This one is Pierce Brown's sci-fi series set on Mars. There is a strictly controlled caste system, with Red being miners, Gray law enforcement, Copper administrators and Golden the ruling elite. Later we meet Pink pleasure providers, White interrogators/torturers, Obsidian bodyguards, Green electronics developers and Purple surgeons. There also seem to be houses, with each sporting a crest, reminding me of Game of Thrones. We follow Darrow, a teenager Red who wants the best for his clan, but not if it means upsetting the established order. Some terms and names might not be translated correctly, since I'm reading a version translated to Serbian. There are several versions of sci-fi melee weapons and armor in Red Rising but the author never explains them properly, so I just made up my own terms. Sorry.
Red caste is given a quota to fulfill; the tribe that does gets the laurels, meaning extra rations, toys, fancy supplies and so on. This reminded of me real-life Soviet quota system described in Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago". If that's where Pierce Brown got his inspiration, I'm already impressed. Darrow has a wife, Eona, although they're only 16. The book calls her "Eo" but I found the Serbian transliteration much more fitting. At 30, Red members are considered elders due to the high rate of accidents they have mining for helium-3, a valuable element used for terraforming Mars.
Darrow's dad was executed because he did a forbidden dance and song in protest of not being given enough rations (reference to how the British squelched Irish protesters?). Executions are done by hanging, though the family has to tug on the victim's legs to actually snap the neck due to low gravity. Despite that, Darrow wants to fulfill the quota, and at the start of the book he does it, though a Copper awards laurels to another Red tribe. The foreshadowing is straightforward: the first page of the book is a flash-forward referring to some kind of rebellion, we get a newscast talking about rebels and Eona constantly mentions rebellion, so we're bound to have her killed/raped, prompting Darrow to take up the cause. In retrospect, even the title of the book reveals a rebellion.
Eona leads Darrow through a ventilation shaft in the spider farm to an outside garden, where he sees the sky for the first time in his life. My God, it's full of stars. There is lush vegetation there unlike in the caverns where they live, so they roll in the grass. She tries to instill disobedience in Darrow, prompting him to start a rebellion. He refuses. They go back and are met by a couple Grays, who are there to punish them for transgressing. Darrow doesn't resist; it means death.
I found this part hardly believable. The idea that kids never snuck out to look at the sky seems impossible; kids are known for sneaking out, especially if it means breaking the rules. Also, the surface of Mars isn't barren – there are trees and wildlife there according to the world map. Soviet quota system worked because inmates were in the middle of nowhere, with barren land around them; on Mars, there appear to be ways to survive outside the caste system. If that were the case, people would have done it.
Within a couple pages, Darrow and Eona get flogged but she starts singing a song during the televized transmission of their punishment. That means death sentence, which is for whatever reason observed by a couple Golds, including one I'll refer to as "headmaster", who allows the televized transmission to continue. Defiant until the very end, she brings tears to Darrow's and our eyes. He tries to give her a proper burial (rebels are normally left to hang until turned into skeletons) and is sentenced to hanging himself. He gets hanged and that's it...
...until he wakes up buried in the ground. It's the resistance movement coming to bring him back to life (Lazarus is mentioned too, just in case you didn't get the Christ analogy). His uncle was working for Sons of Ares all along and they offer him a chance to exact revenge for Eona. Darrow is brought to surface, right in the middle of a gleaming city. He's stunned; the propaganda told him the surface of Mars was barren.
Darrow is told by the resistance leader, Dancer, that the surface of Mars has been inhabited for 300 years. Reds are slaves and now Darrow would become their chief tool in starting a rebellion. For this, he has to blend in. There is also Harmony, a woman from the resistance movement, who speaks ill of Eona. They enter a nightclub/tattoo parlor/bioenhancement shop where girls are given all sorts of surgeries to make them look exotic. One girl, Ivy, has actual eagle wings on her back and takes a liking to Darrow.
Owner of the establishment, Mickey, is hesitant about turning Darrow into Iron Gold, a member of the Gold caste from the old days with superior genetics and knowledge. Dancer promises money and Mickey suddenly agrees. Next comes a training montage in book form. Darrow is fed, exercised, tutored and buffed for several months until he's basically 1,000 times stronger, smarter and more ruthless than before (timelines don't add up later on, it appears that took 2 years). Everything from his eyes to synapses is revamped and now he can blend in with the Golden caste.
So far, Darrow has shown himself to be present in the moment and capable of solving problems on the spot. This was a refreshing surprise, seeing how in most fiction books the protagonist starts off as a kid who gets beaten and outsmarted in every conceivable way. In Red Rising, Darrow has been dealing with vipers and gas pockets that can kill a whole squad of men his entire life, so he's a quick-thinking scoundrel with ruthless reactions. Whenever Darrow is being tested for reaction quality, he outshines everyone present, which is really awesome.
What I don't appreciate is the sudden turn the book has taken past page 50 or so. Darrow has been plucked out of the mines and put into this gleaming city, where he's presumably had a couple million surgeries done on him to change his physique to something more appropriate for the ruling elite. The problem is that I am more impressed by Darrow's reflexes and quick thinking than the augmentations but the writer spent a lot of time and effort to convince me otherwise. His natural talents are much more interesting and believable than these contrived skills and experience he's gotten through what is essentially a hyperbolic time chamber.
Another irksome matter is the fact Reds are literally kept in slavery and starved to death unless they can mine enough helium-3 and literally nobody cares. The notion of televized executions is so improbable that it made me chuckle every time I thought about it; we're living in a world where in 2016 a talking robot, Sophia, got citizenship but I'm supposed to believe in the distant future filled with awesome technology there are literal slave colonies right underneath sprawling surface cities? I think it's more probable that bacteria and individual atoms will be given human rights than for generations of people to live in squalor while expected to mine a supposedly precious element. Can you imagine the protests, the uproar and the level of disgust?
Darrow is sent to be tested for induction into the Gold caste. Everything that's interesting in this section comes from his original skills: he steals a pen from the professor because starved miners steal whatever isn't bolted down, and the supervisor smiles approvingly; he's sent to a testing chamber to catch balls launched at him, which he easily does thanks to his reflexes tempered in the helium-3 mines; he aces the G-force test in a similar manner for the same reason. See what I mean? We didn't need the training montage because he's already an awesome character with believable skills.
Next up is the Institute, a boarding school for Gold teenagers. Darrow meets a feisty boy, Sevron, who seems to have inside information on the biggest secret of their schooling; apparently, they will duel each other as the final exam. Their welcome speech is given by (drumroll) headmaster, who even mentions Eona, though not by name, saying how futile it was that a common girl thought about rebelling. Everybody laughs but Darrow fumes. Everything is Greek- and Roman-themed, including names, locations and building styles. The headmaster waxes on about the importance of personality being tempered, noting that Reds were the prime example of a strong mentality. I think you can already see the twist coming up.
What follows is quite honestly a bizarre and confusing transplantation of Darrow and plenty of people he just met into a battlefield where they have to duke it out. It's a terraformed valley with forests, rivers, mountains, flora and fauna and apparently some monsters thrown in for good measure too. Their supervisors live on a floating island in the sky and occasionally rush down on gravity boots to observe the fight. When there's combat, supervisors make a literal feast in the sky and watch the slaughter. There are medical bots that rush in to retrieve the wounded ones, heal them and put them back into play or just remove the corpses. Yep, the precious Gold sons and daughters get swatted like flies in here. By the way, the invitation to the battlefield can't be rejected and kids' participation is mandatory under law (??).
There are 12 castles, each assigned to a certain deity, such as Pluto, Mars, Minerva etc. Each castle has 50 people, all of which had to kill someone to get there, and a different layout; some have plenty of food but are exposed, others are unassailable but starved for food etc. So, upon their introduction to the Institute and a draft procedure akin to the NBA one, pupils are kidnapped and paired off in barren rooms under the Thunderdome principle – two go in, one comes out. Only after slaying someone does a pupil get a signet with the mark of his house and enters the battlefield, where he'll be a part of a castle crew. Each castle has a supervisor that is meant to leave the floating city once his crew is gone and a standard that can be used to touch another person not belonging to the castle to "enslave" it, but the rules on this were never explained properly.
A slave may listen to avoid being dishonored, the consequences of which I felt were poorly explained, but do so in a literal way that intentionally botches the slave owner's request. Can the slave owner kill a slave? Well, no but sort of yes. As Darrow's fat, lazy slob of a supervisor explains, occasional killing is fine but they shouldn't genocide people. Girls eventually get raped, which was completely expected in such a chaotic environment, and sadists start cutting off ears and fingers of their slaves and scalping their victims. Despite all that, the book shies away from saying "kill", "death" etc., keeping it all appropriately PG-13. I chuckled reading about how people struck with swords were incapacitated, carried off by Medibots or "taken out of the game" and how one of Darrow's officers struck a notch on his axe for each person he "enslaved". Suuuure.
There are maps inside each castle that update as the castle crew explores the environment (???), just like a minimap in real-time strategy video games like Warcraft III. The goal of the game is to get five points by excelling in warfare and diplomacy. Other than that, crews have varying levels of technology and typically have to scrounge for food and water on their own. However, some crews are given nightvision goggles (!), lightsabers (!!), catapults (!!!) and matches (!!!!) by their supervisors. Yeah, some crews don't even have a way to light a fire. We're introduced to some 200 new characters, which is a standard young adult fantasy novel trope. In here, Darrow also realizes he's not the only Red on the battlefield. Can you see the twist? Anyway, the rules feel like they were made by a bunch of kids on the spot.
Of course, Darrow is awarded five points and becomes the ruler of his castle but there's a new challenger, Jackal, belonging to Pluto's home. One of his emissaries rides to Darrow's castle with two lightsabers and a pouch of something, gifting them to Darrow's first officer, Cassius. She says Darrow will die, one way or another. Darrow sends out Sevron to steal the pouch but he fails. Soon after, Darrow is lured out of the castle and nearly killed when Jackal's crew with nightvision goggles can't find him (he did the Predator). After that, Cassius lures him out and they duel with lightsabers. Darrow has no chance and dies whimpering like a dog.
There's a fairly emotional scene here where Darrow describes his train of thought as he feels the life force leaving him. He no longer feels like a man but a small child, curling up around the stomach wound. It turns out Jackal is the headmaster's son and the game is rigged for him to win. Also, Darrow killed Cassius' brother, Julian, and the pouch contained the recording of it. Darrow gasps for air, feels a gaping wound in his body and dies. This is the best written part so far, save the one where Darrow is initially tested. By the way, this sensation of dying is called "agony" and there's an entire ethical concept around it called "mercy killing" or coup de grace.
Well, we're nearly at the end of book one and we've got two more in the series, so Darrow has to survive somehow. He wakes up in a cave, where a girl he fought against, Mustang, saved him for reasons unknown. She sings the exact same song Eona sang as she nurses him to health. Later on, Darrow will be nursing Mustang to health and the two will create a bond but there won't be any plowing for now.
What follows is a steady gathering of slaves, who are set free instead of changing owners. Darrow makes his own clan and starts creating a legend around himself while feigning weakness and gathering troops. They all start wearing wolf pelts and try to make themselves as nasty as possible to strike fear in the hearts of the remaining houses.
Darrow is soon told by his supervisor that everything they're doing is being filmed by their rings, edited and shown to pickers that will jostle for them after the game ends. Again, how many levels of secrecy does the world of Red Rising have? Is this televised and if so, how come this is the first time we're hearing about it? However, the footage is heavily edited and on a delay of about 12 hours or so. After amassing enough forces to take down all the other remaining houses combined, Darrow is warned by the supervisor of house Apollo that he won't be allowed to win. He ignores the warning and spills the beans to his troops, who arrange for a ploy to keep the Apollo supervisor talking while the rest of Darrow's troops captures his castle.
Darrow beats up his own supervisor, marches to one of the remaining castles (Jupiter) and besieges it, with the starving crew surrendering after a few days. One spindly man, Lucian, seems shy and friendly but Darrow somehow recognizes that's Jackal. This part is confusing too – Darrow apparently had an entire pouch of rings from all houses but none from Pluto and none of the rings from the pouch would have fit Lucian (?). Anyway, Darrow pins his hand to the desk with his dagger and gloats for a bit.
What follows is absurdly preposterous. Darrow apparently heard that jackals would gnaw off their leg to escape a trap, so he wants to see if Lucian is worthy of his nickname and will cut off his hand to escape (?????????). Keep in mind, Darrow has already been informed by Sevron that Jackal was trapped in caves and ate his troops to survive. So, we observe Jackal indeed sawing off his hand and one of Darrow's officers throwing him a lightsaber to quicken the process. In retrospect, there are some hints that Darrow intentionally made Jackal's captivity torturous to prompt a supervisor to come and try rescuing him.
The Apollo supervisor barges in and gives a flashbang to Jackal, who stuns the entire room and gets whisked away through the window. Darrow follows them and gets pulled by his hair a couple hundred meters in the air. Apollo supervisor asks him one last time if he'll be obedient because he's got Mustang and then drops him. Instead of falling, Darrow stays afloat thanks to the gravity boots stolen from his own supervisor and repeatedly stabs the guy through the eye, stealing his weapon and armor.
Remember the 12-hour editing delay? That's how long Darrow has to win the game. Darrow straps a couple of his friends to himself and ascends to the floating city. There, they find lazy supervisors plowing each other and enjoying the overall decadence. Darrow rampages through Olympus and kills another supervisor. He sends for reinforcements from the surface and keeps capturing and killing supervisors, who are described as actual Greek gods with their advanced weaponry.
Ultimately, Darrow finds Mustang and sends her to get Jackal. He also sends for his supervisor, who tells him Mustang and Jackal are twins – she will likely betray him and win the game on her own. That doesn't happen and she indeed fetches Jackal naked and bound to Darrow's feet. In the meantime, Darrow recaptures his original castle (Mars) and meets Cassius, who seems a broken, dejected man, who spits in his face and swears to exact vengeance for his brother. Darrow lets him go. Soon enough, an entire squadron of Golds lands and with them the headmaster, who asks Darrow to join his house. Darrow accepts after some hesitation and the book ends.
Darrow is now 20 and it's been 2 years since he left the battlefield. He's got a squadron of 7 space ships and some of his friends from the battlefield are still with him. He's doing simulated combat against Karn, Cassius's older brother, described as a vicious beast. Darrow sends ships to flank Karn and wins the simulated fight.
Ambush! Karn appears with one final ship from behind the asteroids and destroys Darrow's fleet (??), who barely escapes with a couple bodyguards. He comes back to some other iteration of the Institute, the Academy, where he goes for a swim only to get assaulted and pissed on by Karn. The headmaster feels thoroughly shamed to the delight of his assistant, Pliny, who is gleaming. The headmaster informs Darrow that his contract will be sold shortly to whoever wants to buy it, which means he'll be left without any protection as soon as the Moon Queen's party is over. He's invited too, by the way.
Darrow has to make desperate moves and his assistant takes him to Jackal, who has become the Moon slumlord but still hasn't replaced his hand. Jackal offers him a job as a bodyguard/assassin (?), even though he's got thousands of disposable ones he can use. Darrow saves his life when a familiar girl who had her wings clipped shows up and plants a bomb. Darrow finally gets in touch with Sons of Ares. Remember Harmony, Mickey and Ivy? They even get some speaking lines in the book! The rebellion proper has started, with bombs going off all over the place.
Darrow is shown the rest of the video from his wife's execution, the part where she whispered something to her sister – she was pregnant. Harmony suggests Darrow strap a radium bomb to himself, waltz into the party and kill a thousand or so Golds. Darrow is crushed and agrees to the obviously impossible plan. He goes to the party and chats with Karn, who emphasizes how Julian was a soft boy etc. Darrow sees Mustang and Cassius, who climbed up higher than Darrow thanks to challenging everyone to a duel, walk in arm in arm. What was the point of the battlefield then if winning a duel works just the same? Darrow storms out and is about to trigger the bomb but realizes he could start a civil war instead.
Darrow challenges Cassius to a duel, which the Moon Queen approves. Darrow reveals he has been training under the very best duel tutor (?) and rips off Cassius' right arm. Mustang runs in and stops Darrow from killing Cassius as mayhem breaks out. The headmaster runs out and Darrow is with him. They barely make it. Darrow arrives at Moon Queen's quarters, where the two have a pair of scorpions slither onto their wrists; those are genetically engineered lie detectors. They exchange questions and Darrow gets a load of information. In the end, Mustang walks in and Darrow asks if the Moon Queen planned on having the headmaster, her father, killed. She says "no" and her scorpion stabs her.
Head of her personal guard, which also happens to be Sevron's dad and their supervisor from the battlefield, jumps in time to stop the scorpion from stabbing the Moon Queen by cutting off its tail mid-stab (??). The Moon Queen explains headmaster needs to die or the riots will erupt on all planets, showing them a recording of Sons of Ares rioting on Venus. Darrow is now employed by the Moon Queen but that night gets a message from Mustang to take cover. Sevron and the rest of the squad from the battlefield enter Darrow's quarters by blasting his window and he's rejoiced to see them again. They carry a sack with them; there's something wiggling inside.
Darrow and his squad glide out of the window and visit the palace where the headmaster and his family are being quarantined by the Moon Queen. No signs of life from the outside but on the inside – carnage. The fight is still going on, so Darrow and his squad intervene. One of Moon Queen's bodyguards is there and she is about to kill Darrow when he shows what's in the bag: Moon Queen's only grandson (?).
Darrow, his crew, headmaster and his crew ascend in a slow ship meant for troop deployment. One of Darrow's crew kidnaps the grandson and ejects, leaving Darrow and co. exposed to Moon Queen's wrath. They hijack a Moon Queen's ship and escape. As is common in this series, months or years pass within a few pages. Darrow suggests to headmaster to avoid peace negotiations with the Moon Queen and attack the Institutes to kidnap all the cadets and hijack all her ships as a show of strength.
Darrow visits the duel tutor, who turns to have been on the battlefield in his youth as Mars castle crew, which is why he trained Darrow in the first place. Duel tutor wants to stay neutral on his isolated moon. Darrow asks for assistance. Duel tutor refuses and shows him a massive gryphon to use to escape; in the sky, Darrow's ship is being surrounded by Moon Queen's forces. Darrow expected an ambush, so he brought his own forces, which are now surrounding the Moon Queen's.
The Moon Queen's bodyguard is here too with a bunch of elite assassins. Darrow managed to sow landmines as he was walking in, destroying almost all of them. The bodyguard escapes but Darrow intentionally doesn't pursue, since she was irradiated by a landmine. She returns to the Moon Queen, and Darrow realizes she's on Mars. He launches an offensive to Mars, barely surviving an ambush inside the city where the Moon Queen is cornered.
Darrow gradually establishes a new paradigm, one where people can be set to new heights on their merits, not just their color birthright. He reveals his true self to his Obsidian bodyguard, Ragnar, and then a couple of other people. Sevron tells him he knows Darrow is Red, since he was contacted by Ares himself. At first, this confused me but it all made sense in hindsight – their battlefield supervisor is Ares. He has a similar motivation to Darrow; his wife got incinerated due to illegal coupling. The child produced was Sevron aka. Goblin.
It's at this point that I realized there was no twist. I expected there to be some sort of grand reveal by the headmaster that Darrow and that other Red were intentionally allowed to participate in the battlefield to keep Golden sons and daughters sharp but that wasn't the case. How did that other Red come to the battlefield posing as Gold? The very end of the book contains a throwaway line of "he was the other one created by Mickey". This process of reshaping a human born in one caste into a person born in another is thought impossible to the point the entire civilization of Red Rising is founded on strict caste lines, and yet some guy managed to do it twice and the two guys met and fought each other? All right, time for some combat scenes.
After landing on Mars with his crew, Darrow finds the city walls unassailable. Luckily, he had inside help that cut out the river grates, allowing Darrow and his crew to swim inside. As they come up, they see a girl on the bank. She takes out a ball and ZAP! disables all their electronics. Still in heavy armor, they fall down and start suffocating in the mud. It's an ambush and those of his crew on the bank keel over, unable to move. Darrow remembers his miner training, where he was told as a kid that the only way to survive a viper sting is to cut off the limb, so he takes out his lightsaber and carefully cuts out the armor, saves some of his crew and fights on.
Darrow gives lightsabers to Obsidians, which is considered taboo, and they lead the charge to open the city gates. Darrow rushes all alone to capture the Moon Queen and he barely manages to grab the ramp as her ship ascends. He clambers in and sees – smiling bodyguards training their weapons on him all exhausted and wounded. The Moon Queen gloats for a bit and orders her chief bodyguard to kill him. He approaches Darrow and whispers, "You fool, I had it all under control." He knocks down the guards, grabs Darrow and they jump out of the ship.
It's a magnificent victory but the Moon Queen escaped, meaning Darrow and headmaster hold Mars, a crucial helium-3 mining outpost, but failed to win decisively and other families will probably not join their cause. Overall, it's a loss but let's enjoy it while we can. Darrow goes to visit his old home, the mining colony, and takes Mustang with. She is confused but excited. He takes her to his house and opens the door just as his mom is coming down the stairs to put the kettle on.
Here we get a tearjerker moment as she immediately recognizes Darrow as her son and makes them some tea, using his dad's old tea cup. God damn, I'm welling up as I'm writing this. They reminisce and a sleepy girl ambles down stairs, forcing Darrow to turn on his cloaking field and go out. Mustang is nowhere to be seen. She actually never went inside the house but made Darrow an ambush. Ragnar is there too but instead of killing Mustang, he kneels and shows total devotion to the cause. Mustang is overwhelmed but doesn't kill either of them. She disappears and doesn't show up for the rest of the book.
Darrow is arranging for a triumph, which is completely copied over from Roman tradition, even with a servant whispering "memento mori" to his ear as he rides in the chariot. I don't understand why Pierce Brown didn't just make a fantasy book instead of this weird quasi-Roman sci-fi. Anyway, Darrow is poisoned and incapacitated, Ares is decapitated and the headmaster is killed by his own son, Jackal. In retrospect, too much was at stake and Darrow was never going to be allowed to change the caste paradigm. With that, the book ends.
I found this book weirdly enjoyable; weird because Darrow as a character shows a distressing lack of social awareness but enjoyable because everything he does is optimistic and improbable but somehow works, even if only for a moment. He attempts to change things between castes by immediately telling what he plans to do to people around him, which brings a certain amount of uncertainty to their lives. Can an Obsidian bodyguard use a lightsaber, which is a taboo weapon for them? Darrow allowed it to Ragnar but now other Golds have no idea what is proper. This makes it all the more improbable that Darrow was the first one to try breaking these millennia-old traditions. Oh well, on to the next book.
Darrow wakes up all mangled and cramped. He's in a chamber of some sorts, unable to move, stretch or talk. Dark thoughts whirl inside his mind. Suddenly, something opens and he's raised. Darrow realizes his prison was underneath a dining table, where now all his enemies are eating dinner. Kind of gross, but OK.
Darrow is sent to a torture chamber to be dissected so his enemies can understand what magic Mickey used, where two Grays rescue him. They turn out to be connected to Sons of Ares and give him an apparent live holo message from Ares and Sevron. Does anyone die in this series? On their way to escape, they encounter another person from the Mars battlefield. Darrow blows their cover and grabs him. He says there's another battlefield character alive that was thought to be dead; she's held captive in a cell. The two Grays panic, since they signed up to rescue Darrow, not some random woman, but still follow through.
Darrow rescues the woman and leaves the hostage in her cell but the guy starts threatening Darrow, who kills him in a fit of rage. The four amble out of the cell block and activate an EMP bomb, which disables all the cameras and advanced weaponry of the fortress personnel. Darrow's two Grays came prepared, though, when they pull out traditional rifles and machine guns that are powered by gas. They exit to the outside, where they're whipped by the wind as they approach a secluded landing spot; they're on the side of a mountain.
Fortress personnel is on their heels, including Cassius and a Moon Queen's bodyguard, the same one that escaped Darrow's landmines. One of the Grays gets caught out of cover, killed and thrown into the chasm below. Out of bullets, wounded and gasping for air, Darrow takes the remaining Gray and the woman he rescued and jumps off the landing spot towards the ground below.
The ground erupts just as they're about to hit it and a swarm of Sons of Ares flies out on gravity boots. All of them are grabbed just as they're about to hit the ground and carried into the tunnel. Remember that Darrow was a miner? Yeah, it is apparently only revisited when in need of a sudden rescue. Nothing hinted at this during the entire book. Besides, falling to someone's hands should be just as deadly as falling on the ground. Anyway, they're carried through the tunnels. Darrow realizes Ares is actually dead and his armor is worn by Ragnar.
Darrow wakes up in a hospital cave, where his mom is sewing up some socks and his uncle is reading. Both are worn down by the life of living in the mines. Another tear-jerker moment. He is told that Harmony was the one that tipped them all off to Jackal. Apparently, her motivation was that she thought the resistance movement was being led astray and too many concessions were made so she killed the leaders of it off (???). Darrow's doppelganger was used to stage an execution, but the real motives of keeping Darrow alive were flimsy at best – so his enemies can study how he was shaped into a Golden (???).
The mines have turned into refugee camps, as the underground is bursting at the seams with indignant, wretched people. Darrow doubts himself but the common people he talks to think of him as a hero, which slowly gives him some self-confidence. However, it's doubtful if the Sons of Ares can carry on in this capacity as everything has changed in the months he was gestating a prisoner.
What follows is some internal struggle as Darrow tries to reestablish himself as the leader but Sevron denies him the privilege. What I found the most distressing is that Darrow established an elite warrior group during his struggle in the battlefield; in book 3, he has to go through a hazing ritual to get accepted to the same warrior group he formed?!!?! We're meant to get the "rise from ashes" sequence but we already had that in book 1 when Darrow was shaped into a Golden. It makes absolutely no sense but fine, the crew goes on a stealth mission to capture some apparently crucial character that heretofore was completely unknown, like when shows have a villain of the week.
The stealth mission goes awry and the crew discovers the villain of the week was hosting a meeting with pretty much all the major characters, including Cassius and Mustang. They have a Mexican standoff and Darrow is about to suggest to negotiate when Sevron cuts off his comm channel, effectively muting him. A fight breaks out and the villain of the week is incapacitated. Mustang is there too and she's about to kill Darrow but luckily a part of his face armor has fallen off and she recognizes him.
Darrow discovers a secret passage that had a pillar collapsed on it; the passage is swarming with security that can't get in. All right, that does it. I'm through with this series. I skipped to the end of this book and discovered Darrow and Mustang have had a baby and are enjoying a vacation on Earth. Spoilers, I guess.
I got about a third into book 3 before giving up. The plot goes nowhere, the characters appear and disappear by the truckload and their personalities are awfully bland. I enjoyed a random miner character, a refugee who had his legs amputated, in book 3 more than any of the main characters because there's so much personality in him; he and Darrow do some miner speak for a couple moments and it's the most genuine thing in the entire book. It's like the author set up this amazing premise of miner life on Mars but then abandoned it in pursuit of a majestic rebellion spanning planets, asteroids, starship fleets and planetary systems that he couldn't portray with sufficient resolution.
Just focusing on Darrow, a miner, would have given the author more than enough material for a whole series of books that can draw inspiration from real-life miners by using their stories, experiences, songs etc. To me, the first book already showed signs of being a bait-and-switch when Darrow was presented as a miner but then whisked away to the battlefield to establish him as a strategist and warrior. I endured through sheer willpower but you shouldn't have to. Pray to God this never gets televized. Don't read this garbage past the first few chapters of book 1.