Will of the Many Worlds
James Islington has always been good at magical machinery—plots that lock cleanly into place, timelines that click. The Licanius Trilogy proved he could design a system. What it didn’t always deliver was texture. The Strength of the Few does. The edges are sharper, the characters less muted, and the whole thing moves with a confidence that suggests Islington has found his register.
The premise leans closer to Blake Crouch’s Dark Matter than to traditional fantasy. The book treats reality like a set of adjoining rooms, each with its own moral pressure.
The main timeline—a heavy Roman analogue with a Red Rising tint—is the most complete and textured. But the surprise is how quickly the two new storylines take root. New plots can feel like digressions considering the unitary focus of the first book, but here they don’t. They broaden the emotional geography and keep the pace active.
And the pace is lethal. Wanting to read more became a logistical problem—work, sleep, and basic life maintenance all bent around finding the next hour. For a middle book with cliffhangers baked into its DNA, it lands the ending with much more finality than expected.
Two lines capture the book’s moral core. *“The needs of the many will always be loud, but in the end, it is only the strength of the few that matters.” * And later: “As a ruler, you cannot hold life as invaluable; eventually you must start making the calculation.” The story keeps circling those calculations—who makes them, who pays for them, and how power compresses the space for hesitation.