Book Notes: Red Rising

A fun read, with more depth than I expected. I’m planning to read the other books in this series.

Book highlights

They decide the winner. A game of merit won by birth. It keeps the hierarchy in place. It keeps us striving, but never conspiring.

An empire cannot be destroyed from without till it is destroyed from within. Remember that. We’re empire-breakers, not terrorists.

But the game isn’t like that, because life isn’t like that. Gods don’t come down in life to mete out justice. The powerful do it.

But we have widgets and datapads now, and we Golds have the lower Colors to do our research. We need not study chemistry or physics. We have computers and others to do that. What we must study is humanity. In order to rule, ours must be the study of political, psychological, and behavioral science—how desperate human beings react to one another, how packs form, how armies function, how things fall apart and why.

Man cannot be freed by the same injustice that enslaved it.