The Strength of the Few
core novel 2025 The Hierarchy
Record
| First published | 2025 |
|---|---|
| Original language |  EN |
| Work type | novel |
| Canon status | core |
| Reader rating | 4.30 (124,938 ratings, collected 2026-08-26) |
| First-edition ISBN | 9781982141233 |
| Internal chronology | 2 |
Synopsis
The Strength of the Few, published in 2025, is James Islington's sequel to The Will of the Many, continuing the Hierarchy series. It picks up after Vis Telimus has won the Academy's Iudicium competition and risen to the rank of Sextus within the Republic's Governance order. His situation grows stranger when an ancient device duplicates him across three parallel worlds, each unaware of the others, forcing him to live out separate lives shaped by the choices of each reality. In the original world, factions within the Military, Governance, and Religious orders maneuver for power as suppressed unrest threatens to boil over. Across every version of himself, Vis is drawn deeper into questions about Synchronism, the philosophy underpinning the Republic's authority, and about the true nature of the ancient Cataclysm, all while a looming threat gathers that could endanger the parallel worlds he now inhabits.
Where it sits
- Universe: The Hierarchy
- Series: The Hierarchy core; position 2 of 2 in the series' recorded order
- Author: James Islington
Notes
- From the series record (The Hierarchy): Planned trilogy; book 3 (The Justice of One, 2027) not yet published.
Neighbouring works
Publication order and internal chronology are tracked as two separate orderings, but they resolve to the exact same sequence for this book, so one combined line is shown instead of two identical ones.
- Reading order, within the series The Hierarchy: position 2 of 2: previous The Will of the Many (2023)
Sources
← The Hierarchy dossier · All universes
Part of the Library. Fields without an identified source are omitted, never guessed.