Orson Scott Card, one of the greats of contemporary science fiction and fantasy, is best known for two long story sequences. The series that began with 1985's "Ender's Game" (11 books, counting its spin-off "Shadow" series) stars a young hero fighting, initially, against an alien race known as the Formics. The "Alvin Maker" books (six so far, begun in 1987) are set in an "alternate-history," frontier America where folk magic still works. Now Mr. Card has almost simultaneously brought out two books, each starting a fantasy series.
Mr. Card tells us that "The Lost Gate" (Tor, 384 pages, $24.95) has been more than 30 years in gestation; what held him up was working out a proper magic system. To do that, you not only have to show magic working but also have to explain why, for the rest of us, it doesn't. You can have the witches and wizards off to one side of the mundane world, for instance, keeping themselves hidden, as in the "Harry Potter" books. Or you can have old divinities still functioning at a reduced level, as in Neil Gaiman's "American Gods." Or you can set the tales in a different world entirely, as with Ursula Le Guin's "Earthsea." Anything, so long as there is a system of some kind to give the story a spine.
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