To continue to the next stage, Darrow must complete the Passage, a test in which the 100 newly chosen students in each of the twelve Houses are paired with another house member and tasked to kill each other as a means to eliminate the weaker half. Darrow is selected for House Mars by Fitchner. Using a fabricated identity Darrow is accepted into the Golds' elite Institute, where he befriends Cassius au Bellona and alienates the arrogant Antonia au Severus. He is physically transformed by Mickey, a Violet 'carver', who gives him the abilities and appearance of a Gold. Ares have adopted the video of Eo's song and execution as a rallying vehicle for their cause.ĭarrow is given the chance to infiltrate the Society to bring it down from within. However, Darrow awakes to find that he has been drugged and delivered into the hands of the Sons of Ares, a group of Red and others who fight against the oppression of the 'low Colors'. Darrow cuts down and buries his wife's body, a crime for which he is also hanged. She is subsequently hanged on the orders of the Mars' ArchGovernor. While Eo is publicly whipped for her crime she sings a forbidden folk song as a protest against the Reds enslavement. He and his wife Eo are captured after entering a forbidden area and are arrested. Sixteen-year-old Darrow is a Red, a class of workers who toil beneath the surface of Mars mining helium-3 to terraform the planet.

The powerful ruling class of humans has installed a rigid, color-based social hierarchy where the physically superior Golds at the top rule with an iron fist. It has been seven hundred years since mankind colonized other planets. A six-issue prequel comic book series, Red Rising: Sons of Ares, was published in 2017. Brown began developing Red Rising as a television series in 2018, and later announced that the potential series had a director and a showrunner with either Netflix, Apple TV+, Disney+, Amazon Prime or HBO interested in adapting the series as of September 2021. In 2014, Universal Pictures secured the rights for a film adaptation, but the project was eventually scrapped.

Red Rising has received generally positive reviews. The novel, set in the future on Mars, follows lowborn miner Darrow as he infiltrates the ranks of the elite Golds.

Red Rising is a 2014 dystopian science fiction novel by American author Pierce Brown, and the first book and eponym of a series.

The Rising by Terra Harmony