Red Rising.

I wasn’t familiar with Pierce Brown’s Red Rising series until a review copy of the game, also called Red Rising, showed up a few months ago. My review of the game, which I enjoyed quite a bit, is up now over at Paste, and as part of my research for that game I read the first novel in the series. It’s not as good as the game is, with a fairly juvenile plot married to enough graphic violence to keep it from the YA section, but reading the book did help me understand the character cards in the game more and see how well designer Jamey Stegmaier integrated the two.

The novel tells the story of Darrow, a particularly skilled miner of helium-2 who lives and works in a colony beneath the surface of Mars with other “Reds.” The dystopian society of the novel has humanity stratified into castes identified by colors, with Golds at the top and Reds at the bottom, taking up the most dangerous jobs and unaware of how far civilization has advanced on Mars’s surface. A rebel group saves Darrow from execution and drafts him to infiltrate the world up top, hacking his body to make him appear to be a Gold so he can try to enter the competition held at the Institute to identify future leaders for the Martian government, and thus eventually topple the Golds’ rule from within. After he succeeds, he finds himself in a Lord of the Flies-like environment where some unknown number of teenagers are separated into a dozen Houses and must fight each other – and try to survive without ready sources of food or water – to determine who will be Primus of each House and who will be the ultimate winner of the contest.

The setting of the novel is almost incidental to everything that happens within it – Brown just needed a world where it was plausible that there’d be a de facto slave caste living beneath the surface, believing that they were working towards the noble goal of creating a habitable planet up above, unaware that this had already occurred and they were simply held in bondage. The science aspect here is really shaky, from the idea of terraforming Pluto (surface temperature -226 C) or a thriving colony on Venus (surface temperature 475 C, with rainfall so acidic its pH is negative) to the way Brown introduces random advanced technologies when the plot requires them, but he has created a fairly strong set of core characters around which to build the story.

Darrow is a well-rounded protagonist whose rage often clouds his judgment, so while his rapid ascent to one of the leadership roles in his House in the game is rather convenient, he’s also prone to missteps, from rash decisions to difficulty deciding whom to trust, that create tension and move the story along in more credible ways. Cassius, an early ally who doesn’t know any of Darrow’s secrets, is more complex than the typical “arrogant scion” archetype, while their house-mate Sevro is an endearing nut who runs around in wolf skins and forms a ragtag army of misfits from the House who become the Howlers. Mustang is the most well-defined woman character in the book, which skews heavily male among core characters, although the depth of her personality doesn’t become apparent until near the end of the story. Some of the various lieutenants in Darrow’s armies grow over the course of the book and acquire enough character of their own to be more than just redshirts (or goldshirts), which also made their character cards in the game more meaningful.

The story is gratuitously violent from shortly after Darrow enters the institute, which may be the point, or just a very grim view of humanity, but it has the same problem I have with most superhero movies – solving problems by beating the hell out of your enemy. Darrow eventually comes around to a less-violent approach, but still a violent one, and the way the great game works involves physically subduing your rivals if you don’t actually kill them. Darrow is clever, and often thinks like a master tactician, so when the result of a battle is bodily dismemberment, it’s unsatisfying, because the character should be capable of more than this – but I’m not sure if Brown himself is.

Red Rising has a real conclusion, while still leaving the long-term story intact for future novels, which now number two in Darrow’s story plus two more set in the same universe. I’m not that driven to continue, however, because I’m expecting more of the same – Darrow will co-opt some rivals, kill a few enemies (or have his minions do it and then bemoan their level of bloodthirst), and eventually avenge the death that started the whole ball rolling. It was a quick enough read, but the story just isn’t that different from most of those in the YA fantasy/sci-fi space.

Next up: Jasper Fforde’s recommendation of Mil Millington’s Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About.