Books: Morning Star By Pierce Brown (2016)

In Morning Star, the conclusion of Pierce Brown’s Red Rising Trilogy, we get another wild tale of war, revenge, politics, duplicitous humans, and more death and destruction than you can shake a leg at.

 “Darrow would have lived in peace, but his enemies brought him war. The Gold overlords demanded his obedience, hanged his wife, and enslaved his people. But Darrow is determined to fight back. Risking everything to transform himself and breach Gold society, Darrow has battled to survive the cutthroat rivalries that breed Society's mightiest warriors, climbed the ranks, and waited patiently to unleash the revolution that will tear the hierarchy apart from within. Finally, the time has come. But the devotion to honor and hunger, for vengeance, runs deep on both sides. Darrow and his comrades-in-arms face powerful enemies without scruple or mercy. Among them are some that Darrow once considered friends. To win, Darrow will need to inspire those shackled in darkness to break their chains, unmake the world their cruel masters have built, and claim a destiny too long denied - and too glorious to surrender.” 

There is a lot at stake here, and the novel runs faster, harder, and more headlong than the previous two novels (mostly because there is a lot of stuff to cover in its 518 pages) combined. There is little time for sitting and talking, which is good…and bad. While the relentless works, it also takes on a sense that while many will pay the price for this war, you know the ending. Brown gives us a few surprises though, and brings forward Servo to give the series the dark, sarcastic humor it has lacked, but the ending was never in doubt. 

While the first person narrative worked for the first two books, here I feel that book could’ve been stronger had we seen other perspectives. Being in Darrow’s head all the time made the book go over so much of the same ground the previous books did. I have no doubt he loved Eo, but it becomes redundant when we cover his guilt feelings for her death and those of his extended family again and again. 

When I read the first book back in 2014, I was curious if the author was going to explain how, some 700 hundred years in the future, we humans became the way these folks did, where a society is based on color codes, where the Roman Empire somehow came again. But either it was not important, or something else, but we never get a glimpse on how this happened, even as Morning Star does make more references to Earth, to the Romans of yesteryear. I mean the works of Homer and Sophocles survived, but apparently Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire did not, which I find curious (I also ruminated on the oddness of Darrow’s name that came up in Red Rising, that the name was unusual, but again, this story thread was dropped).

 

Unlike James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse series, which went out of its way to explain space travel, Pierce Brown forgoes all of this, which then leads me to believe this whole series really is a space opera in the vein of Star Wars or Star Trek, with a lot of gory elements borrowed from George R.R. Martin.

This was not, as it may seem, a horrible series. I enjoyed it and look forward to seeing where Pierce Brown goes from here. It’s just I’m not a huge fan of ultra sadistic books, where human life is tossed away like a forgotten toy. I go numb from the horrible ways in which people die, even these fictional characters. That is part of the reason I gave up on Game of Thrones. I grew weary of so much death, and the blurring of the line between moving the story forward and torture porn.

As I said, I’m curious as where Pierce Brown will go from here. A nice hard-core science fiction novel or even a good fantasy novel would be nice. I hate to see him stuck producing just this style of space opera over the next decade. 

But we’ll see.

Books: Golden Son By Pierce Brown (2015)

With Golden Son, author Pierce Brown's second novel in his Red Rising Trilogy, he's able to forgo the World Building that preoccupied the first book and rush pellmell into Darrow's emotional and very violent struggle to bring down the Gold society from within that dominates the worlds of Mars and Luna (the moon). 

The story picks up two years after the events of Red Rising, and we see Darrow au Andromedus on a training mission aboard his own starship for war-games -though these Academy days seem fairly over, as this is about all we see of that time. Still, as Darrow navigates his way, he worries about the fact that in that time, he's heard nothing from the Sons of Ares, the secret rebellion group that started him on this journey. In the end though, this shift away from the Institute opens the book to a wider and more complex arena, even if the reader is forced to believe that Darrow had the ability, the agility to keep up his deceptive appearance amongst the duplicitous Golds for all those years without hearing from the Sons of Ares. Anyways, Darrow’s reach has expand exponentially, and story leaves Mars behind (for now) which helps with the action, as things move swifter than a nail driven through concrete out into the galaxy. Brown, however, is not afraid to take his hero Darrow down a few pegs, but like any true defender of the downtrodden, he gets back up to continue. But this can also be a bit of contrivance, Brown ultimately explains it that the reason Darrow does not let things defeat him is because the real tragedy of this struggle is the massive loss of life -something not done by his hand, of course, but more so the effect of what he's become. So he's driven more by guilt so he must always get back up on his two feet. And that maybe one of the very few flaws with the book; Brown's over reliance on this story structure. Darrow encounter's some horrible situation, then comes up with a magical (it seems) solution then suddenly stumbles into another setback. 

Unfortunately, this had the tendency to take me out of the narrative. But the book does rocket along and (hopefully) it'll break out of the box that some seem to want to put it in, that this is just another dystopian novel in the vein of The Hunger Games. By far, these books (especially this second one) are better written, with more complex characters and with higher stakes, so those thoughts should be set aside. 

Again, there is no clear explanation to how Earth fell, but Brown makes some veiled references. History, they say, repeats itself and Golden Son could be defined as a retelling of the Roman Empire during its glory years. And while Homer and Sophocles survived, apparently Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire did not. And this colored based society has no historian (probably suppressed by the Golds), but to be honest, I'm not sure they would even admit that the original Roman tumbled under its own importance. 

I'm curious if, in the end, all this series is really is about, a science fiction retelling of Roman Empire and it's eventual (in book III) fall. 

But for me, who devoured this in a few days, I have a long wait for 2016 and that final book.