Red Rising
Red Rising
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Pierce Brown on Red Rising
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A hike, a Greek play, and a red planetThe project began not at a desk but on a mountain. Brown was 22, freshly out of college, and had been rereading the Greek tragedy ‘Antigone’ in the days before a hike in the Cascade Mountains. What he saw in the sky on that hike closed the circuit between the ancient play and an entirely new world.
Then I read the play Antigone... a week later, on a mountain hike, I saw Mars bright in the sky. A seed planted by Antigone began to grow. What if I took ancient Greece, added stars, spaceships, opera, Romans, twists, betrayal and blood!? Two months later, I had Red Rising.
What the hike gave him was not a plot but a question about grief and consequence. He had been moved by ‘Antigone’ not as a political fable but as a love story with an aftermath nobody writes: the person the martyr leaves behind.
I was hiking in the Cascade Mountain Range, and I’d been rereading the Greek play Antigone. I was struck by the contrast in the story, the dichotomy of the forces represented, a young disenfranchised girl who stands up to cold power, and I thought what a beautiful thing it was that such a fragile character could be a seed of destruction. Then I wondered, What did Antigone leave behind? What if there was a person who was in love with Antigone? How could her actions transform not only him but the world? The story started to unravel before me.
Because the book began with a death rather than a hero, the character Brown conceived first was not Darrow. The woman who dies is the one who generated everything.
Eo was conceived far, far ahead of Darrow. She was the first character. It was always about that sacrifice.
Darrow is, in this framing, a reaction: the person shaped by a loss he could not prevent. That design decision carries the book’s emotional logic all the way through.
Moving through eight states and more than ten schools before finishing high school gave Brown a firsthand education in what it costs to be an outsider trying to read an unfamiliar room. That accumulated experience became the book’s emotional fuel, combined with two specific literary antecedents he had been carrying for years.
Adversity sparked Red Rising. I lived in eight states before I graduated high school. That’s a lot of social cliques to break into. I started at public schools, and then went to some of the stodgiest private schools this side of Dead Poets’ Society. Much of the adversity there came from the teachers. I wanted to capture that feeling of social anxiety and oppression, and combine [it] with the Greek play Antigone and Dumas’ perfect work, The Count of Monte Cristo.
How he wrote it
Plato poisoned, slang from library archivesBrown did not plan the book before writing it. The first draft arrived in roughly six weeks of continuous forward momentum, carried by a protagonist whose motivation was clear enough to make plotting feel secondary. That instinct against outlining has stayed with him.
I’m not a plotter. I found writing an immediate first-person story very liberating.
The Society’s color hierarchy, in which Golds rule and Reds mine the planet’s lowest tunnels, was not invented from scratch. Brown lifted the skeleton of the system from Plato’s ‘Republic’ and then asked what the philosopher had failed to account for.
The origin here is in Plato’s Republic, where he says that in a perfect society men should form a natural hierarchy. There are men with souls of gold, men with souls of copper, iron. The ones of iron should till the soil, while the ones of gold should rule the city. But he didn’t believe it should pass down through birth; he believed it was a meritocracy. The problem is that he didn’t see that people would want to accumulate wealth or power and pass it down to those they love. So I thought that would be interesting: We have a meritocracy, but how could it be poisoned?
The Reds’ dialect, the ‘bloodydamn’ oaths and colloquialisms that give the mining caste its texture, were not made up at the keyboard. Brown spent time in library archives reading immigration-era documents before he wrote a single line of Red dialogue.
I based a lot of the Reds’ slang on posters that were put up in New York during the Irish immigration in the latter half of the 19th century. I took some of their verbiage, and I just altered it.
The goal was belonging, not color. Language, in his view, is the mechanism by which a community signals who is inside it and who is not. Giving the Reds a shared idiom grounded in real historical dispossession made that signal legible.
His two years studying political science and economics at Pepperdine, followed by work on a Senate campaign, fed the book’s power mechanics directly. Where the color hierarchy supplies spectacle, the underlying logic of how power accumulates and holds itself in place comes from a specific reading list.
Both of those disciplines are considered social sciences — that is, the study of people and how they interact. Both heavily influence how I portray interactions in Red Rising. I draw specifically on Locke, Hobbes, Aristotle, Plato, Napoleon, and Nietzsche.
Darrow was built in deliberate opposition to a kind of hero Brown had grown tired of. The concern was honesty: a protagonist whose hands stay clean at the end of a violent story is a lie about what violence costs, and Brown wanted a different deal with his reader.
I, Darrow came about as a character because I was irritated by the Hollywood type protagonist who has to be morally clean at the end of a story... I wanted Darrow to be like, let’s bathe this guy in blood and see if his thesis still stands and let’s see how his heart can war against itself, because I think that’s fundamental for having an interesting protagonist. [paraphrased from audio]
The personal thread
Darrow as a compass for a directionless yearWhen Brown sat down to write, he was 22, without a clear career path, living in a professor’s garage and giving studio tours at NBC. Darrow did not begin as autobiography, but the character’s defining quality, a sense of absolute purpose, was something Brown was writing toward for himself as much as for a reader.
I didn’t initially write him to be my doppelgänger. I wrote him at a time when I was graduating college, and Darrow was a way to clarify my own objectives and goals. As a generation, we’re left to our own devices to find what we’re seeking. Darrow has a mission. It’s the assurance he has. I found my North Star.
In a video Q&A for Penguin Random House, Brown returned to the same period and made the transfer between himself and Darrow more explicit. The dead-end jobs were not background color; they were the pressure the character was built to release.
a vessel for myself because I’d just come out of school and was working a bunch of dead-end jobs and didn’t have a vehicle to feel empowerment. [paraphrased from audio]
On what the book is wrestling with
Whether revolution survives the revolutionaryThe Society’s Golds justify their dominance as a natural order earned through merit, which is precisely the argument Plato made and which Brown spent the novel stress-testing. The question underneath the plot is whether any system built on that premise can remain what it claims to be.
The overall goal of what I want to do with using sci-fi is to help them question our culture today. And that’s the advantage of science fiction because you’re not attacking them and their beliefs now directly, so you can make them just think. [paraphrased from audio]
Brown designed Darrow’s arc to carry a specific philosophical weight: that a person who goes to war against a corrupt system will be changed by that war in ways that complicate the victory. The series exists because he has not found a clean way out of that problem.
If I had an answer for that question [whether true revolution is possible without becoming what you were trying to destroy], I wouldn’t be writing the series. [paraphrased from audio]
For all its mythological architecture, Brown has been consistent that the book’s scope of ambition is limited by his age when he wrote it. He resists the idea that the novel is delivering a political argument.
I’m not trying to tell anyone anything. I was 23 when I wrote this, which is pretty limited life experience, so I have to come at this with a massive degree of humility. It’s not necessarily saying what I think but what is real in this imaginary world.
What he wants us to sit with
The temerity to struggle when all seems darkWhen Brown describes what he hopes readers take from the series, he does not reach for politics or plot. The word he keeps returning to is one that the book earns slowly, across years of following characters through failures they do not recover from cleanly.
Empathy. I don’t think my series has any overt goals. I hope it enriches their sense of humanity, that they seek to find connections, and can overcome their own personal obstacles after they’ve seen characters they love and have followed for years overcome their obstacles. I hope they have the temerity to struggle, even when all seems dark.