RogerBW's Blog: Red Rising, Pierce Brown

2018 young adult SF, first of its series. Darrow is a Red, lowest of the colour-coded castes, mining helium-3 on Mars to power the terraforming project. One day the work will end and everyone will live on the surface… but it's all a lie.

There's a lot going on here. Darrow will get widowed, then hooked up with the Resistance and discover the truth (the terraforming is long since done, but a mining labour force brought up with the ethos of selfless sacrifice is dead handy so nobody told them); he'll get remade into the likeness of a Gold (hmm, Five Fates anyone?), and be inserted into their society to be a fifth-columnist when the revolution comes. Then he goes to Gold Leadership School, and discovers that rather than actually, you know, teach anything they divide the kids into arbitrary teams (based on personality traits) and dump them into a wargame arena.

So far, so Hunger Games meets Ender's Game and Lord of the Flies, with some faction struggles among the rulers. But one can see how this could be a really powerful story. If if weren't for two things.

The writing is plodding and pedestrian. I "read" this as an audio book, which I find usually leaves me more in favour with slack pacing, but every bit of it dragged. Are we supposed to feel tension? Because we can generally work out what's going to happen next, and then it's just a matter of waiting to get there. The actual prose is endlessly dreary. With lots of short choppy sentences.

I would never sing the forbidden song. I would work. I would bow. Let me wash dirt from my hands instead of blood. I want only to live with my family. We were happy enough.

The other problem is Darrow himself, who is a thoroughgoing Mary Sue, perfect at anything he turns his hand to. He's the best drill operator ever. He needs to be fast with his fingers; he's not just fast enough to pass for a Gold, he's the fastest Gold ever. He's completely uneducated, but one night (well, maybe more than one, it's not stated) with some drug therapy and accelerated audio of Great Literature while he sleeps and he can pass perfectly for someone who's been brought up in Gold society. Misses one question on his multi-hundred-question entrance exam. Has a wife who causes her own death explicitly to motivate him to rebellion. Unlike anyone else, actually tries to stop his soldiers raping the women on the other wargame teams. (Presumably homosexuality exists, since it's still a suitable subject for casual insults, but nobody seems to do it even for power games.) He's supposed to be an everyman hero, but he's simply and effortlessly better than everyone he meets at everything, and in any moment has the personality he needs to make this work.

And when we get into the wargame section that's the majority of the book, Brown throws in so many cool things that the actual plot gets lost. Darrow's a great leader who can unite people behind him! Oh but wait his best friend betrays him. Oh but wait he builds up a new faction. Oh but wait the referees cheat to ruin his supplies and mobility. Oh but wait when he captures more they don't ruin those.

Acknowledgments include: "And to the reader, thank you. You're going to bloodydamn love the next two books." No, I'm not.

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