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.
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.
