I haven’t been for the past month or so, but reading fiction in the evenings has been a part of my evening shutdown routine during my better stretches this year. I’ve read mostly science fiction this year in the evenings, which brought a change from my previous habit of more classic literature. There was a short story collection that sparked a few thoughts, but the highlight of this reading was the Red Rising trilogy. I picked up the first one after hearing about it from a couple of the podcasts I listen to occasionally and ended up plowing through all three (there have been subsequent novels set in the same world too but I haven’t read those yet) in perhaps too short a period of time.

The first book starts on a partially terraformed Mars set at some indeterminate point in the future amidst a community of the lowest caste of a solar system wide society spanning from Mercury to the moons of the gas giants. There is interplanetary travel in the story, but there is nothing like hyperdrive and it can take months to traverse between different planets and moons. The main character, Darrow, is a young Helldiver operating deep in the mines of Mars. Then things proceed as Darrow navigates a world dominated by Golds (with a whole lot of other colors in between).

I won’t give a plot summary since I’m not interested in spoiling anything, but it is a wild ride. The action across the three novels is taut and fast-paced. I know that the mental image I have of some of the characters is wildly different than how they are described in the text, but that has never stopped me from enjoying a book before and there isn’t yet a film or television adaptation. The reader gets more of Darrow’s inner thoughts than those of the other characters, but there is a great deal of turmoil in him as he both shapes and is shaped by the events unfolding around him. This also isn’t a simple story of good universally triumphing over evil, and that makes it much more compelling.