Red Rising

This might be both my fastest DNF to date, and a surprising one. I always have a soft spot for scifi generally, and am especially compelled by any intersection of labor and any speculative fiction.

Maybe the strongest antipathy I have is toward the protagonist, which I register is something that could just be a matter of personality. Like, I can’t say I was fond of Ignatius J. Reilly, but I was almost always interested in what he was thinking. And an important detail here is that, at least as far as I got, the protagonist is just a kid (a 16-year-old boy) living a nightmare.

But as I read more, I realize more often that I’m always working with a finite and fluctuating pool of charity toward any given book (I tried at least twice before this year to read A Confederacy of Dunces and didn’t have the patience). So, being finite, the charity I can extend to, say, Darrow, is limited by the charity I feel like I have to extend to the rest of the work. So when Darrow is occasionally not r/iamverybadass-ing around and I read this:

> A cadre of Tinpots eye us as we trudge by over the worn concrete floor. Their Gray duroArmor is simple and tired, as unkempt as their hair. It would stop a simple blade, maybe an ion blade, and a pulseBlade or razor would go through it like paper. But we’ve only seen those on the holoCan. The Grays don’t even bother to make a show of force. Their thumpers dangle at their sides.

I spend a long time in my notes enumerating all of the tropes I hate and finding the right TVTropes url for them. I’m typing this all on a phone and, well, don’t have the patience to include them all + formatting now, but maybe will later. Or maybe I’ll find one be swept away again by one of the literally thousands of books I would like instead!

I read the whole trilogy in the end. It's not too bad!

I liked how the first book set off quickly. After having read Wool, I was ready to spend the whole book gradually learning what lies behind the propaganda. But slow investigation is not what this book is about.

A couple pages later, and we are in "school", in a Hunger Games battle that lasts months. It is a testosterone overdose dreamscape. All the boys are superhuman invincible body-builders. All the girls are supermodel damsels in distress. All the action is medieval. The sci-fi disappears while we watch this battle royale where everyone is just fighting with swords on horseback.

Already the worst part of the series is evident in a way. The hero is the best at everything and always wins. But that would be boring, right? So sometimes he makes a dumb mistake for no good reason other than regretting it for the rest of the series. Pax

These mistakes felt so out of place to me. He's the best fighter, best tactician, best strategist, best friend, etc. Why walk into an ambush that the reader can recognize from miles away?

That's how I recall it anyway. I should have written this review in April...

After seeing the high scores on Goodreads for this book I started it with great anticipation. The first few chapters slipped away fast enough; it is certainly easy reading and you get caught up in the story. However, the problem comes when you stop reading and think for a minute. With a science fiction book you expect to have your credulity stretched with regard to technology and so on, but this book falls down on basic believability and actions of the characters. [Spoiler alert]. To put a couple of teenagers in a room and that they decide one needs to murder the other to leave the room is not so likely, but that apparently hundreds of them all come to the same conclusion independently and swiftly is just silly. And then to postulate that a society based on leadership from children who are all murderers is stable for hundreds of years? And that their parents not only send them to a likely death but do nothing to prepare them for what is to come? But worse than all those unlikely elements, far worse, is the assumption throughout the book that conflicts can only possibly be solved by warfare and death. The characters are all supposed to be incredibly clever. Can they really not come up with anything better than that between them? Clearly, this is a book aimed at young adults (my fault for not realising that before starting it) and it is horrifying to think what message this (as well as similar 'dystopian' novels) imparts to its young readers.

I bought this comic yesterday at the local comic shop. I haven't read it yet because I need Tim Gerard Reynolds to come over and read it aloud.

I liked it but it didn't really click with me. It felt like a typical dystopian novel

This book isn't well-written. It isn't even well-edited. Repetative language, words, plot elements.
It is the same old-same old YA rebellion-in-making.
And yet... it is captivating. I love it. It touches my rebel streak.
A lot of the praise should go to the narrator, Tim Gerard Reynolds. His voiceacting brings the story to sparkling life. First the rough accent, then slowly the transformation to Gold, while still keeping that edge. Wonderful job.
Had the book been edited better and the actual writing been better, it would have earned another star. Too bad. But is a most enjoyable read, and I am looking forward to the sequels.

It's kinda the same genre as Hunger Games, but beats its hands down.

Caste systems on Mars. Teenagers playing war games at Command School with life or death consequences. Deception, disguises, and subterfuge. Welcome to Red Rising.

The first part of the book was slow, and I almost gave up on it. I did not get attached to Darrow or Eo, and did not care about their harsh life under the surface of Mars. But I found myself enjoying the story much more from Part 2 on, although the book was plodding at times and I never did get attached to Darrow. He's just too perfect. He was better at everything and it was tiring to read. But I enjoyed the politics of the story and the world building was solid. I will eventually read book 2. 3 stars.