/lit/ - Literature

>>22281915
A week is more than enough time to reread the last one

>>22281915
I do really like Red Rising. I remember the last one being depressing. Don't really remember what happened. A lot of people dying and getting betrayed and misery.

>>22281938
It certainly a lot darker, but I get what he is doing. I feel like he didn't really have a vision for the second series in the fourth book, but with the fifth he is definitely trying to subvert out expectations of there being some sort of easy way out of an oppressive system/culture and of such struggles fitting into a nice Manichean mold of good versus evil.

The first series is an uprising of the oppressed from the view of the teen-20 something idealist. It's a mythologized style to the point of being goofy at times. Good versus evil.

The new twist shows something more akin to how revolutions have actually played out. You have multiple factions and the most extreme voices have the most momentum whole the center is hamstrung by indecision. If the first series was liberal glee, a shout of "break the chains," the second series is a comment on the dangerous of mob rule.

You have the obviously conservative character of Lysander, who is cast in a fairly good light (with the degenerate Venusian and Mercureans as a foil), but even the real heroes, Darrow, Virginia, Sevro, and Victra are as much fighting against left wing radicals as anyone else.

Atalanta, Ajax, and co. are the evil of conservatism when a society has decayed into decadence. The Rim is obviously a foil to them, the Moon Lords a better sort of virtue conservatism, but still illegitimate because of the oppressive hierarchy that keeps them in power.

The Vox and Red Hand represent the evils of out of control radicalism. Quicksilver is the faliure of out of control capitalism, but less of a main theme, while Sephi's unwillingness to have her part of Mars join the fray is the dangerous of particularism and isolationism.

Then the Syndicate and Vulsong Fa, the Abomination, and the Ort Cloud denizens are the threat of pure chaos and collapse. I really hope Fa doesn't turn out to just be a took of the Society; there seems to be some foreshadowing the Atlas serves him rather than the other way around.

All in all its shaping up to be much more interesting than the first series, which was fun but didn't give you too much food for thought.

Although the entire Figment narrative seemed a little squeezed in, the Occulus looks like it might introduce the theme of out of control growth/technology and Quicksilver's role in a more significant way. There are some hints about how Pierce sees robots and AI factoring into his world in Golden Son, and we've already seen a warning about out of control technology with the Storm Gods.

The only problem is that, even though the books have almost tripled in length, it seems like there are a lot of threads to wrap up in just 1,600 or so pages (the seventh book is apparently largely written).

I'm particularly interested to see where the Luna/Abomination narrative goes as well as what has been going on down on Earth.

I assume the Rim, having sent its fleet out, is about to get hammered by the Ort Cloud monstrosities in Dark Revolt 2.0.

I wonder if we'll get new POVs now that some have bitten the dust.

I also wonder where Appolonius is going to end up in all this.