Red Rising

There’s a reason Pierce Brown’s “Red Rising” is one of the more popular science fiction books in recent memory. The first in a trilogy, “Red Rising” is a fantastic read that balances world building, character development and tight plotting. It takes a little while to get going, but it’s hard to put down once it does. The plot changes direction four to five times over the course of the book - just when you start to think you know where Brown is going, he throws a curveball that alters your perspective of the story. There’s more than enough here for an excellent TV show. This could be the next “Game of Thrones”.

The story is told through the eyes of Darrow, a headstrong young miner who works in the caverns of Mars, where he and his family are tasked with terraforming the planet to make it suitable for human colonization. They exist in a society with a rigid caste structure straight out of ancient India. Darrow’s people are the Low Reds, who have the unglamourous and supremely dangerous task of “hell diving”. There are Pinks, Browns, Greens, Blues, all under the brutal subjugation of the Golds, the 1% who rule over everything with an iron fist.

“Red Rising” takes place in a frightening transhumanist future, where the elites have genetically modified themselves to exalt themselves over the rest of society, while altering everyone else to fill preordained roles - sex slaves, miners, police, bureaucrats - that cater to their every whim. Imagine how unbearable Wall Street bankers would be if they actually were more intelligent, more attractive and more athletic than the rest of us. It’s the logic of Darwinism taken to its inevitable conclusion - modification, separation and eventually differentiation. The Golds and the Reds are still both human, but the gap between them is much wider than the ones that exist in our society.

Darrow discovers that reality first hand when tragedy changes the trajectory of his life, and he is forced to leave his placid world as a family man behind when his wife is publicly executed for defying the authorities and questioning her place in society. In the aftermath, he eventually links up with a shadowy group of revolutionaries called the Sons of Ares, who view him as a weapon they can aim at the Golds. They fake his death so that he is symbolically killed, buried and born again to become an instrument of vengeance. There’s more than a whiff of Jesus Christ in his story.

He undergoes extensive rounds of genetic and behavioral modification so that he can go undercover at the Institute, the academy where young Golds train to become the Peerless Scarred, the 1% of the 1%. The Institute is where the heart of Red Rising takes place. It’s Lord of the Flies on steroids, as Darrow and his classmates scheme and fight against each other to win the game and earn favor from the powers that be. The point of the game is isn’t immediately clear to them, and there are enough twists and turns over the course of book to leave even the most attentive reader unsure of what’s going to happen next.

In the process, Darrow has to figure out how to be a leader and how much of his identity he can discard or keep in order to infiltrate the corridors of power. Brown sprinkles a lot of interesting notions about leadership throughout the book, and that’s where it differs from most thrillers you can read in a few sittings and never think about again. It works on a deeper level because it creates three dimensional characters and uses them to comment on the human condition. Any good piece of art contains some implicit critique on the society it comes from and “Red Rising” is no exception.

I went to the same high school as Brown, and there is so much of St. Mark’s in The Institute that it isn’t funny. Both places are designed to pit the children of the elite against each other and educate them on the ways of the world in order to prepare them for leadership roles at the very top of society. No one was getting killed at St. Mark’s, but the competition was just as intense. There are only so many spots in the Institute, so many leadership roles in one House, so many spots at Harvard, so many internships at Goldman Sachs. The competition within the 1% to be the 1% of the 1% creates a facsimile of meritocracy that colors the way the elites view society at large.

The biggest thing is that there’s no ethos beyond kill or be killed. Just as in the book, the elite of our society have long since abandoned religion and any sense of noblesse oblige beyond Darwinism. You get to the 1% by being more connected than the 99%, but you get to the 1% of the 1% by being more ruthless. Human beings compare themselves against their peers, and the elites of our society are ruthlessly pitted against each other early in life in order to create sociopaths who believe in nothing bigger than themselves and their own egos. In the end, it doesn’t matter who winds up on top because the system is designed in a way so that the person at the top has to sell their soul to get there.

At the end of “Red Rising”, Darrow is given a choice to stand firm in his principles or to compromise his morals in order to get ahead and advance in the system. To return to the Christ analogy, it’s reminiscent of his final temptation by the devil, when Satan takes Jesus to a cliff and shows him the whole world, telling Jesus that he can rule it all if he agrees to worship him. Brown is telling the story of what happens if Jesus said yes.

SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome

In her book SPQR: The History of Ancient Rome, Mary Beard sets out a daunting task. She’s trying to cover 700+ years in a little over 600 pages, which doesn’t leave much room for exploring details or taking a breath as she races through some of the foundational pieces of Western Civilization - the founding of Rome, the wars with Carthage, the end of the Republic, the five good Emperors - at a breakneck pace. The books ends right where Edward Gibbon starts The History of the Decline And Fall of the Roman Empire, with the imperial decision to extend citizenship to everyone in the Empire in 212.

The good news is that Beard is an engaging writer with a clear mastery of the subject matter. After a lifetime studying the history of Rome, she’s comfortable summarizing vast periods of history without missing any of the essentials necessary to follow along. What makes SPQR interesting is that Beard has a skeptic’s eye for much of the conventional narrative surrounding Rome. How much do we really know about its founding? How much can we really discern about the intentions of its most famous characters? How much can we ever really know about a society that existed thousands of years ago?

The discussion surrounding something with the importance of the history of Rome is an ever-changing process, partly because archaeologists are constantly uncovering new information and partly because the way we view the present impacts how we discuss the past. What makes getting answers particularly challenging is that the Romans themselves didn’t always have them either. By the end of the Republic, the actual founding of the city near the year 700 BC was so shrouded in myth that no one could give a better answer than the tales of Romulus and Remus and Virgil’s Aeneid.

Most histories of Rome contain stories of the twins who were suckled by a wolf, the raping of the Sabines and the reign of the first seven Kings, who purportedly ruled for around 150 or so years near the very beginning of the city’s history. For Beard, none of it seems all that plausible. In her telling, those types of stories are placeholders, meant to represent greater and underlying truths about the city’s history, whether it’s how it intermingled with its neighbors or how it learned to fear monarchical rule.

I like to look at history like a microscope. The more you focus on any one particular series of events, the more you lose focus on the wider historical context surrounding it and vice versa. When you are looking at a 700+ year view of history, more than twice as long as the history of the US, you have to take a very broad view. Even the greatest historical characters lose some of their personality and dynamism from that perspective. You can’t really tell the story of Scipio Africanus or Julius Caesar or Nero when you are giving them 10-15 pages as part of the broader story of Rome. They all had parts to play, but in the end they were all just parts.

Caesar is the perfect example. He’s the man who conquered Gaul, who crossed the Rubicon and who ended the Republic before being famously assassinated on the steps of the Senate. While he’s obviously a fascinating character, he’s also a transitional figure who took advantage of the decline of parliamentary norms and the increasing inability of the Senate to govern the vast series of lands that it had accumulated for itself. Whether or not Pompey defeated Caesar, then, didn’t really matter. If Caesar had been defeated, Pompey (a rather tyrannical figure in his own right) would have been King. It had to happen - it was only a matter of who was going to fill that role.

No matter how great a tactician Hannibal was, the famed Carthaginian general couldn’t change the underlying demographics of the Punic Wars or Rome’s more stable political structure. In other words, Rome was always going to rule the Mediterranean. From there, once it gained that power, it was always going to lose its Republic. It’s a fatalistic view of history - we are all pawns in stories that we can’t fully comprehend, doomed as a society (or at the very least foretold) to play out the roles handed down to us by forces greater than ourselves.

Maybe it’s 20/20 hindsight or maybe it isn’t. Either way, it certainly is a different way of viewing history than the one we were taught growing up. Americans tend to view history as the story of Great Men, whether it’s Washington winning the Revolution, Lincoln winning the Civil War or Churchill winning WW2. We are constantly told that the upcoming election is the most important election ever because we are determining who will be President. This man or woman will have their finger on the nuclear button and their leadership will determine whether or not the US will rise or fall.

From a broader perspective, though, it’s hard to look at Rome and not wonder what lessons it has in store for America. Like Rome, America was founded by a small group of upstarts and then gradually grew to conquer an entire continent. Like Rome, a distrust of monarchy was an essential part of America’s DNA. Like Rome, America takes great pride in its democracy and the values that it stands for. Like Rome, America has grown into a colossus that stands astride the world. As the comedian Eddie Griffin put it, when did we go from the United States of America to the United Empire of Earth?

History can have a funny way of repeating itself. One of the central themes of Beard’s book is the topic of identity and immigration and how far to extend the promise (and the privileges) of citizenship in the most powerful nation the world has ever known. Are Americans, like Romans, global citizens? Is there even such a thing as American (or Roman) nationality? Or is it more an idea and a series of beliefs about the world that everyone can aspire to? What would happen to Rome if everyone in Italy became a citizen? If everyone in Greece? What would happen to America if the same thing happened in Mexico? Central and South America? What is lost and what is gained in the process? It’s the same question now as it ever was.

If it didn’t matter to history whether or not Caesar or Pompey won the Roman civil war, how could it possibly matter whether or not Trump or Hillary win the Presidency? When someone writes the history of the US in the year 4000, what will get mentioned and what will have been forgotten? Our society is constantly worrying about the judgment of history when the reality is that the judgment of history changes all the time. I won’t be around to read the History of the Ancient United States, but my guess is that it will end up hitting a lot of the same themes as SPQR. Some things never really change because there’s only so much any of us (no matter who we are) can do to change them.