I almost gave up on Red Rising (The Red Rising Trilogy) after about 30 pages or so. It seemed stale, just another future with brutal overlords and a rigged brutal life for the underclass. The book started to pick up a little, then it kept getting better. By the time hero Darrow was leading his Mars house the plot was moving and the characters were more complete.
A few words of warning. Red Rising is violent. People get killed. Most of the murders are not described in graphic detail but there is enough that you will get sick of it.
Plot and Background
The society Darrow lives in goes to extremes to maintain its vitality with the same families and castes on top. One method is the Board of Quality Control selects only a fraction of the highest caste Gold youth each year to attend the schools scattered around the solar system. And of that fraction, half are murdered immediately and others will die. Youth who do not score high enough to go to the schools are relegated to powerless roles, the dilettante Pixies and looked-down-on Bronzes.
In theory only the students who graduate as Peerless Scared or Graduates can assume roles of power. Another method to ensure only the best survive is the school testing ground. Students are divided into Houses, each based on a Roman god, and must themselves sort out who leads each school, and which school will win over all the rest. The schools do not get the same resources. Mars has nothing except a tall castle, no food, no weapons, no way to start a fire. Ceres has ovens, walls, food. Minerva has horses and archery weapons. The Mars adult preceptor tells Darrow that Mars burns hot and burns out quickly. And indeed we see this. For a while I thought Red Rising was a Lord of the Flies reprise with the Mars house losing all cohesion, factions and internal fighting.
When the Mars preceptor shows the Mars students their house, he asks them how they can possibly win. The answer? Enslave the others. Each house has a standard that will mark anyone from a rival house as a slave. When I was reading this, my first thought was “get allies”, and I was surprised when the answer was “take slaves”. Each house strives to get slaves, capture the standards from other houses, take over their resources. Darrow makes a new path, with allies.
Backstory and Ideas
This novels had one of the more intriguing social backdrops. Superficially we have a rigid society with severe caste restrictions (called Colors in Red Rising), with the bottom caste of Reds relegated to dangerous mining work far underground. The Reds believe they work to help terraform Mars, not knowing that the planet already is home to millions of people, with atmosphere, plants, animals, cities. The Reds are kept in artificial strife, with a rigged set of mining quotas and awards for the most production, given barely enough to eat. Girls marry at 14 and people are old at 35.
The problem with this is that it is not sustainable. Violence and fear can keep people in line for a long time but not forever. The minute Reds realize the lie, they will have no reason to obey other than fear.
The other threat to the Gold rule is internal. There are more types of power than military, commercial or political. What happens if a Pixie becomes socially dominant? Is there a Gold version of the society leaders?
Then there is good old fashioned nepotism. In fact, Darrow realizes that the school game is rigged to favor the son of the Mars governor. Given the social structure Red Rising sketches, the governor takes a huge risk. He promises favors and position to the twelve Preceptors – if his boy wins. If his son does win, all is good, no one will have reason to talk about it. If his son does not win, then what hold does the governor now hold? It’s too good a story, too juicy a gossip, too funny a joke with too many who know, not to whisper about. The author may have painted himself into a corner at the end when Darrow pledges himself to a man who is going down, we just don’t see it yet.
I’m curious how author Pierce Brown addresses these internal issues in the next book in what is planned to be a trilogy. If he spends time on Darrow and the plot elements of Darrow gaining power and position and eventually changing society, the story will be a good read. But if he uses the political and social flaws in his imagined world plus Darrow’s drive, we could have a winning combination.
I am not real fond of the dystopia genre and ever since Hunger Games became successful we’ve been inundated with them. Red Rising is several notches above and I recommend it.
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