Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Out of This World | 1994 | Lawrence Watt-Evans | Buy |
| 2 | In the Empire of Shadow | 1995 | Lawrence Watt-Evans | Buy |
| 3 | The Reign of the Brown Magician | 1996 | Lawrence Watt-Evans | Buy |
The Three Worlds trilogy is Lawrence Watt-Evans’s take on portal fantasy, published between 1994 and 1996. The premise is that three parallel realities are connected by portals: our Earth, a universe ruled by a technologically advanced galactic empire called Shadow, and Faerie, a world where magic is real. When people from Earth stumble through one of these portals, they get caught up in conflicts much bigger than they expected.
Out of This World begins with a group of ordinary Earthlings who discover a portal and find themselves in the Empire of Shadow. As the trilogy progresses through In the Empire of Shadow and The Reign of the Brown Magician, the characters must deal with the politics of both Shadow and Faerie while trying to find their way home or decide if they even want to go back.
The series plays with the idea that each world has its own set of rules, and what works in one place may be useless or dangerous in another. Technology from Shadow does not function in Faerie, and magic from Faerie does not work in Shadow. Earth sits in a middle ground where neither is fully effective. Watt-Evans uses this setup to tell a story about people adapting to radically different environments and the power that comes from understanding more than one world.