/lit/ - Literature

>>21370228
Nah, I've gotten good non-pretentious. Like people told me that Red Rising was just a more fun/cooler sort of Hunger Games/Ender's Game type book to start that got butchered a bit by being edited to fit the YA market, but that it branched out into becoming a sprawling war focused sci-fi epic that is sort of the good military parts of GOT meets Dune, over the backdrop of a elite warrior society obsessed with classical Greece and Rome.

I probably would have skipped it based on how the first book was marketed, but it ended up being one of my favorite series.

You get genetically enhanced super soldier heros clashing, against the backdrop of a pretty grim multi faction battle of attrition that spans the solar system. Most of all, it's propulsive and keeps you guessing in a way many sci-fi books don't.

Like, I loved Hyperion, but the follow up series and Ilium floundered and didn't go anywhere for long stretches. I really like Alistair Reynolds's stand alone Revelation Space books, but the trilogy started to get hackneyed and predictable (same problem with The Black Company). Red Rising keeps you guessing and doesn't get bogged down in boring plot lines in a way that makes 800 pages fly by, which I can say is often not the case, even for books that are better written and more serious.

I thought the first book of this series was a fun enough read but it's almost a disservice to the rest of the books due to how much the story changes. Red Rising is like a better sort of Ender's Game / Hunger Games, but the rest is some of the funnest/best military sci-fi I've read.