Red Rising Review: Revenge, Empire, and the Cost of Becoming Gold

Pierce Brown’s Red Rising begins as what looks like a familiar revenge story. In its opening movement, it resembles a science-fiction version of The Count of Monte Cristo: an ordinary young man is stripped of his former life, remade through suffering and education, and sent back into the world as a weapon.

But Darrow’s grievance is larger than Edmond Dantès’s. He has not merely been betrayed by jealous rivals or corrupt officials. His entire civilisation is built on a lie. To take revenge, he must enter the ruling caste responsible for that lie—and become exceptionally good at being one of them.

That is the novel’s real tension. The danger is not only that the Golds will discover Darrow. It is that Darrow may discover how naturally their power comes to him.

Spoiler note: This review discusses the novel’s opening, Darrow’s transformation, and the basic structure of the Institute, but avoids the ending.

Cover image: Red Rising by Pierce Brown, published by Del Rey. Used here for purposes of review and commentary.

The Lie Beneath Mars

Seven centuries before the novel opens, humanity colonised Luna and reorganised itself into a rigid hierarchy known as the Society. Humanity is divided into fourteen colour-coded castes, each engineered, educated, and conditioned for a designated social function.

At the top stand the Golds: physically enhanced, politically dominant, and trained from childhood to regard rule as their biological purpose. At the bottom are the Reds, expendable labourers whose hardship is justified through a carefully maintained fiction.

Darrow is a sixteen-year-old Red helium-3 miner beneath the surface of Mars. He believes that he and his people are making the planet habitable for future generations. Their suffering is presented as heroic sacrifice: brutal in the present, but necessary for humanity’s future.

The truth is that Mars was terraformed generations ago. Cities, forests, and a wealthy civilisation already exist above them. The Reds are not pioneers. They are slaves kept productive by the belief that their exploitation serves a noble purpose.

This is one of Brown’s most effective political ideas. The Society does not rule the Reds through violence alone. It gives their suffering meaning. An oppressed population is easier to control when deprivation can be interpreted as duty.

Revenge Disguised as Revolution

Darrow’s awakening begins with Eo, his wife, who publicly defies the Society and is executed. Her death draws him towards the revolutionary Sons of Ares and transforms his private grief into a mission against the entire hierarchy.

The emotional logic is powerful, but it is worth noticing how the novel uses Eo. She becomes the moral source of the rebellion, the lost love whose dream Darrow must carry forward. Yet she has relatively little space to exist outside that function.

Darrow’s political purpose is therefore built around a highly personal loss. He may be fighting for millions of Reds, but the force driving him remains intimate: love, grief, humiliation, and rage.

That is not necessarily a weakness. Revolutions are rarely powered by abstract theory alone. People often understand systemic injustice only after it wounds them personally. But it complicates the claim that Darrow has moved beyond revenge. Eo’s dream gives his anger a political vocabulary; it does not remove the anger underneath it.

The question throughout the novel is whether Darrow is learning to seek liberation—or merely expanding the list of people against whom he wants revenge.

Carving a New Man

To infiltrate the Golds, Darrow undergoes a brutal “carving.” Mickey, a Violet artist and biological engineer, rebuilds his body: bones, muscles, eyes, skin, reflexes, and proportions. He is then trained physically, culturally, and psychologically to pass among the ruling caste.

The parallel with Dantès is clearest here. Both protagonists disappear from their former worlds and return transformed. Both acquire the knowledge and abilities needed to enter social spaces previously closed to them. Both emerge not merely restored, but weaponised.

The difference is that Dantès acquires education, wealth, and a new identity. Darrow acquires an almost entirely new body.

This is where my scientific instincts initially tugged at the story. The physical differences between the Colours are enormous, and Brown attributes them to generations of genetic engineering, reproductive control, and selective pressure.

But asking whether Golds and Reds would still count as the same species is not quite the right objection. Species are not defined simply by visible difference, strength, height, or anatomy. Under the biological species concept, the crucial question would be whether the populations remain capable of exchanging genes and producing fertile offspring. The novel does not give us enough information at this stage to settle that question, and biology offers no single universally applicable species test in any case.

Nor is seven hundred years necessarily too short for dramatic change when a civilisation possesses deliberate genetic engineering advanced enough to rebuild Darrow. The implausibility lies less in the speed of natural evolution than in the astonishing neatness of the result: fourteen castes, each associated with a defined function, remaining sufficiently distinct and politically stable across centuries.

That artificial tidiness is also the point. The Colours are not a prediction of how human evolution would naturally proceed. They are political ideology made flesh. The Society has taken the claim that some people are born to rule and others to serve, then engineered bodies that appear to prove it.

The Institute and the Logic of Empire

After surviving the entrance process, Darrow is admitted to the Institute, where the next generation of Gold leaders is trained. At this point, the novel changes shape.

The Count of Monte Cristo comparison begins to recede. The Institute is closer to a collision among The Hunger Games, Lord of the Flies, and Ender’s Game: privileged adolescents placed inside an engineered conflict and told that brutality will reveal who deserves power.

The training begins with the Passage. Students are paired and forced to fight to the death. Half are eliminated before the larger exercise even starts.

The survivors are divided among Houses and released into the Valles Marineris. Each House receives a fortress and must conquer the others. Captured flags reduce opponents to slaves. Alliances form and collapse. Food, territory, prestige, and violence become instruments through which an artificial society rapidly recreates the hierarchy outside it.

The Institute does not teach the Golds that power is morally justified. It teaches them that victory constitutes justification.

The strongest student is not necessarily the wisest, most compassionate, or most capable administrator. It is the person best able to dominate peers under conditions designed to reward manipulation, deprivation, and force. The Society then interprets survival in that environment as evidence of fitness to rule.

This is ideology disguised as a meritocracy. The Golds create a test that rewards Gold values, then point to the results as proof that those values are natural.

The Seduction of Leadership

Darrow enters the Institute intending to study and eventually destroy the ruling class. Instead, he discovers that he can lead it.

He is physically formidable, quick to understand the incentives around him, and able to inspire loyalty through shared hardship. He adapts faster than many students born into Gold society because his earlier life has already taught him endurance, danger, and collective dependence.

This is satisfying to read. Brown understands the intoxicating appeal of competence. Darrow enters a system designed to humiliate and expose him, then begins beating its natural heirs at their own game.

But every victory creates a moral problem. Darrow wants to overthrow a hierarchy while building one of his own. He despises the Golds’ belief that power proves superiority, yet his success increasingly depends on demonstrating superior power.

His strongest moments come when he rejects some part of the Institute’s logic: when he recognises that loyalty can be earned rather than compelled, that followers are more useful as people than as property, and that leadership need not be identical to terror.

Even then, the alternatives remain entangled. Darrow often offers freedom because it creates stronger allegiance. Compassion may be sincere, strategic, or both. The novel is most interesting when it refuses to separate those motives cleanly.

The Institute is supposed to teach Darrow how Golds rule. It also gives him repeated opportunities to enjoy ruling.

Darrow and Baru: Two Ways into an Empire

It is difficult not to compare Red Rising with Seth Dickinson’s The Traitor Baru Cormorant. Both novels follow gifted young protagonists who enter imperial institutions with the stated purpose of destroying them from within.

But the two books imagine power differently.

Baru studies currencies, administrative structures, elite incentives, and the hidden dependencies that hold an empire together. Her battlefield is institutional. Darrow’s is theatrical and martial. He wins followers through courage, violence, charisma, and the ability to turn himself into a symbol.

One story suffocates; the other burns.

Baru’s danger is that prolonged service to the empire will make complicity indistinguishable from infiltration. Darrow’s danger is that he will become the kind of leader the Society has always claimed humanity needs: exceptional, commanding, violent, and convinced that history depends on his will.

Neither protagonist merely puts on a disguise. Each adopts a role that rewards talents already present. The mask is dangerous because it fits.

Where the Novel Strains

Red Rising moves with tremendous force. Brown is good at escalation, reversal, rivalry, and the sudden conversion of personal humiliation into public spectacle. The prose rarely allows the reader enough time to question whether the world could function as described before the next crisis arrives.

That momentum carries the novel through some obvious exaggerations. The colour hierarchy is too orderly. The Institute is a spectacularly wasteful way to educate a governing elite. Its brutality is so overt that the Society occasionally resembles a civilisation designed specifically to produce rebellion.

The characters can also be broader than the political questions surrounding them. Eo becomes an ideal. Gold rivals often embody recognisable aristocratic types. Darrow’s ability to master new physical, intellectual, and social demands sometimes approaches wish fulfilment.

Yet these excesses are closely connected to what the novel does well. *Red Rising* is not cautious sociological speculation. It is political mythology: Rome, Sparta, caste, slavery, revolution, and young-adult competition fiction compressed into a story that moves at the speed of revenge.

The world is exaggerated because Darrow experiences it as revelation. Everything he believed has collapsed, and the replacement reality is larger, crueller, and more operatic than the tunnels in which he grew up.

The Cost of Becoming Gold

By the time the Houses are unleashed against one another, *Red Rising* has become more than a simple revenge tale. It is about transformation—biological, psychological, social, and political.

Brown’s strongest idea is not that the ruling class possesses genetically superior bodies. It is that a hierarchy can train everyone inside it to mistake domination for excellence. The Golds believe they deserve to rule because they survive institutions built to reward the behaviour of rulers.

Darrow intends to expose that fraud. But he can do so only by proving himself inside the same institutions.

The first novel leaves the contradiction unresolved. Its sequel, Golden Son, carries Darrow beyond the controlled brutality of the Institute and into the actual machinery of imperial power, where performance becomes harder to distinguish from identity.

If The Count of Monte Cristo is about a man patiently constructing the self capable of punishing his enemies, Red Rising is about a young man constructing the self capable of breaking an empire.

The unsettling question is whether the person capable of doing that will still know what freedom is for—or whether the Society will have succeeded in creating one more Gold.