In the world of Red Rising, leadership grows out of love.
More specifically, true leadership—as opposed to mere domination—depends on a leader’s ability to embody love as defined by psychiatrist M. Scott Peck: “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.”
The novel follows Darrow, a Martian miner living in a dystopian caste system loosely based on ancient Roman society. Darrow is a “Red,” a member of an exploited group whose sole purpose is to terraform Mars for the benefit of the “Golds” . . . or so he has always been told.
When his wife is executed for singing a radical protest song—and he discovers that the surface of Mars has actually been fit for human life for centuries—Darrow joins a resistance movement and infiltrates the Golds’ elite military training academy, aiming to take the system down from the inside. To do that, he will have to lead House Mars in an all-out war against other aspiring Golds for control of the Institute.
While author Pierce Brown uses a structure common to recent dystopian fiction—pitting groups of young people against each other in violent conflict—Red Rising stands out for its focus on leadership and group dynamics, rather than individual survival. While Darrow quickly distinguishes himself as a charismatic leader within his assigned House, he soon finds out that he cannot win the true loyalty of the Golds by being a tyrant. While other House leaders secure short-term victories by brutalizing enemies and friends alike, Darrow takes the longer route of earning his troops’ respect by putting his own reputation, body, and life on the line, again and again.
It’s fascinating to follow Darrow as he learns from his early mistakes and discovers how to win over first his own team and, later, the captured opponents under his command. At a key moment in the novel, Darrow is called upon to dispense justice to a Gold who has sexually assaulted another member of the group. Knowing that just punishing the offender won’t solve the House’s morale problem, he comes up with a solution that is at once clever, powerful, and moving.
In Darrow, and in the many interesting Gold characters caught up in the drama of the Institute, Brown offers deep insight into human motivation and the forces that make groups stick together.
Inventive, compelling, and highly entertaining, Red Rising is an excellent book for anyone interested in stories about the personal dimensions of politics, the nature of leadership, and the power of self-sacrifice. Readers looking to explore intriguing new worlds will enjoy the Romanesque interplanetary society of the Golds, while the novel’s open ending promises exciting further developments in the sequels.