Morning Star

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If I could give this more than five stars, I would.

There are spoilers for the first two books. So, if you haven't read them and don't like spoilers, for the love of Eo don't read this review.

This is the conclusion of the “Red Rising” trilogy. In the first book, we were given a YA dystopia in the mode of “Hunger Games” and “Divergent.” The hero, Darrow, lives in a future where the solar system has been terraformed and society (the “Society”) has been transformed into a genetically determined caste system based on “Colors,” with Gold being the rulers and Reds being the proletarian slaves. Darrow is a Red who is “cut” to become a Gold by the subversive “Sons of Aries” revolutionary movement in order to penetrate and. He enters the Gold academy and performs brilliantly and is poised to enter the Society at a high enough level to further the goals of the movement. Along the way, he makes friends (Sevro, Cassius) and finds a love interest (Mustang.) At this point, it is all a solid YA dystopian coming of age novel.

In the second book, Darrow moves his plot along, overcoming long odds, making alliances, poising himself for some military position high enough to support the revolution. We see further into the Society, how it developed, its mores and military practices, such as the “Iron Rain.” However, it all comes undone at the last minutes when Darrow is unmasked, some of his friends are killed, and he is handed over to his enemy for torture and execution.

The third book opens with a defeated Darrow imprisoned in a tight, cramped box. Things look bad for him, until - voila! - there is an improbably rescue filled with excitement and action. He is re-united with Sevro and the rest of the surviving Sons of Aries who have been fighting a guerilla war on Mars in his absence. From there it is a matter of reintegrating him in the movement and allowing him to take over more and more control as the stakes and battles get bigger and bigger.

I loved this book as a classic in the pulp tradition. The space battles were exciting with a logic to their seguences as leech craft lock onto capital ships to drill their way into those ships to allow the marines they carry to capture the ships from inside. At the same time Ripwings try to destroy the leechcraft and rail guns shred friends and enemies alike.

If you ever liked classic pulp from E.E. “Doc” Smith, this is your book.

This is not to say that there are not problems with the book. The ending sequence seemed wildly unlikely and ad hoc, and, yet, satisfying. At other times, the author's desire to build suspense led me to weirdness. Mustang gets a near disembowling cut at the end, which is ignored immediately and she continues to fight for another hour, I think.

Another problem is that Darrow becomes a completely dishonest narrator at the end in order to conceal the big surprise. There may be some wiggle room to argue that he was simply acting in order to sell the scam, but that is hard to do with author Pierce Brown's decision to write a stream of consciousness in the present tense.

But the fact is that by that time Brown had made the sale to me so that I was willing to overlook issues that I would have picked at if I had been even slightly bored. Instead, I moved past problems, caught up as I was in the excitement of the storytelling.

Brown has left plot ends dangling for later books.

I enjoyed this book thoroughly as a kind of escapist return to the roots of science fiction.