I just finished books 1–3 of Red Rising by Pierce Brown, and I want to talk about it.
If you've read any modern dystopian fiction, the setup will feel familiar: a rigid caste system, a protagonist from the bottom who finds out the world is a lie, and a long fight to tear it all down. Red Rising hits every one of those beats. What makes it different is the scale. This isn't a single city or a single country. The stage is the entire solar system.
What It Gets Right
The world is big and the book actually uses that bigness. Factions, fleets, planets, moons — by the third book the conflict has grown into something that genuinely feels solar-system-wide, not just a backdrop with a couple of locations on it.
The characters are where it really got me. By the end of the first book I was attached to most of the main cast, and that only deepened through books two and three. When the stakes rise — and they rise constantly — it matters because you care about the people the stakes are landing on.
It's also, plainly, fun. Pierce Brown writes action well, the politics are messy in a satisfying way, and the twists land more often than they don't.
The Slow Start
I'll be honest: the first stretch of book one took me a little while to get into. The world-building is dense up front and the early chapters spend a lot of time establishing the setup before the story really opens up.
But once it got going, it got going. I was reading chapters at lunch during work. That's the test for me — if I'm finding fifteen-minute windows in the middle of a workday to pick a book back up, the book is doing its job.
The Movie/TV Problem
After finishing book three I went looking for news on an adaptation, because this series feels tailor-made for the screen. What I found instead was a graveyard of dead deals.
The problem is the same thing that makes the books great: the scope. A story that spans the entire solar system is expensive. Multiple TV and film projects have been announced and quietly fallen through, apparently because the budget required to do it justice is hard to justify.
Maybe someday someone takes the swing. I hope so. Until then, the books are the version that exists, and they're worth the time.
Would I Recommend It?
Yes — easily. If you're a fan of dystopian fiction, space opera, or (lucky you) both, this series should be on your list. Push through the slower opening and you'll be rewarded with three books that get bigger, faster, and better as they go.
I'm taking a short break before starting book four, but I'll be back.