The Will of the Many
The Will of the Many
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James Islington on The Will of the Many
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
Eight years done, a blank slate waitingFinishing a trilogy that had consumed most of a decade left Islington with a specific kind of restlessness. The Licanius Trilogy was complete, and the desire to move on was not about finding a new audience but about the ideas that had never fit inside that world.
The first and perhaps most obviously practical prompt was that I’d finished my previous series (The Licanius Trilogy), and really just wanted to write something different—not for a different audience necessarily, but something that would let me tackle different themes and different characters.
Three creative ambitions had been accumulating while he worked on Licanius, each one blocked by the demands of that world’s third-person multi-POV structure. The shift to a new project meant he could finally run all three at once.
I wanted to write from a single POV and in first-person (a la some of my favorite series), something with a more distinct cultural flavor (in this case, I was keen to do something with ancient Rome), and work with a magic system that was more ‘democratized,’ rather than one where only certain people were born with the ability to use it.
Having a completed trilogy behind him changed what he was willing to risk. The worry that his first book’s success was a fluke had, by his own account, inverted into something more useful by the time he was designing the Hierarchy.
Hierarchy, funnily enough, was almost the opposite — I’d proven I could complete a fairly complicated series with what I felt was a really satisfying ending, which let me take some swings with the story which I’m not sure I would have been confident enough to do, otherwise.
That confidence shows up structurally: the book’s present-tense narration and its deliberately withheld backstory are exactly the kind of choices a writer makes when he trusts himself to land an ending.
How he wrote it
Rome, a twenty-year-old magic concept, and a character who arrived firstThe magic system at the center of the Hierarchy, in which citizens cede their Will (their physical and mental capacity) upward through a pyramid of power, did not originate with this book. Islington had been carrying the concept since reading David Farland’s Runelords roughly two decades before he started writing.
I had the pyramid structure concept, and how it might tie in to society, in my head from quite an early stage. That was inspired in part by a series called *The Runelords* by David Farland… I read it probably twenty years ago now, but the magic system has been stuck in my head ever since… I loved the idea of people being literal sources of power, but that they had to give it up (nominally) by choice – it’s such an interesting dynamic! – and I’d always wondered what that might look like in a more advanced, structured society.
Rome emerged as the setting because of what it spares a reader, not what it demands of one. Islington did not choose it out of personal expertise in classical history; he chose it because it occupies a rare position where the aesthetic is already in most readers’ heads before the book begins.
Rome also appealed because, I think, it straddles a line between familiar and exotic that not many other historical cultures do: it’s different enough to be a great backdrop for a fantasy story, but it’s also fairly easy for readers to conjure the aesthetic. You don’t have to be steeped in Roman history to get a mental image of senators in togas, gladiatorial fights in the Colosseum, or legionaries in uniform.
The choice to narrate in first-person present tense, unusual for epic fantasy, was made in two stages for two different reasons. The perspective came first, as a conscious formal challenge. The tense came later, driven by specific requirements of the plot’s tension and, more obliquely, by something he wanted to do with the book’s final pages.
Initially, it was just because I was intent on writing something new – stretching myself a little – and changing the perspective felt like one of the most obvious ways to do that… partly to benefit the tension of the story (Vis not knowing who he can trust from moment to moment), and partly due to what I wanted to do with the ending…
The protagonist, Vis, arrived before the world around him had a shape. Every other element, the Catenan Republic, the Academy, the Will-ceding hierarchy, was built to fit a character Islington already knew.
From memory, Vis came first, with a vague idea of what the world around him should look like — and then the worldbuilding and story came after that.
Plotting Vis’s rise through the Academy’s ranked classes, where he must ascend from the lowest tier without revealing his true identity or abilities, posed a specific structural problem: how to keep a highly capable protagonist from making every stage feel routine. Islington described his solution in the About the Authors TV interview, noting that one class involved a teacher who blocked Vis for explicitly political reasons and that a chess-like game called Foundation, where multiple storylines converged, became one of his favorite scenes in the book.
I really wanted to make his progress varied and interesting rather than just going, oh, he’s smarter than everybody else and so he just keeps on moving up. [paraphrased from audio]
On craft choices
The voices that shaped a new approachWhen asked directly which authors shaped the Hierarchy’s form and feel, Islington named two writers whose first-person series had built devoted followings before him. The answer is also a quiet argument for what he was trying to achieve: a fantasy that reads with the propulsive intimacy of those books rather than the panoramic spread of his own previous work.
For the first-person storytelling of Hierarchy, probably Patrick Rothfuss and Pierce Brown (with a bit of David Farland’s Runelords series thrown in, on the magic system side of things).
Rothfuss’s Name of the Wind and Brown’s Red Rising both center on a lone male protagonist navigating a hierarchical institution while concealing his true capabilities. Islington inherited that architecture and then built the Catenan Will system across it.
Writing on contract for the first time, rather than finishing a manuscript before selling it, changed the conditions under which Islington had to commit to the book’s core premises. With Licanius he could follow the story and adjust; here he had to be certain before he began.
It was still only the second time I’d had to come up with a completely new world, new story, new characters, new magic system… It was a lot! But I got there in the end, and am incredibly happy with the result, so it was all worth it.
What he wants us to sit with
Enjoyment first, then the question of what is rightIslington is deliberate about the order in which he wants his books to work on readers. Theme and moral weight matter to him, but they come after a more basic obligation that he thinks epic fantasy in particular tends to forget.
First and foremost? Entertainment. I’ve always read for pleasure, and whatever else a fantasy book is trying to do or say, if I’m not enjoying it then I’m not going to stick with it. I think especially in epic fantasy, too, where books and series tend to be long and can be genuine commitments to read, respecting readers’ time—making sure they’re actually engaged the entire way through—is paramount.
The Hierarchy’s Will-ceding system, in which ordinary citizens surrender their physical and mental capacities upward to those above them, is built to press on questions that the book never fully resolves. Islington’s description of how he constructs moral greyness makes clear that the unresolved quality is the point, and that he draws a line between genuine ambiguity and mere inconsistency.
I think I set the moral greyness of the world by aiming to have most characters trying to be moral, but in a way that keeps them (as the saying goes) the heroes of their own stories – they’re doing what they think is right, or at least what they’ve convinced themselves is right… that should always be the purpose of moral greyness in a story, in my opinion – to make readers pause and actually consider what is right in various scenarios, regardless of what the characters believe.
The distinction he draws elsewhere is precise: characters who are unpredictably good or bad from scene to scene are not morally grey, they are simply bad characters. It is only when people do questionable things for reasons they believe are good that a story creates the kind of friction worth arguing about at a book club table.