[skydancer8]

TITLE: Red Rising (Red Rising Trilogy, Book 01)
AUTHOR: Pierce Brown
GENRE: Science Fiction
PUBLISHED: 01/28/2014
RATING: ★★★
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon
MOBILISM LINK: Mobilism

Review: I have a confession to make, my darlings; I delay reading sequels. Not because I don't want to read them – I’m usually desperate to! – but because sequels, especially concluding instalments, make me so ridiculously nervous. I have on my Kindle books published two years ago, sequels to books that I really, really loved, which I can't quite bring myself to start reading.

I know. Bloody bizarre, isn't it? I can't explain it even to myself.

Why is this relevant? Well, because Brown’s Golden Son has been out since January, and I haven't read it yet. Instead, I decided to reread Red Rising first, so that I could dive into Golden remembering who everyone is and what exactly happened in Red.

Red Rising is probably a book even those of you who don't read science fiction have heard of. It made an enormous splash last year and featured prominently on most of the ‘Best of 2014’ lists, both the speculative fiction lists and the general ones. And there’s excellent reasons for that.

Brown’s debut is set on a Mars at least 700 years in the future – probably closer to 1000-1200 years in the future – in a universe governed by a strict caste system. The human race is divided into Colours, the castes of which are not defined arbitrarily but biologically. The Golds at the top are faster, stronger, smarter, and more beautiful than the other castes, and they rule ruthlessly, unquestioningly. The book is mostly concerned with these Golds, and with the Reds, the lowest caste of menials.

The first thing you should know about me is I am my father’s son. And when they came for him, I did as he asked. I did not cry. Not when the Society televised the arrest. Not when the Golds tried him. Not when the Grays hanged him. Mother hit me for that. My brother Kieran was supposed to be the stoic one. He was the elder, I the younger. I was supposed to cry.

Darrow, our main character, is one of these Reds. In fact, though he doesn't know the term, he’s a lowRed – meaning he’s one of thousands (millions?) of Reds who live beneath the surface of Mars and believe that Mars is still an uninhabitable wasteland; that the efforts of the Red miners go to terraforming the planet that has been habitable for centuries. At the beginning of the book, Darrow is a Helldiver, a particularly dangerous job with a short life expectancy. Darrow, though, is incredibly good at it and something of a celebrity among his clan. The story really gets going when he realises that the competition of the mining clans – to see who mines more in each period – is rigged, with one clan always set to win. It triggers a chain of events that will quickly see him sent to the surface to accomplish the impossible – infiltrate the Gold caste and bring them down from the inside.

Red Rising is interesting for numerous reasons, but one of the ones I found most fascinating is the fact that, all things considered, I’m not sure you could call the system Darrow lives in a dystopia. There is no war in this world, and there doesn’t seem to be much or any illness or starvation either. If there is a huge disparity between the wealthy elite and the menials, well – that’s no different to how our world works. Unless Brown means his society to be a critique of ours, which is possible, and not something I’ve considered before. Brown’s is a totalitarian society, with plenty of intrinsic policies that turned my stomach, but it functions and most of those who live in it are happy or at least content. Very few are actively suffering, so does that make it a dystopia, or not?

But there’s a few things to talk about, so let’s get down to that.

You can take it as read that I enjoyed Red Rising. It deserves the acclaim it’s received, and I recommend it. In many ways it’s quite thought-provoking, and I think it has a lot to say wrapped up in a very addictive storyline. But I have some reservations, some ways in which Brown let me down, that I think seriously detract from the world he was trying to build.

The big thing is that the culture of the Colours isn’t actually significantly different to ours. This is approximately 1000 years in our future, but various characters still use ‘like a girl’ and ‘buttboy’ as insults. So 1000 years in the future, we’re apparently still dealing with misogyny and homophobia in exactly the same way that we’re dealing with it today. Not only does that seem incredibly stupid to me – hate to break it to you, but human prejudices don’t remain unchanged for a thousand years – but it was also really depressing to read. Most of the spec fic books I pick up don’t have LGBT characters. That’s depressing enough. But they also don’t repeatedly use variations of ‘gay’ as insults, which feels even worse. Over and over Red Rising has all the characters – including Darrow, our supposed hero – insult their enemies as ‘buttboys’ or ‘peckerlickers’ or what-the-hell-ever. They might be childish insults, but it hits just as hard as reading ‘faggot’ on the page again and again. There’s no reason for it – no real reason, 1000 years in the future, in a society that holds up the ancient Spartans as the ideal. Again, Brown, hate to break it to you, but most historians accept the fact that the Spartans, for all they despised Athens, had institutionalised homosexuality too, albeit not to the extent of some of the other Greek states. (Here’s a fun bit of trivia for you: Spartan wives were expected to dress as men on their wedding nights, supposedly to help their husbands make the transition from sleeping with men to sleeping with women!)

I really can’t find an angle from which this casual homophobia is acceptable. As a queer person, it’s actively hurtful to read, especially since it serves no purpose within the story. There’s no reason for Darrow’s world to be homophobic, and every reason for it not to be. And since I’ve read hundreds of books without LGBT characters where variations of ‘faggot’ don’t come out of the mouth of the hero, I don’t know why Brown included it. It adds nothing but a streak of vicious prejudice to something that most people use to escape that crap in our own world. I read fiction to be entertained, not to find myself and people like me being attacked.

And no, I don’t think that’s an overreaction. I don’t think people would have accepted it if Darrow (or anyone else) had been using the n-word, so why the hell should I have to accept what’s basically the same thing, aimed at a different minority?

Other reviewers have commented upon the amount of rape (as opposed to the rest of the violence) within Red Rising. I think it needs to be commented upon. There’s a right way and a wrong way to write any trauma, especially a trauma a significant number of your readers will have experienced for themselves. The right way is to respect it, to respect the damage or other effects it can wreak while respecting the people who have gone through it. The wrong way is to trivialise it, to use it as a simplistic plot device, and that’s exactly what Brown does. The women (and there are many) raped in Red Rising aren’t even given names; they only exist at all to show how evil certain other characters are, how necessary it is for Darrow to stop those villains.

To be fair, you could make that argument about all the violence within the book: the worst villains in Red tend to be the ones who are most brutal and vicious. But I think the existence of the Pinks, the prostitute caste, makes the entire issue of sex one that is given a deeply creepy slant in this book. Every other caste is honoured for what they do – we even hear Golds compliment the Reds, the lowest of the low, on at least two occasions – but Pinks are consistently described in demeaning, insulting ways; to be called a Pink is an insult. Why? If you have an entire caste of people who are bred for beauty and pleasure, why aren’t they honoured and adored? Why don’t we have something more reminiscent of Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel sequence, where courtesans are respected and influential? Doesn’t that seem a more likely development in a universe where every other caste is valued? Doesn’t it seem more believable that after a thousand freaking years, we would have overcome the stigmas around sex? Doesn’t it seem like lazy world-building, and indicative of a creepy mentality, that Brown casually dusts his villains with rape while replicating our modern world’s prejudices towards sex and sex-workers without the slightest modification?

You know, the more I analyse this, the less shiny Red Rising becomes in my memory. Sure, it’s entertaining. Yes, I’ll probably read Golden Son, after all this – mostly because I’m hoping for some healthier world-building. But it’s deeply, disgustingly problematic, more so because it’s so popular and very few people seem to be calling it on its bullshit. Giving a few made-up items names with capital letters does not make your world original; calling your castes after colours doesn’t make your system unique. Having your hero slowly realise that he might be as bad as those he’s trying to fight against is awesome; making him a homophobe is not. And don’t even get me started on Eo’s pathetically short arc. She should have been the main character, not Darrow, but instead we get another (creepy!) stuffed in the fridge trope where a woman is killed solely to give the male main character emotastic manpain...

“We couldn’t save her, Darrow.”

“Why not?” I ask.

“We just couldn’t.”

“Why not?” I repeat. I glare up at him, glare at his followers and hiss the words one by one. “You saved me. You could have saved her. She is the one you would have wanted. The bloodydamn martyr. She cared about all this…”

“Martyrs are a dime a dozen.”

I mean, that doesn’t even make an attempt at sense. The girl whose face was shown throughout the universe, beautiful (that always helps when you’re making a statement) as she sang a forbidden song that touched millions – the one who believes, fiercely, that there must be a revolution, but who also had the heart to probably not become as bad as what she was fighting against in the process – and instead you want the guy who spent his life perfectly accepting of the way things are? The one who’ll fight for revenge instead of for a better future?

Why am I supposed to like this book again? I suppose its sole positive characteristic is the fact that its female characters, on the whole, are just as ruthless and vicious as its male ones, so at least we get equality on that front. That I do appreciate, believe it or not; it’s just as stupid to claim that women are never evil, fucked-up, or violent as it is to claim they are weak little darlings who must always be protected. Neither is true and both are damaging stereotypes.

All in all… Three stars because I finished it, because I think Brown’s writing style is entertaining and addictive. But only three stars, because so much of it is disgusting crap.

[Tidal]

Thank you for this, Sky. Your comments about the prejudices and language still present in a 700+ speculative future are bang on. Such inconsistencies always put me off and usually cause me to abandon the book before I've finished it. You've saved me some wasted time. Red Rising has been scratched off my list, to make way for another book.

[skydancer8]

You're welcome! Glad I could help identify a book you shouldn't waste your time on

I have to disagree Brown created a rather well balanced world. If you look at history a 1000 ago years many cultures considered homosexuality if not a taboo then something shameful. In Rome women were considered property not equal human beings, while homosexuality wasnt shunned in Rome any male who indulged in homosexual congress and took the submissive or feminine role was shunned for debasing himself. the up yours insult or flipping the bird was used in Roman times as an insinuation of having had anal intercourse and thus not being a whole or true man.
Today homosexuals are still killed and denigrated in middle eastern and African countries. In the West calling someone or something gay is still an insult among heterosexual men. Brown's world is based on an idealised Roman principle, at least a variation idealised by the characters without a complete frame of reference. Each color represents ones place within the rigid hierarchy. How much of a stretch is it to imagine that in a highly Patriarchal society where one is born to ones duties and there can be no deviation from the established rule of law, that homosexuality would be considered if not weakness then deviation.

Also you cant use ancient Greece as an example when the author uses Rome as a base for his society, you may as well compare it to early Iberian or Etruscan culture. In all fairness the Romans did adopt much from Greece but they were a distinct people with distinct customs and taboos.
Also Athens didnt have a healthy homosexual culture at least not by today's standards as they indulged primarily in pederasty.
As did Crete and Sparta. Though Sparta took it further by encouraging homosexual bonds as they believed that it removed the weakness of women entirely and made for stronger fighters. Of course Sparta suffered from a major population decline and in the end couldnt support their state as apart from outside enemies they were hopelessly out numbered by their slave class the Helots.

Red Rising is a good book. Well written, well plotted and seemless world building. It doesnt shy away from prejudice which it shows is inherent in the future culture.
I am sorry it offended your sensibilities but having read and enjoyed the book i didnt notice what Triggered you.

In the end it seems you just didnt like the book as it doesnt follow the tropes you like.

It should be a girl.
We live in 2015. I thought it wasnt important if the protagonist is male or female as long as the story told is good.
There would be more gay characters and homosexuality should be the new normal.
Its not too crazy to believe that a future society may have similar prejudices to our own.

i could go on but it seems you made your mind up about the books you like so anything deviating from your comfort zone or belief system is terrible.

To anyone who has not yet read this book i do recommend it fondly and the sequel. I encourage you to decide for yourself.

[skydancer8]

Okay, having studied Roman and Greek culture for two years for my degree, I can categorically tell you that no, the Romans did not view women as property - women could enter into legal contracts and run businesses in their own names, as well as hold on to their dowries and divorce their husbands. Many Greek states didn't give their women any rights, though. And most of the ancient world had very little problem with homosexuality, actually, from the Native American tribes all the way to China and Japan. The modern homophobia we know is almost entirely a construct by the British Empire that they enforced in the countries they conquered, including the homophobia now present in the Middle East and Africa. Homophobia was not a global phenomenon 1000 years ago, not even close.

And it's a huge stretch to say that in 1000 years human society will hold the exact same prejudices it does today. That makes no sense at all, historically or anthropologically. Human culture evolves. It evolves rapidly. Look at how attitudes have changed towards women or LGBT individuals from fifty years ago. Or a hundred years; two centuries ago black people didn't have the vote in the US, and now they do. So in five times that time, you want me to believe we won't only not erase some of our prejudices, but we'll actually backtrack from how we are now? That is not logical.

The Golds in the book constantly refer to Sparta as the ideal, which is Greek. And Sparta never called its women weak; for crying out loud, they honoured women who died in childbirth the same way they honoured warriors fallen in battle! Spartan women had more rights than Athenian women, able to own property and divorce their husbands at a time when Athenian women had almost no say in their lives at all. Their women trained as warriors alongside their brothers. A Spartan women was given a special dagger on her wedding night that she wore always; she was supposed to use it to mark her husband's face if he ever hit her, so that everyone could see what a terrible person he was. But even if Brown did use Rome as the basis for his society, pre-Christian Rome was not homophobic. Men could and did marry other men, homosexuality was not a crime, and male prostitution was not only accepted, it was taxed. Rome celebrated homosexuality in all sorts of ways, and it was never criminalised before the advent of Christianity.

I don't think the main character always needs to be a girl, only that Darrow was a very confusing and poor choice for a leader of the uprising rather than Eo. Darrow didn't want to fight, remember? Didn't see anything wrong with the system he was living in. Or don't you remember Eo's frustration with his indifference at the beginning of the book?

Statistically it is unrealistic to have no queer characters given the number of people who are LGBT+ in the real world.

It's absolutely insane to believe that a society 1000+ years on from ours would have the same prejudices as ours. Human societies don't even hold on to political outlooks for ten years, never mind constructed prejudices for centuries.

Just two quick thoughts. You say human culture evolves, that you are criticizing the author for creating a society that has essentially devolved from where we are at today. However.

Is that not the very nature of futuristic dystopian fiction? In this case, a society springing from ours, which enslaves and corrupts?

Secondly, you say that society evolves, yet you also say that it was acceptable to be homosexual in times past, yet it became unacceptable in more modern times. In that case, is it any sort of stretch whatsoever to say that it could become unacceptable again, especially in a brutally dictatorial patriarchy?

Just some thoughts to consider.

[skydancer8]

Your points are actually entwined for the purposes of my argument. Yes, morals could theoretically devolve again I suppose, but in a culture which a) is based on a very homosexuality-friendly culture (ancient Rome) and b) has no evidence of Christianity (as far as I can tell/remember), which is where modern homophobia comes from, it doesn't make sense to devolve this way (without another cause/reason/motive, none of which has been presented to us via the worldbuilding). Also, the world of Red Rising is not portrayed as being deliberately homophobic in the sense of 'hey look this is an evil dystopia' (which I would argue anyway, because it actually seems to function fairly well for anyone who isn't a Red?), but in the sense of lazy worldbuilding. Dystopian fiction presents the corruption unique to that dystopia deliberately, so readers can get a sense for what is wrong with this society; this is why it's made so clear to the reader that the Reds are horrifically enslaved. The 'corruption' of this dystopia is the abuse of the Reds and, arguably, the rigid caste system which gives no one the chance to choose their own futures and/or move up or down the castes. It's the decadence of the Golds, and their brutality. But Brown doesn't make the case that the homophobia is also an element of the dystopia, or we would have read about anti-gay laws and possibly glimpsed the abuse of queer people within the book. We didn't, because the homophobia is not an element of the corruption, merely what Brown considers a normal, given part of any worldbuilding.

Homosexuality became socially unacceptable because of the spread of British colonialism, essentially. But the culture of the Golds is based on a culture that predates British colonialism. In no other way does that world mimic our modern one, really. Brown co-opted the modern homophobia because he didn't think it through, didn't properly research the opinions on homosexuality in ancient Rome, and just lazily assumed any war-based culture would be homophobic, if he thought about it at all. But most ancient patriarchies were VERY friendly towards male homosexuality. Lots of warrior cultures had traditions of male homosexuality among their warriors - look at the Samurai, look at the Sacred Band of Thebes. Crete, Sparta, Athens, some of the Celtic tribes. I don't recall reading about a Sacred Band equivalent in Rome, but nobody blinked at two soldiers sleeping together for the majority of the empire's history.

You can absolutely write a dystopia which is homophobic. But it's written in a different way, a more deliberate way, which highlights it and drives it home to the reader. Brown didn't do that. It's normalised in the writing in a way that the abuse of the Reds isn't, so subtle that most readers probably miss it. And even a homophobic dystopia needs a motive for its homophobia - something about keeping birthrates up, maybe, or the rise of a particular religion, etc - to be believable. If Brown had built a deliberately homophobic dystopia, but not explained why it was homophobic, how the culture had (d)evolved in this way, I would still have criticized it.

But a) the homophobia in this world is not a deliberate part of the corruption Brown created and not something our hero is fighting against, because it's not seen as a social evil by the characters in the way the abuse of the Reds/strict caste system is and b) there is no reason given in the text why the homophobia is there. To which I must conclude that it's only there because of lazy writing and worldbuilding.

Thanks for the review. I agree with your analysis, that this sort of homophobic language (i.e. with no contextualization or legitimate world-building purposes) is at best an unnecessary distraction and at worst a bad sign for the author, and should be objected to. I was waiting for the trilogy to end before I give it a try. But I think I skip it altogether now.

Darrow was too arrogant, immature, and rude for my taste. It was annoying to read paragraphs where he complimented his skills and considered himself superior to others. Then he failed and I thought he would learn his lesson in Golden Son. But no! He was still arrogant and underestimated the situation.

I thik you are right for LGBT angle not rape. İt is an brutal universe and people send their children kill or die tests they do not interested any woman right or trauma and ı feel cruelty of system in the books. and if you dont count nobilty womans have not most right in history. in muslim country they can divorce, refuse marriage, refuse secont wife in law but even that do not work mostly because judges, law makers, ....et cetera all was man west and China was worse if you are not noble even man are can not divorce and ı do not thalk about 1000 years ago 200 years ago was same

[skydancer8]

I thik you are right for LGBT angle not rape. İt is an brutal universe and people send their children kill or die tests they do not interested any woman right or trauma and ı feel cruelty of system in the books. and if you dont count nobilty womans have not most right in history. in muslim country they can divorce, refuse marriage, refuse secont wife in law but even that do not work mostly because judges, law makers, ....et cetera all was man west and China was worse if you are not noble even man are can not divorce and ı do not thalk about 1000 years ago 200 years ago was same

I'm not sure I perfectly understand your comment, because the English is a bit broken, so I'm sorry if I misunderstood something. But a) my main issue with the rape in the book is not that it exists, but how it's used as a literary device to identify villains - every time a female character is raped, it's about motivating the main (male) character to stop the (male) bad guys, and the trauma/effect the experience has on the girls is completely handwaved. Which is just stupid and disrespectful.

And b) that is the layperson's version of Ancient History, but it's not actually true; in a lot of the Nordic/Viking cultures, for example, rape was punishable by exile (which, in those climates up north, equals a death sentence). The Aztecs also punished rape with death; in ancient Sumer, the first human civilization, for a citizen to rape another citizen was punishable by execution. Etc. A lot of ancient cultures took rape very seriously, and again, women, even non-noble women, had enormous power and respect even in medieval Europe, which is what we think of when we think 'oh, women in ancient times had it so hard'. China and Egypt's royal families were both originally matrilineal and matriarchal; there are several instances both in ancient China and Egypt of kings having to step down in favour of their daughters, because the daughters were the ones with the right to rule. And in ancient Rome, which I think Red Rising uses as at least partial inspiration for the Gold culture, women could divorce their partners simply by sending them a letter, or by announcing in front of witnesses that the marriage was now over.

So it's complete bs, basically, to say women had zero rights in the ancient world, and even if that were true, it wouldn't make for good worldbuilding to say they have no/little rights thousands of years in the future. If it's a crime now in our time it really doesn't make sense that it would be brushed off in a society that treats its men and women as equals in all other ways. And, as I said, my main issue was with how the rape was used as a shoddy plot device anyway, which is undeniable and disrespectful to all the real-life people who've had to deal with it.

[skydancer8]

I thik you are right for LGBT angle not rape. İt is an brutal universe and people send their children kill or die tests they do not interested any woman right or trauma and ı feel cruelty of system in the books. and if you dont count nobilty womans have not most right in history. in muslim country they can divorce, refuse marriage, refuse secont wife in law but even that do not work mostly because judges, law makers, ....et cetera all was man west and China was worse if you are not noble even man are can not divorce and ı do not thalk about 1000 years ago 200 years ago was same

Also, if we're talking about a culture where people send their children into this test expecting or at least accepting that they're going to be raped and possibly not come home at all, it's utterly unrealistic that there are no male rape victims. I was going to link to a few articles, but honestly, they're so horrible I don't want to trigger anyone. But go google male victims of rape in war. It happens constantly, and some studies/experts suggest that a man is actually more likely to be raped in modern war than a woman is. So why is this not a thing in Red Rising? A stigma against homosexuality doesn't prevent the rape of men by men; if anything, it encourages it, because in a crazy twist of anti-logic the victims are the ones stigmatised. That it's not a thing in Red Rising goes back to what I said before; that Brown is a lazy world-builder (there's no reason for the misogyny and homophobia presented in his world, they're both just something he wrote in automatically because that's how he sees the world) who doesn't actually understand rape, not as a trauma that has a real effect on actual people (in which case he would have written it very differently if he wrote it at all) and not the fact that rape is not something that happens only to women. His world-building fails and his attempt at 'realism', if that's what it was, falls apart the second you start poking at it.