Summary: Red Rising

The GIST

Red Rising by Pierce Brown is a 2014 dystopian science fiction novel set on a future Mars, and the opening book of the series that bears its name. It follows Darrow, a sixteen-year-old miner from the lowest caste of a color-coded empire, who is remade in body and name so that he can walk among the rulers who killed his wife and tear their order down from the inside. It is a revenge story, a war story and a school story at once, told at a sprint and soaked in the imagery of ancient Rome.

The book landed hard. It reached number 20 on the New York Times Best Seller list in February 2014, Entertainment Weekly gave it an A-minus and praised its cinematic sweep and its fusion of Roman mythology with science fiction, and USA Today said it rose above a crowded dystopian field. Kirkus compared it to The Hunger Games and Game of Thrones. Brown has said he began with Darrow and built the world around him, drawing on the plight of Irish immigrants in the nineteenth century and on the disenfranchisement of working classes. That origin shows on every page: under the swords and starlight, this is a book about who does the digging and who gets the sky.

The Story

Far in the future, the Solar System is ruled by the Society, a rigid hierarchy in which every person is born into one of fourteen Colors. Your Color decides your body, your work and your worth. At the top stand the Golds, bred to be stronger and sharper than everyone else and raised to believe that ruling is their nature. At the very bottom are the Reds, the laborers.

Darrow is a Red, and proud of it. He lives in a mining colony deep under the surface of Mars, where his people drill for helium-3, the fuel they have been told will one day make the planet fit for human life. The work is brutal and the lives are short, but the Reds have a story that makes it bearable: they are pioneers, and their sacrifice will let the rest of humanity come and live on a world that is still too hostile to stand on. Darrow is rash and clever, one of the best at his dangerous trade, and newly married to Eo, the girl he adores.

Eo sees further than he does. She is the one who questions the bargain, and when the two of them slip into a restricted underground forest, a small stolen moment of green, they are caught and sentenced to a public whipping. The punishment is broadcast, and Mars's ruler, the ArchGovernor Nero au Augustus, is there to watch. Eo uses the moment. In front of the cameras and the Gold who governs her planet, she sings a forbidden song, a protest against the enslavement of her people. For that, Augustus has her hanged.

Darrow is broken. He buries his wife, which is itself a crime, and is sent to the gallows for it. But his uncle Narol has drugged him so that his death can be faked, and Darrow wakes in the hands of the Sons of Ares, a rebel movement that wants to overturn the hierarchy altogether. There he meets Dancer, who becomes his mentor, and Dancer's half-disfigured partner Harmony. And there he is shown the thing that changes everything.

They take him to the surface. It is not a wasteland. It is a beautiful city under an open sky. Mars has been terraformed for centuries, and the Reds below have simply never been told. The story of noble sacrifice is a leash, kept in place so that the miners stay docile and keep digging. Generations of Darrow's family have lived and died in the dark for a future that had already arrived for everyone else.

Dancer's plan is audacious. Fighting the Golds from below has failed; someone has to become one of them. Darrow is handed to Mickey, a Violet artist of flesh known as a Carver, who rebuilds him on the black market into a Gold, bone and muscle and face. A winged Pink named Evey nurses him through the ordeal. He is trained until his new body can do what Golds do, and a Pink called Matteo schools him in what Golds know: the Society's history, its politics, its arts, its manners. When the work is finished, the miner is gone. In his place stands Darrow au Andromedus, a young Gold with a fabricated past.

He tests brilliantly and wins a place at the Institute, the school where Mars's most elite young Golds are forged. He is drafted into House Mars, one of twelve Houses, and falls in with a set of classmates who will shape the rest of his life: Cassius au Bellona, a highborn charmer who quickly becomes a real friend; Roque, a gentle, self-styled poet; and Sevro, a scrappy, antisocial outsider chosen last. There is also Antonia, ruthless and beautiful, whom Darrow manages to alienate almost at once.

Then the Institute shows what it is. Its first lesson, the Passage, pairs the new students off and makes them fight barehanded until only one of each pair is left. Darrow comes out the other side, but what he had to do in that room becomes a secret he must keep from the people closest to him, and it sits under the rest of the book like a lit fuse.

The survivors are released into a vast valley in the Valles Marineris that has been dressed up as a medieval land. Each House is given a castle and one instruction: conquer the others. Each House also has a standard, and a student touched by an enemy standard becomes that House's slave and must obey. High above, adult overseers called Proctors watch and judge. House Mars's Proctor is the sour, mocking Fitchner. There are no teachers, no rules worth the name, and no one coming to help.

House Mars does not unite. It splinters. One faction gathers around Titus, a violent, tyrannical brute who treats captured students as spoils, and his cruelty forces Darrow to decide what kind of leader he is willing to be. Darrow's answer is cunning before strength. He draws in a rival House, Minerva, led by a quick-witted, formidable girl he knows only by the nickname Mustang, and uses that outside pressure to break Titus's hold and take command of his own House. Because the blade he carries is curved like the tool he once used in the mines, his classmates give him a name of his own: the Reaper.

From there the game widens. Darrow learns to play Houses against each other, and to weigh mercy against advantage; when Mustang falls into his power, he lets her slip away, to his own housemates' fury. Other players come into view, among them the hulking warrior Pax at Mustang's side and the slippery Tactus of House Diana. And through all of it runs a rumor about House Pluto and the student who leads it, a boy whose methods are so vicious that he is known only as the Jackal. He is said to be the ArchGovernor's own son.

That is where the story turns dark and personal. Secrets surface, friendships crack, and Darrow discovers that the contest may not be the fair trial of merit the Golds pretend it is. How he answers, and what it costs him, is the hold-your-breath final act that reviewers singled out, and it is best met without warning.

What It's Really About

At its heart this is a book about the lie that keeps people in their place. The Reds are not held down by chains so much as by a story: that their suffering is noble, necessary and temporary. Brown's sharpest move is to let Darrow believe it completely, and love his life inside it, before taking him up to see the sky. The anger that follows is not abstract. It is the anger of someone who was proud of his own exploitation.

It is also about what infiltration does to the infiltrator. Darrow has to become a convincing Gold, which means thinking, fighting and commanding like one. He makes friends among the people he came to destroy, and some of them are loyal, funny and brave. The Institute keeps asking him the same question in new forms: how much of the enemy's cruelty can you borrow before it is simply yours?

That makes it, underneath, a novel about leadership. The Institute is a machine for teaching young rulers that power is taken, and Darrow watches fear, terror and slavery all work, up to a point. What he tries instead is to free people and earn their loyalty rather than compel it. One reviewer at The Huffington Post called the book a powerful lesson in leadership that could push readers to think about how their choices land on family, friends and the wider world.

Readers love it for less lofty reasons too. The pace is relentless, the world borrows the grandeur of Rome and bolts it to spaceships, and the cast is easy to fall for. Fans call themselves Howlers after characters in the novels, and Brown has spoken about how warmly the series has been embraced by lesbian, gay and transgender readers, including one reader who told him he found in Sevro the friend he never had. Not everyone was won over: Publishers Weekly found it thrilling but short on originality and plausibility, and Tor.com's reviewer, who admired how seamlessly Brown blends familiar traditions, wished for more worldbuilding. Both points are fair. This is a book that takes familiar pieces and runs with them very, very fast.

Who Should Read It

Read it if you want a story that grabs you by the collar: fans of The Hunger Games who are ready for something bloodier and more political, readers who like the scheming and sudden brutality of Game of Thrones, and anyone with a weakness for Roman history, underdogs and long-game revenge. It is violent, and it includes sexual violence among the students, so it is not for the faint of heart. But if you like to lose yourself in another world and come up for air wanting the next volume, this is where the rising starts.

This has been a summary of Red Rising by Pierce Brown, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST.