I just finished another book that further reinforced how much I like science fiction. Red Rising felt quite a bit like the Hunger Games and Divergent, but it was nonetheless unique enough to be pretty interesting. I only think it was okay overall, because there was a bit of lack of clarity of some of the plot mechanisms that allowed the main character to either escape conflict or fall into some other conflict that helped set up further parts of the story. It is kind of like in Harry Potter how you can explain most things away with selective use of certain types of magic or rules about magic that you can make up as you go along.

This was a different take on the kids killing kids genre and overall class warfare because it is set in space a long time after certain wars have taken place which makes society a much different place. As this is the first book in a trilogy which I am not sure I will finish, I understood that much of what I wanted explained is probably being saved for future books. It was a page turner for me, as I am easy to get catch on a cliffhanger.

The idea of enslaving part of the human race to support so-called higher classes is clearly not new, but the way it was executed was particularly interesting. Certain groups of people are enslaved but do not realize they are slaves because they think they are pioneers working for a future generation of colonizers which will come after them. Keeping a totalitarian hold on a group of people on the scale of an entire planet is tough. This book had some interesting solutions to those problems. I would definitely recommend this to anyone looking for a quick, fun read. I may add the other two books in the series to the end of my list, we shall see.