Houston Southard

Pierce Brown - Red Rising

A bloodydamn good series. I've turned more people onto this book than any other. It's 1st person POV present tense action drama splattered with Keatsian prose and the repetitive Homeric characterization that made the Iliad possible to retell orally.

Humans now populate the solar system. The world is a color-coded caste system with the enslaved Reds laboring at its bottom and the elite Golds lording from the top. Darrow's a Helldiver, a teenage Red mining Helium3 from Mars' core at the Gold's behest. They do this to terraform Mars for colonization, when in reality it's already been occupied for centuries. As the truth unfolds and dissenters around him are silenced only for wanting to live for more, Darrow resolves into a cold rage.

He wants the hierarchy dismantled, and to do that means becoming one of them through a crazy bout of biomodification. To beat the Golds, he must understand them. Once he understands them, though, will he still be a Red? Pierce subjects Darrow to the ultimate conquest paradox: Once you usurp the current order, the vacuum calls for new leadership. Did the Golds have a point or is there a better way to govern?

Take the Napoleonic rigor of Ender's Game's battlecraft, the caged do-or-die conquesting of The Hunger Games, the sociopathic backstabbing and character abandonment issues from Game of Thrones, set it all to a Dune backdrop, and presto... Red Rising. Brown wrote this as a dystopian twist on the plight of 19th century Irish immigrants and the general disenfranchisement of the working class, where technology has come full circle and now the high class fashion themselves after the Roman pantheon.

This is one of the few dystopian fictions that impossibly overshoots the craze overshadowing it. Stop what you're doing and read this book. Live for more.