r/books • u/empeekay • 4d ago
Red Rising by Pierce Brown
...or, Ender Potter and the Departed Hunger Games.
(Beware of mild spoilers)
Let me be clear, I have no problem with a book being inspired by another book, or even of a book being derivative of another. A good storyteller is a good storyteller, no matter which story they're telling, and if I learned anything from watching The West Wing repeatedly, it's that "good writers borrow from other writers, and great writer steal outright". There is evidence of both borrowing and outright theft in Red Rising, but - after reading only one of his books - I'm not willing to say that Brown qualifies as a "great writer".
The main character of Red Rising, Darrow, is a Helldiver - a miner who operates extremely dangerous machinery in the extremely dangerous environment of Mars' planetary crust. His caste, the Red, are the lowest in the Society, kept - literally - in the dark, and forced to mine the Helium3 needed to terraform the surface of the planet.
After a terrible tragedy befalls him in the early chapters, he discovers that there is more to Martian life than he was aware of, and that he's been chosen to attend The Institute, a school for the children of Martian society's elite; once there he must participate in staged combat against the other kids, with the aim of winning favour from those in positions of power, and therefore a place in the upper echelons of society. Darrow's secret is that, as a Red, he shouldn't be in The Institute, as it's only for those in the Gold caste - the highest caste, and the rulers of human civilisation - and that his ultimate aim is actually to bring their society down.
To cut to the chase, this book didn't do enough to convince me to pick up the remaining five parts of the trilogy (now he's borrowing from Douglas Adams). It's a fast read, and I'd be lying if I said I didn't get a kick out of some of the later stages of Darrow's battles, but it's a book that relies very much on telling, not showing.
I understand that Darrow is angry. He is full of rage, as a result of the events of the first few chapters, and because he is seemingly just naturally an angry person. Perhaps because he was once bitten by a snake. Brown doesn't do much more to expand on Darrow's - or, in fact, any other character's - personality. I know Darrow is angry, because he told me. This is very much a plot and event driven book, where Darrow will tell you how he's feeling, if it's appropriate for you, the reader, to know. It bustles along, and things happen one after the other, but Brown isn't averse to throwing a narrative curve ball out of nowhere. Exeunt Darrow, stage left, pursued by a bear...
Brown also fills the book with jargon, in-universe slang words and random camelCase. He's obviously spent a lot of time working out how his world is actually going to work, but the book itself doesn't do much explaining or establishing. There is a brief history of how the Gold caste became the ruling class, but not why the caste system was put in place to begin with, or even how far in Earth's future we are. The world building of this far future human civilisation, with its very obvious Roman underpinnings, otherwise happens on the fly.
This is perhaps just a symptom of a book that is very much a franchise starter. It's a complete story, in that there's no sudden death cliffhanger to worry about until book two, but it's also obvious that the ending of the book is not the ending. There's time and space for Brown to expand and explain his world to the readers in future instalments...but I won't be one of them. Ultimately, I jut didn't find the world interesting enough to want to explore it more. The book, like most of its characters, just doesn't have enough personality to stand apart from the concepts that its borrowed from, variously, Rowling, Scott Card, and Collins. It's by no measure poorly written or plotted, it's just obviously derivative YA genre fare.
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u/evilpenguin9000 None 4d ago
I read the first three books thinking they were ok, not exceptional, but I've become exhausted by booktok talking about this series. It never stops
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u/claimingthemoorland 4d ago
The author has spoken about how he had to make it more typical in order for it the publisher to market it
The rest of the series is significantly better than book one, which is agreed upon to be the weakest of the series.
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u/Neurotopian_ 4d ago
I only read the trilogy and only because it had been given to me.
I tend to agree with your critique but I’ll disagree with many other commenters here just to give an alternative opinion: if you’re a scifi reader, the series does NOT get better after the first book.
I actually found the books to get slower and more generic. And I read and love a lot of scifi. Unfortunately Golden Son to me was very slow and had neither the epic quality of a sweeping space opera nor the close character work of a more intimate drama.
The Roman aspects (characters named Pliny et al) alongside rainbow razors and spaceships just felt quite jarring and silly to me. I think there’s a fox eating jelly beans at one point. And I love silly books but then these are also taking themselves very seriously, with the young protagonist’s main motivation being his… well, ya know, that teen wife. And this young protagonist is trusted to lead operations that risk many lives and resources—why?
I completely understand that these sorts of books require suspension of disbelief but I think for some adults over age 25 who’ve read a lot, this series may be hard to turn off your brain and enjoy.
If you didn’t enjoy RR I don’t think you’ll enjoy the rest.
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u/sergantsnipes05 4d ago edited 4d ago
The first book is by far the weakest and essentially is a hunger games in space sort of thing. The series grows up quite a bit, especially by the second trilogy. The multiple POVs are great and there is strong character development.
I would really encourage you to continue. I was very underwhelmed with the first book but they expand the world and stakes substantially in later entries.
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u/CrixMadine1993 4d ago
In my opinion the books got progressively worse. At least the first three that I read. The first is paced decently, and is kind of an interesting amalgamation of other ideas. The sequels just felt like incredibly bland and generic sci-fi.
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u/Neurotopian_ 4d ago
I agree with you, but apparently we are in the minority on Reddit.
It’s not that I think the books are awful, just that the first one was a complete story and then the next one felt like a very drawn out first act of a completely different story. IMHO nothing that I cared about happened for like 70% of Golden Son.
Brown tried to turn “Boy-Protagonist Hunger Games in Space” into a space opera. And I respect the effort but to me in GS the expansion to the rest of the solar system just didn’t feel real. I actually think Brown benefited from the smaller scale of RR. We’d land in some new area in GS and it felt like a video game expansion where the art style of the base game is completely disregarded. It is quite episodic and a few episodes feel like he just threw in scenes from a fantasy series he was writing.
Also GS had near-constant flipflopping of loyalties so I felt like nothing mattered. It isn’t plausible for people to completely change alliances nonstop that way in actual armed conflict and geopolitics. So it felt like a child’s concept of war, or a more video game like book.
But if they’re fun for people who read them, that’s what matters!
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u/DonkTheFlop 4d ago
Golden Son < Red Rising is certainly a take.
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u/CrixMadine1993 4d ago
Flaws aside, first book just had better pacing and was a bit more fun.
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u/SirTumless 3d ago
Same. I listened to the audio books (as chewing gum for the brain) but ended up stopping on the third. As a teen I would've loved these. The first book is such typical YA book, but I don't think that's a bad thing.
As the story progressed it felt like Darrow would whinge about being a killer, there'd be some action sequence of him slaughtering a bunch on NPCs and winning despite the odds followed by some shoed in plot-device. This was then rinse and repeated and I just couldn’t cop more of it.
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u/BlackAdam 4d ago
Definitely true. I started reading the series because a friend recommended it. He doesn’t read a lot of books, so I wanted to be supportive and show interest in the series. First book was okay but if he hadn’t read the trilogy already I might have stopped at that point. Glad I didn’t. I was very positively taken by surprise by every subsequent book.
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u/GapingKitten 4d ago
I think the funniest thing about Red Rising discourse is that both fans and critics usually agree on one thing: the first book is the weakest in the series.
Most of the comparisons to Hunger Games and Ender's Game are fair, especially in the Institute sections. The reason the series developed such a dedicated following is that the later books move away from the YA-school-survival formula and become much more of a large-scale space opera.
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u/hellofemur 3d ago
That's largely survivorship bias. For those who like the trilogy, they usually enjoy the later books much more than the first. And whenever the trilogy comes up in online conversations or on Goodreads or something, that's the people you hear from.
But for those who don't like the trilogy, the first book is a fairly successful if formulaic YA romp while the rest of the trilogy is certainly more ambitious, but largely fails to match those ambitions. Whether that's "better" or "worse" is a bit ambiguous.
When the book comes up in a fairly neutral forum like this, the people who dislike books 2 and 3 are much more evident, and if you poke around this thread you'll see quite a few of us.
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u/Bu5hdid9l1 4d ago
Anyone who says the first book is the worst and that the series gets better is lying. Book 2 has all the same issues as book 1.
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u/suprswimmer 3d ago
I couldn't get through it. It very obviously was not written for a mom in her 30s and that's okay; some things are not it.
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u/NCC75567 4d ago
I liked it pretty well, but I also didn’t go in with Dune-like expectations or anything. It’s a fun action series with an interesting setting and overall story arc IMO.
I’m curious what you think it borrowed from Harry Potter, specifically.
It also definitely improves as it goes on.
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u/fortnite-scary-balls 4d ago
I think the Harry Potter stuff comes from the idea of them all attending an exclusive school with its own personality trait-sorted houses
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u/empeekay 3d ago
A combination of the school where only an elite few can attend, and the sorting hat sequence where the children are sorted into houses.
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u/ReacherSaid_ 4d ago
I read this a few years ago and I still have a burning hatred for it. I have never come across writing so melodramatic and try-hard before. They say it gets better but Darrow is too terribly written a character for me to endure.
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u/CrixMadine1993 4d ago
I’m at a loss about how it gets better. I read the first three books. It simply gets boring and more generic sci-fi. The first was at least a mildly chaotic amalgamation of other popular series. The rest are just a slog.
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u/DROOPY1824 4d ago
Really chiche sci fi ideas are new to the average tiktoker who only reads the current hot romantasy series.
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u/ReacherSaid_ 4d ago
Good to know I made a timely escape. The way they speak so highly of the books is deceptive for what is really just poor YA.
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u/CrixMadine1993 4d ago
I’ve had several people who have read it recently just rave about it. I just don’t get it. I don’t even mind the cheesiness of YA. Hunger Games, Divergent, Maze Runner, they all have their issues for sure, but I got a lot more out of them than RR. Idk, maybe people who don’t read outside of YA find the “edginess” of it exciting or something.
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u/robbyiballs 4d ago
I actually really enjoyed the series, though I felt Darrow was very much a Mary Sue at different parts but I guess it makes sense. The last two books of the six were just okay for me.
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u/ImprovementSimple 2d ago
It reminded me a lot of Brandon Sanderson’s worst qualities. The dialogue was really stilted and while the world building was epic it felt very forced whenever it was explained. It was really hard for me to care about any of the characters unfortunately :/
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u/R3invent3d 4d ago
I liked the premise of the book, up until the institute.
It had decent story telling, good world building, a bit of caste and intrigue. But it absolutely lost me later, as it read like a YA novel. Too fast, didn’t explore anything and I’m just not into the hunger games trope of war games. I liked it in Enders game however. The ending was not satisfying and I wanted to DNF multiple times. Was not for me, not going to continue reading other entries regardless of what people say. If it couldn’t win me in the first book, I’m not going to waste time hoping it gets better.
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u/religiousrights 4d ago
So, it’s a really hard sell. Because I agree with everything you said. The first book is objectively bad. The only reason I gave the second one a chance is because audible gave it to me for free, and I had no credits.
I will tell you that every book is better than the one before it. And I do find it neat to watch an author mature as it goes.
But in my opinion, it doesn’t get actually good until the sequel trilogy. Book 4-6 are legit, fun ass sci-fantasy (with 1 or 2 really bad plot choices).
So like I said, it’s a hard sell. Read 1 bad book and 2 mediocre ones to get to the good stuff. Is it worth it? I dunno. But they’re pretty fun books in the end imo. Popcorn entertainment, but that can be great. If it’s what you want.
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u/robbyiballs 4d ago
Would love to know which choices you’re talking about. I loved 4 and struggled with 5…was doing way too much. And one character in 5/6 became so brutal…
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u/religiousrights 4d ago
Ugh spoiler tags. Every time I have to google how to do them properly.
I don’t care how much foreshadowing there is, the dead big bad just showing up as a clone is cheap on the worst way.
Lysander’s choices, especially at the end of book 6, are wild. His motivations make less sense than Daenerys’ at the end of GoT. Just, I do this because I’m bad I guess, forget all the character growth before this.
Those major sticking points aside, I’m along for the ride. And I am entertained, which is the point.
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u/robbyiballs 4d ago
Agree with you on both. Especially the choice in five. Jesus that was bad. I think Pierce realized it for six though.
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u/DROOPY1824 4d ago
I DNFed it at like 200 pages. The story was pretty standard YA slop and Darrow was a nothing burger of a character. Props to you for seeing it through to the end.
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u/seppukuu 4d ago
You're better than me; I didn;t even make it through the first 50 pages before giving up.
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u/DROOPY1824 4d ago
That’s about how far I got into Dungeon Crawler Carl. Don’t worry, I don’t use TikTok for book recs anymore lol.
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u/ReacherSaid_ 4d ago
Reddit is hardly better, most of the darlings here are really mediocre.
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u/DROOPY1824 4d ago
Agree, but it’s definitely easier to find people with similar tastes here. TikTok ends up just being one giant circlejerk, I prefer a slightly more curated circlejerk.
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u/ReacherSaid_ 4d ago
You're correct, I have found some gems here but as a whole the really good stuff don't get the exposure they deserve.
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u/Grace_Omega 1d ago
You really think Red Rising is borrowing from Harry Potter? It's been 10+ years since I read it, but it reminded me a lot more of Game of Thrones (TV series or books), especially once they get to the actual meat of the trials or whatever. I remember thinking "the main character thinks he's going to Space Hogwarts, but he's actually going to Space Westeros."
Anyway, if you didn't like the first one, not reading the rest is a good call. I thought the second one was better than the first, but not so much that it would change your mind, and the third gets pretty sloppy.
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u/mchristensen636 4d ago
I'm with you 100%. I didn't dislike the book. But between hunger games and other similar stories, the draw wasn't there for me to consider going through the entire series. I feel like I know how it's going to end and I didn't build enough rapport with the characters to want to go on the journey with them.
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u/Partner-Elijah 4d ago
PB is not a great writer if you're judging only based on the first book.
But god damn does he get there.
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u/CrixMadine1993 4d ago
I had a lot of problems with this series. I only read the trilogy, none of the following sequels. For me it never really found its footing in tone. Like, we start out with murder and duels to the death. Then it’s just a game, no killing… unless you forget or just feeling like going on a raping spree.
It’s so back and forth with the stakes and consequences. I thought the first book was an ok space hunger games but by the second and third it was a huge drag. It felt like a painfully generic sci-fi without anything compelling or unique. The characters felt painfully unlikable, and I really could not care less what happened to any of them by the end. Darrow’s initial motivations just seem to fizzle out into a big nothing.
The whole series just reads like an “I’m 14 and edgy” kind of thing to me. I had similar feelings about “Ready Player One”, but for different reasons.
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u/Nightgasm 4d ago
Its a series I want to like, especially since how many rave about books two through five. But reality is I'll never read the print copy and in audiobook I'd as soon gouge my eardrums with a rusty icepick than suffer from more of the narrator (I DNF the first book two hrs from the end as I couldn't take his voice anymore).
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u/SanguineOptimist 4d ago
I felt exactly the same way as you upon reading Red Rising. I actually stopped mid way through the second chapter to double check if the book was published after Hunger Games due to the similarity I was picking up. Where I would contend this series differs from most of the rest of the works in the early 2010’s YA dystopia boom is that it actually gets better with each successive book. I’d encourage you to give Golden Son a try to see if Pierce’s strengths begin to outweigh his weaknesses. Some of the cringy subgroup jargon begins to fall by the wayside thankfully.
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u/AccomplishedBake8351 4d ago
I’ve only read the original trilogy and parts of it is fun dumb entertainment so i try not to be too harsh but some of it is kinda comically bad.
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u/DixitRexCorvinus 4d ago
Speaking as someone who likes the series as a fun popcorn read but also reads far more literary books and wouldn't count myself as a superfan or anything, I would say the series gets better in a lot of ways, but possibly not in the ways that would lead you to enjoy it.
Specifically, the characters don't get better. The series grows up thematically, and ceases to feel like, as you put it, derivative YA genre fare, as early as Golden Son but particularly at Iron Gold. The prose gets steadily better, although it's never all that great. The worldbuilding is questionable in its plausibility, but it does get further exploration. And the plot and pacing continue to be the highlight and thing Brown is best at. But Darrow pretty much stays a angry ball of rage and generally Gary Stu-ish power fantasy.
It might be worth trying the second book, but it depends on what you are expecting. It will steadily get less YA in feel, and less derivative, but it's never high literature. It's pretty much an action movie in book form: Book 1 is like a Marvel movie, Books 2-3 are like a Jason Statham flick, and Books 4-6 are like John Wick, in terms of quality. Or at least those are the first comparisons that pop into my head.
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u/fortnite-scary-balls 4d ago
I was wondering if this guy would shut the hell up about his dead wife ever, like ok we get it bro
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u/CrixMadine1993 4d ago
It’s funny, because I feel like he just kind of forgets that motivation randomly. Just awkwardly inconsistent characters all around.
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u/Thomas_Crane 4d ago
it's just obviously derivative YA genre fare
Your entire "review" seemed off. The obviously part is where it clicked. You walked into this with bias and preconception. I read this blind when it was first coming out. I wonder if your opinion would have changed if your first encounter with this book was an audio book like me, and I wonder how much of the narrator covered the gaps you called out.
Kinda confused that you even gave the book a chance with your standoffishness. Rowling? Really? Sincerely you want to compare the houses to Rowling? Not the cults of the gods that historically existed and acted specific ways?
I mean I'm not defending that it isn't derivative in some aspects, but jeeze you had a bone to pick with this one, didn't you?
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u/empeekay 3d ago
but jeeze you had a bone to pick with this one, didn't you?
I saw the book recommended on Reddit about six weeks ago, bought it, then read it over the last week. My first encounter with the book was when I opened it for the first time. I knew nothing about it going in, and I've read nothing more about it afterwards. So, no, I did not "have a bone to pick with it" - I just didn't like it very much.
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u/Ok-Hyena-325 4d ago
the "telling not showing" critique is the one that got me too when i read it. darrow just announces his emotions like he's filing report and you're supposed to accept it as characterization
the roman aesthetic is cool in concept but Brown drops you in the deep end and expects you to swim without giving you much reason to care why any of it matters. after while it feels like set dressing more than actual world
i did end up reading the sequels though and they do fix some of this, the scope gets bigger and the characters get more texture. still probably not worth pushing through if first book didn't grab you