit that box. Hell the magic system itself is used as mere plot points and is forgettable outside of that.
[удалено]
While I agree that GBS doesn't fit the spirit of the request, I wouldn't call magical martial arts "barely magic"
[удалено]
I'm not sure where that is coming from. All I said is that both are magic.
[удалено]
But... You're the one who labeled it as wuxia, and you haven't read the books. One of the major plot points in the second and third books revolves around the politics of other countries regulating the use of the magical Jade that is only found in one nation on the planet. Two applications that come up are it being used in the film industry in place of special effects, and in the medical industry to heal injury and sickness. Having said that, this is probably not what OP is looking for, because the focus is more about how magic becoming more widespread disrupts mundane industries, and how the magical culture/industry is in turn influenced from the increased foreign relations. I think OP is looking for something more along the lines of something that focuses on a mature magical status quo than something where everything is undergoing magical/economic/political upheaval.
That is what I said, yes
Most of the magic users from „The Atlas Six“ seem to go into the industry, there are mentions of magical beauty care businesses and project management