As a reader who puts a lot of expectation on worldbuilding, Golden Son was always going to disappoint me. It has clearly been this way since its inception. It’s not as though it’s sliding into chaos. I get that it’s necessary to make them monsters, but I just don’t see how this society has endured for centuries. In this book we get a closer look at Gold Society, how it all balances on a knife edge and is base don ruthless exploitation of anything and everything. Just ramming two words into one feels more like a placeholder than a final name, and capitals in the middle of words are always going to throw me out of the narrative. But then there are GravBoots, FlakScreen, FleshMask. Personally I think it should be two words, but I can deal with that. The ArchGovernor is a title that makes sense. Too many things in the Red Rising universe are named simply by smashing words together. I like immersive wordcraft, and I don’t mind jargon and new terms. I just wish he was better at naming things. Starting with the prose, I want to first say that Brown’s writing grabs you by the throat and doesn’t let go. These boil down into too main categories. Because when my brain was fully functional, too many things pulled me out of the story. In order to enjoy the story, I had to turn my brain off. Golden Son paints a marvellously bloody tale of revolution and pain, but my enjoyment of the book comes with one caveat. Personally, I love the blood and gore, and it stays just the right side of the line into pure splatterpunk. Brown is at his best when mutilating characters and butchering innocents, and if you shy away from violence this is most definitely not the book for you. The romance is still stilted and some of the archetypes have a YA flavour, but overall this is a much more mature book. Jumping ahead two years, Golden Son falls squarely on the adult side of things, stripping away almost all of those YA trappings. My big complaint about Red Rising was the tonal difference between Young Adult presentation and very much adult content. But after this jarring start, Golden Son finds its footing and climbs the corpse-strewn mountain of grimdark science fiction. It reads almost as if Brown changed his mind about what would happen in this sequel. So much of what was set up in that previous book either has already happened and been glossed over.

The first hundred pages of Golden Son are an abrupt shift of gears from Red Rising. Conspiracies that Darrow must exploit if he is to bring about revolution.

But even a Gold is not safe from danger, and conspiracies abound. Find my review of Red Rising here-ĭarrow has infiltrated Gold society, and now rises rapidly through their ranks.

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