Red Rising

Brace yourselves, because here's the next big hit in dystopian young adult sci-fi. I've got plenty of scattered thoughts on it.

First, why? Young adult sci-fi is everywhere these days and the genre is only growing more and more crowded (and derivative) as everyone tries to come up with the next Hunger Games. These books have mass appeal because they're easy to read and generally based on simple, broad themes like "coming of age" and "fighting oppressive regimes" and "people are violent" but also "people are also good." Red Rising is no different, really. It's set in a dystopian future, its narrator comes from society's lowest caste, and the bulk of its story is set during a giant war game where a bunch of eighteen-year-olds fight for glory and prestige as part of their college experience.

Still, this one feels a little different from the rest. It's not high literature, but it crams an impressive bit of world building, characterization, and dramatic storytelling into its 400 pages while moving at a fast and furious clip. I say this a lot, but one of the easiest metrics for measuring how much you enjoy any given book or video game or TV show is how quickly you burn through it, and how readily you pick it up during your free time. I knocked this one out in just over 24 hours, which says plenty in its own right. Despite a few criticisms I have with it, Red Rising was a true page turner.

If the blog was half as active as it was back in its heyday, I'm confident this book would become a hall-of-famer. Six of us read all three Hunger Games books, after all. So I want to tread lightly and not spoil the plot. Instead, here's an overview that, hey, sorry, does spoil the first hundred pages or so.

Darrow is a Red. He lives down below the surface of Mars and spends his life toiling away in the helium mines in order to harvest the resources with which to terraform Mars. He and his Red peers are overseen by a class of people called Grays who in turn report back to the ruling class, the Golds. It's fairly standard stuff - simple folk, oppressed, told that their sacrifices are for the betterment of mankind - and within the first hundred pages Darrow's world is turned upside down; his tribe is denied their drilling wages, his wife is killed in a protest, and he decides to end his own life. While unconscious, he's taken in by a terrorist group - called something like the "Sons of Ares" - who reveal, in some clunky exposition, that everything Darrow knows is a lie. They bring him to the surface of Mars where he discovers that, holy crap, it's already been terraformed. In fact, it's been terraformed for hundreds of years. There's a great big world up there where Golds live in luxury off the labor of the Reds and others. Darrow is understandably pissed off and he agrees to take part in a scheme on behalf of the Sons of Ares.

Here's where everything takes an abrupt record-scratching shift. Darrow agrees to infiltrate an elite academy for the Golds, posing as a Gold, in order to become some sort of prodigy with an inside track to a position of power. Then, when the time is right, he can help take down society from the inside. The remainder of the novel takes place in the aforementioned war game. Darrow makes allies and enemies out of an impressive number of characters as they fight and plan and scheme. So for the first hundred pages or so, we're down underground with the Reds, learning what their world is like and empathizing with them, only to leave that shit behind entirely to spend the rest of the book among the elitist and entitled Golds. It's oddly effective - especially since this is clearly the first book in a trilogy - and the lack of any payoff or resolution with the Reds is forgivable. It's also pretty impressive how quickly we (and Darrow!) go from hating all Golds (fuck you, one percent!) to understanding that there are all kinds of different types of Golds (not all Golds...). Some are scared shitless, some are terrible rapists, and most are just kids trying to make their families proud. Oh, and lots of them die. Not most of them, but enough of them so that whenever it happens, it makes an impact.

Some of the characters are painted a little too broadly, and the color-based class system is embarrassingly on-the-nose (space racism!) but it all made for a very effective story. Sometimes it was too fast-paced for my liking, and there were more twists and turns - betrayals, identity reveals, stunning realizations - than the book probably needed, but in the end I really enjoyed my time with Red Rising. The book ends in a manner that, naturally, sets up the second book in the trilogy - Golden Son - and I'm hopeful that it zooms out a little more and goes back to exploring the strife between the Golds and the Reds and everyone else.