The War Shelf

Where Red Rising Comes From

4 min read By Sandro Andreatta, historian With sources

Spoilers: the opening of book one only.

Red Rising is usually sold as The Hunger Games on Mars, and the comparison is fair. A short synopsis: a teenager from the bottom of a color-coded society takes part in a lethal survival-based contest run by the people on top. When Brown talks about where the books came from, though, he rarely mentions young adult fiction. He talks about Plato, about the Roman Republic, about a Greek tragedy he was rereading on a hike, and about a revenge novel from 1844.

A hierarchy that Plato meant to be perfect

The colors come from the ancient Greek philosopher Plato. In the Republic, Plato argues that a perfect society would sort people into a natural hierarchy, and Brown has said that this is where the caste system of Golds, Reds and the rest began.1 What interested him was the question Plato did not ask: how a society built on that idea could be poisoned.2 Brown has described the Golds as his version of Plato's philosopher-king, a meritocracy in which "a golden man with a golden soul" rules.3 The trilogy takes the philosopher-kings at their word and shows what they do to keep their place.

Rome, Republic and Empire

The Golds' names, titles and Latin mottos are the obvious Roman-inspired layer, and Brown is precise about it. In 2018 he said that much of the "historical and event-driven inspiration" comes from the Roman Republic (509 BC to 27 BC), while the iconography and nomenclature come from the Empire (27 BC – AD 284).4 For the sequel series he went further, to the years between Julius Caesar's death and the rise of Octavian, with their "shifting alliances" and "the privatization of armies".5 He has also named the television series Rome, for its intrigue, and Machiavelli, whom he read as a boy, for his ideas about power.6 Elsewhere he lists Locke, Hobbes, Aristotle, Plato, Napoleon and Nietzsche among the thinkers he draws on.7

Mars, not Ares

Setting the story on Mars was a thematic choice as well as a practical one. Brown has said the planet appealed to him because of the difference between the Roman god Mars and the Greek god Ares.8 The Romans used Mars as propaganda; the Greeks saw Ares as a bloody, rage-filled figure.9 A society that keeps order by violence plays out on the planet named for the Roman version of the war god.

Antigone in the mines

The first spark, by Brown's account, came when he was hiking in the Cascades and rereading Antigone from Sophocles. What struck him was "a young disenfranchised girl who stands up to cold power".10 He said the same in other interviews: a 2,500-year-old play about a girl defying authority,11 a young woman who sacrifices herself to reveal a corrupt law.12 Red Rising opens with an act of defiance of that kind, and it costs the young woman who commits it her life.

Slaves, immigrants and castes

For the Reds, Brown looked at history rather than myth. He based much of their slang on posters put up in New York during the nineteenth-century Irish immigration,13 and he read anthropological studies of immigrant and slave groups.14 In 2018 he added post-Civil War Reconstruction, "particularly the pernicious difficulty former slaves faced in finding work and true liberty", and the caste system in India.15 He also drew on eras in which slavery was not defined by race: "The victims of Rome and the Mongols were not racially targeted."16

The revenge plot

The story itself has older models. Brown has called Dune and Dumas's The Count of Monte Cristo "the closest parallels" to Red Rising in tone and story,17 and he has said that good portions of the book come from Monte Cristo and that the feelings Ender's Game gave him shaped it too.18 Read with that in mind, Darrow's path follows Edmond Dantès: a man wronged by the powerful, remade into one of them, working his revenge from inside their world.

A note for readers of this site

Asked in 2014 for his favorite writers, Brown named Gene Wolfe, Neil Gaiman, J. K. Rowling, Robert Heinlein and George R. R. Martin, and called Bernard Cornwell "my favorite writer of historical fiction".19 With the author of the Sharpe books on that list, it is less surprising that Red Rising's later wars are written with a historical novelist's interest in campaigns and politics.

Notes

  1. Catherine Elsworth, "Interview with Pierce Brown," Goodreads, December 2014, https://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/993.Pierce_Brown. ↩

  2. Catherine Elsworth, "Interview with Pierce Brown," Goodreads, December 2014, https://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/993.Pierce_Brown. ↩

  3. "Talking with Author Pierce Brown at Phoenix Comicon," Nerdophiles, June 18, 2015, https://nerdophiles.com/2015/06/18/talking-with-author-pierce-brown-at-phoenix-comicon. ↩

  4. Hank Stephenson, "Pierce Brown: Returning to the World of Red Rising," Shelf Awareness for Readers, January 19, 2018, https://www.shelf-awareness.com/readers/2018-01-19/pierce_brown:_returning_to_the_world_of_red_rising.html. ↩

  5. Hank Stephenson, "Pierce Brown: Returning to the World of Red Rising," Shelf Awareness for Readers, January 19, 2018, https://www.shelf-awareness.com/readers/2018-01-19/pierce_brown:_returning_to_the_world_of_red_rising.html. ↩

  6. "Talking with Author Pierce Brown at Phoenix Comicon," Nerdophiles, June 18, 2015, https://nerdophiles.com/2015/06/18/talking-with-author-pierce-brown-at-phoenix-comicon. ↩

  7. Megan Mooney, "An Interview with Pierce Brown," Turning Page, May 10, 2017, https://www.turningpagemag.com/2017/05/an-interview-with-pierce-brown.html. ↩

  8. Catherine Elsworth, "Interview with Pierce Brown," Goodreads, December 2014, https://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/993.Pierce_Brown. ↩

  9. Lauren Sarner, "Pierce Brown Knows Mars the Planet and Mars the God," Inverse, February 4, 2016, https://inverse.com/article/10941-pierce-brown-knows-mars-the-planet-and-mars-the-god-asking-the-prophet. ↩

  10. Catherine Elsworth, "Interview with Pierce Brown," Goodreads, December 2014, https://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/993.Pierce_Brown. ↩

  11. Lauren Sarner, "Pierce Brown Knows Mars the Planet and Mars the God," Inverse, February 4, 2016, https://inverse.com/article/10941-pierce-brown-knows-mars-the-planet-and-mars-the-god-asking-the-prophet. ↩

  12. "Interview with Pierce Brown, author of Red Rising," The Qwillery, January 27, 2014, https://theqwillery.com/2014/01/interview-with-pierce-brown-author-of.html. ↩

  13. Catherine Elsworth, "Interview with Pierce Brown," Goodreads, December 2014, https://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/993.Pierce_Brown. ↩

  14. "Interview with Pierce Brown, author of Red Rising," The Qwillery, January 27, 2014, https://theqwillery.com/2014/01/interview-with-pierce-brown-author-of.html. ↩

  15. Hank Stephenson, "Pierce Brown: Returning to the World of Red Rising," Shelf Awareness for Readers, January 19, 2018, https://www.shelf-awareness.com/readers/2018-01-19/pierce_brown:_returning_to_the_world_of_red_rising.html. ↩

  16. Hank Stephenson, "Pierce Brown: Returning to the World of Red Rising," Shelf Awareness for Readers, January 19, 2018, https://www.shelf-awareness.com/readers/2018-01-19/pierce_brown:_returning_to_the_world_of_red_rising.html. ↩

  17. Catherine Elsworth, "Interview with Pierce Brown," Goodreads, December 2014, https://www.goodreads.com/interviews/show/993.Pierce_Brown. ↩

  18. "Talking with Author Pierce Brown at Phoenix Comicon," Nerdophiles, June 18, 2015, https://nerdophiles.com/2015/06/18/talking-with-author-pierce-brown-at-phoenix-comicon. ↩

  19. "Interview with Pierce Brown, author of Red Rising," The Qwillery, January 27, 2014, https://theqwillery.com/2014/01/interview-with-pierce-brown-author-of.html. ↩