Books Like Red Rising: 9 Ruthless Sci-Fi and Fantasy Epics to Read Next
Brutal academies, undercover rebels and revenge served across a whole solar system
Red Rising by Pierce Brown does something very few books manage: it starts as a lean, furious underdog story and keeps escalating until you are reading a full-blown space opera about war, loyalty and the price of revolution. Darrow, a lowly Red miner beneath the surface of Mars, is remade to infiltrate the Gold ruling caste and destroy their colour-coded hierarchy from the inside. The Institute sections are savage, the betrayals genuinely hurt, and Brown's short, punchy chapters make a 400-page book vanish in a weekend.
Readers come to us at Ever After Books asking for "more Red Rising" more than almost any other series, and the honest answer is that nothing is exactly it. But different books capture different pieces: the deadly academy, the infiltrator living a lie, the boy who becomes a weapon, the rebellion that costs more than anyone expects. Here are the nine we hand over most often, and exactly which itch each one scratches.
What to read after Red Rising
The Will of the Many by James Islington
The single closest match on this list. Vis, an orphan with a hidden past, infiltrates an elite academy at the heart of a Roman-flavoured empire built on a pyramid of borrowed willpower, and every rung of the hierarchy is soaked in the same institutional cruelty as Brown's Golds. Competitions, conspiracies, a narrator who refuses to kneel: if you want that exact Institute feeling again, start here.
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Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
The blueprint for the brutal-school-forges-a-commander story. Ender Wiggin is a child hothoused through Battle School's war games because humanity needs a genius general, and the book asks the same uncomfortable questions Red Rising does about what victory turns you into. Faster and more contained than Brown, with an ending that has been shocking readers for four decades.
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Empire of Silence by Christopher Ruocchio
Hadrian Marlowe narrates his own legend from the far end of it, a nobleman who fell from grace and will one day be called a monster for what he did to end a war. The Sun Eater series has Red Rising's scale and its fascination with myth-making around a violent hero, but told in lush, Gene Wolfe-flavoured prose. Slower burn, bigger universe, enormous payoff across the series.
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The Poppy War by R. F. Kuang
A peasant girl tests into her empire's most elite military academy and claws her way up through prejudice, hazing and impossible exams, and that is before the war starts and the book turns genuinely harrowing. Kuang matches Brown's willingness to hurt you, grounding it in a fantasy retelling of twentieth-century Chinese history. Read it for the rage; brace yourself for the second half.
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Red Sister by Mark Lawrence
Nona Grey is taken in by an order of nuns who train assassins, mystics and warriors, and the convent is every bit as lethal as the Institute. Lawrence shares Brown's gift for friendships forged under pressure that you would die for by book three, and for slow-building prophecy stakes behind the school story. Fantasy rather than sci-fi, but the vibe transfer is nearly perfect.
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Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson
A street thief joins a crew planning the impossible: infiltrate the nobility, spark an uprising and kill the immortal emperor who has ruled for a thousand years. Vin's double life among the aristocracy mirrors Darrow's masquerade among the Golds, and Sanderson's metal-fuelled magic system delivers the same crunchy, tactical action. The heist structure makes it a very moreish entry point to epic fantasy.
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The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson
Baru watches an empire swallow her island home, so she joins its civil service to destroy it from within, wielding accountancy and economics instead of razors. It is the infiltration half of Red Rising distilled to its purest, cruellest form: every relationship is a potential sacrifice and the ending is one of the most devastating in modern fantasy. Cold, brilliant and unforgettable.
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Dune by Frank Herbert
Brown has been open about his debts to Herbert, and you can feel Dune's fingerprints all over Red Rising's Mars: feudal great houses, a messianic young man shaped into something dangerous, and a desert people who become the spear of a holy war. It is denser and stranger than Brown, more politics than punch-ups, but it is the source code for this whole subgenre.
Skyward by Brandon Sanderson
Spensa wants nothing more than to be a pilot, but her father died a coward's death and the flight academy is designed to wash her out. This is the cadet-school underdog arc with the grimdark turned down and the heart turned up: fierce rivalries, cockpit action and a snarky ship AI. Perfect if you loved Darrow's ascent but fancy something a shade kinder.
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Keep the streak going
If you want a recommendation tuned to exactly which part of Red Rising hooked you, try What Should I Read Next?, stack your victims on your TBR list, or raid the whole Science Fiction collection. Hail libertas, and happy reading.