Red Rising by Pierce Brown

Published by Del Rey on January 28, 2014

Red is the lowest color on Mars, but Red is rising. Darrow is a Red. He was born to sacrifice. Working deep underground to mine the planet's helium, he believes his sacrifices will one day make Mars ready for human habitation. Obedience is noble, or so he has been taught. His wife, Eo, thinks he is a puppet of the Golds, who keep the Reds hungry and obedient. Eo wants Darrow to lead the Reds in revolution but Darrow does not want to die a martyr, as did his father. A traumatic moment changes his mind.

Darrow joins a resistance movement and discovers that there is more to Mars than the underground life he has known. His anger makes him want to take on Octavia au Lune -- who rules the solar system from her base on Earth's moon -- and all the other Golds who have enslaved the underground Reds, but that is a long-term goal. His immediate mission is to infiltrate the Golds, to become one of them so that he can work against them. Once he becomes his enemy, empathy creates an internal conflict that provides the novel with much of its substance.

Red Rising is the sort of novel that is often described as "a rousing adventure." It is actually a little more than that. It delivers action but also intrigue. It moves quickly but it takes time to explore moral conflicts. Its characters are skillfully crafted. It features an impressive amount of world-building based on a future that borrows from Roman mythology (along with, of course, a polite nod in the direction of Edgar Rice Burroughs). This is a science-lite version of science fiction that melds with fantasy without becoming fantasy. There's nothing wrong with that, but if you're looking for an explanation of how Mars was terraformed to give it not only a breathable atmosphere but climate control, you won't find it here (apparently it has something to do with helium mining).

My qualms about the story concern my sense that the setup merits something meatier than the war games that dominate so much of the story. The drawn-out war games seems like padding to justify turning a book into a series of books, perhaps with a view to exploiting the mania for war games novels that made it to the big screen, including Ender's Game and Hunger Games. Darrow spends most of the novel trying to prove his mettle to the Golds in order to gain a leadership position. Some of this is interesting (particularly the conflicts within Darrow's "tribe" as members vie to lead the group before battling other tribes) but if the point is for Darrow to do something to free the underground Reds from enslavement, the war games do little to advance the plot. I suspect it will be clear when the trilogy concludes that the story could have been told just as effectively, and more economically, in two books, or maybe just one. The political intrigue that runs through the war games kept me reading but it didn't prevent me from wondering whether the plot would ever stop lurching from one battle to the next and return to the promise of the novel's beginning. I know Pierce Brown will make more money by writing a trilogy (and more power to him), but I would rather have seen the action condensed so that the novel could more rapidly reach a conclusion. Still, although I will unhappily wait for the next book to see if the novel's premise leads to a payoff, I liked the characters and their interpersonal conflicts well enough to recommend Red Rising as "a rousing adventure."

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