Science Fiction Guest Review: Red Rising

Enoch Powell (@mogtheurbanite) reviews my favorite contemporary Sci-Fi series

Aristo's note:

I was talking about fiction with some friends on twitter, and somehow found myself shilling my favorite contemporary science fiction series, Red Rising. I sold it as “The neo-feudal space faring society of Mechwarrior, but instead of mechs there are armored exoskeletons and nanowire whips that turn into swords. Nobles duel to the death amid a backdrop of court intrigues, populist revolutions, and a fascinating thought experiment that critiques every political system mankind has ever thought of, taking no prisoners and making no friends.

My description piqued the interest of my friend “Enoch Powell” on Twitter. He tore through the first 3 books of the series within a matter of days, and I asked if he would be interested in writing a guest review. I wanted to have this series reviewed because it really deserves it, but I didn’t want to re-read the book to do so. Don’t forget to follow Enoch at @mogtheurbanite. He is a man of wisdom, faith, and family. So without further ado, please enjoy our first guest review!

At the suggestion of Aristophanes, I picked up this book and felt it deserved a review. I knew nothing about it, but I quickly found myself unable to put it down (no exaggeration, I read the entire thing in less than a single day).

Red Rising begins in a Martian mining colony, where the workers extract resources, with the intent of fueling the eventual terraforming of the planet.

The planet, the mine, and the entire Solar System are ruled and controlled by a genetically determined caste system; the hauntingly beautiful and coldly inhuman "Golds" stand at the peak, ruling over the other castes without question.
At the bottom, brutal and dangerous manual labor is performed by "Reds", with a host of other color castes filling in every role between these two.

The caste system is inescapable. Not only does everyone wear the mark of their caste permanently on their wrists but their entire genome has been reworked to reflect their place in the great system; each caste's eyes and hair are colored to reflect their position and the various strains of humanity are reproductively incompatible.

Darrow, our protagonist, is a Red.

He may be a "HellDiver", the most talented of the Reds, in charge of running the titanic and dangerous drills. But he is a miner, the son of a long line of miners and Darrow expects nothing more than to live his hardscrabble existence, until his sons are old enough to replace his hands at the drill head.

All of that is torn away from him. Instead, he finds himself at the middle of the most audacious conspiracy possible; a revolutionary movement that intends to do the unthinkable.

They will make a Red into a Gold.

After vicious genetic tinkering and a training regimen intended to push him far past the limits he was designed for, Darrow is cast into the world of the Golds, where he discovers that the cruelty of the system makes no exceptions for any Color.

The Style:

The description of "Red Rising" might make you think it is a Young Adult novel; the character is just out of boyhood, and he is flung into leading a rebellion against a tyrannical system.

The similarities end there.

The author is unafraid to make a political exploration of the system he has built and does not flinch away from using horror, suffering, violence, and anguish to do so. This makes for a vastly superior story and one that young men should read. There are deep lessons about leadership, grief, betrayal, death, and killing to be learned while reading "Red Rising", lessons every man should learn.

The Themes:

The world of "Red Rising" is engrossing, especially to those of us who are not enamored with liberal democracy; the Color system arose directly as a refutation to the core tenets of Progressivism and its failures to provide leadership for mankind.
At no point is there a reduction to the long exhausted "good guy/bad guy" dynamic for the Color system; no political system is heralded as superior or ideal and the system that does rule is merely the most powerful one.

The Color System is fundamentally transhumanist. The Colors are biologically different and mutually infertile while the higher castes are objectively different and perhaps superior to the lower; Golds are taller, stronger, and more intelligent and the story tracks the differences in Darrow as his genome is ripped apart and reassembled. But you will find no "Star Trek" style drabness in the plot; far from dispassionate and calculating, the Golds are emotional, brilliant, and fiercely Darwinian. They have adopted old myths and made their own; the weak among their own ranks are given nothing but scorn and the entire political philosophy is one of "rule by those fittest to rule".

Reading further, you will find the origins of the Gold's vital spirit. Crushed under the authority of Terra, the colonists of Luna, where the Color system first came about, rebelled against the tyranny of Earth. Suffocated by massive bureaucratic systems only interested in supporting the weak, the undeserving, and the unfit, the Gold took power and conquered on their own merit. They have not forgotten the lessons they learned from that war.

The Sci-Fi:

Red Rising and the two subsequent novels that make up the trilogy give quite a lot for science fiction lovers. There are large scale space battles, boarding actions, and fans of Starship Troopers will especially enjoy seeing the "Iron Rain", planetary invasions where untold masses of men drop directly onto the battlefield, assaulting cities running massive shields that prevent their orbital bombardment. The Golds have resurrected honor duels by sword and sword alone. There are also portions of the novel that are nearly medieval at their tech level; I won't spoil it, but if you like cavalry actions and shimmying up into a castle via the garderobe (toilet chute) to take it by storm, you'll enjoy this book.

Fan-Art of an “Iron Rain”

In Summary:

If you haven't found something to pique your interest by now, then I don’t know what to tell you. But if you have, take my word for it. Read it. And when you find yourself through it and wanting more, read the whole series. I tore through all three in less than a week and you may very well find yourself doing the same. There is plenty to go around for a hungry reader, and book six, Lightbringer, releases in May of next year. (As a side note, I went ahead and listened to the Audible version of this book. I think they picked an excellent voice actor, so if you're like me and listen to a lot of books, don't hesitate to get it that way.)

Get yourself a copy of Red Rising, by Pierce Brown, on Amazon at this link