Why We Love Dystopias but Struggle With Reality: Thoughts on Red Rising

I've been making my way through the original Red Rising trilogy, and I can't stop thinking about why stories like this resonate so deeply.

If you haven't heard of the series, Red Rising is a science fiction saga set hundreds of years into the future, after humanity has colonised the solar system. Society is divided into a rigid caste system based on colours. At the very bottom are the Reds.

We meet Darrow, a Red who spends his days mining helium-3 beneath the surface of Mars. Like everyone around him, he's been taught that his people are sacrificing themselves so that one day Mars can become habitable for future generations. It's dangerous, exhausting work, but they're told it has purpose.

Except it's all a lie.

Mars has already been habitable for generations. Cities flourish above ground while the Reds continue to labour beneath the surface, deliberately kept in the dark so the ruling class can preserve its power. Darrow's journey begins when he discovers this deception and chooses to fight against the system that has exploited his people for centuries.

On paper, it's a science fiction novel. In reality, it's a story about power.

It's about propaganda. It's about who controls information. It's about how inequality isn't an accident, but something that is often maintained through institutions, incentives, and the stories societies tell themselves. Most of all, it's about what ordinary people choose to do once they realise the world they've been taught to believe in isn't the truth.

These are the kinds of books I love most.

Whether it's Red Rising, The Hunger Games, or The Will of the Many, I'm endlessly drawn to fantasy and science fiction that asks uncomfortable political questions. Stories where there isn't always a perfect answer, but where the cost of maintaining the status quo becomes impossible to ignore.

Reading Red Rising in 2026 feels strangely timely.

We're living through a moment where the gap between the richest and everyone else continues to widen. Billionaires accumulate unimaginable fortunes while millions struggle with rising housing costs, healthcare, education, and stagnant wages. Wealth isn't just buying bigger yachts anymore. It's buying media companies, funding political campaigns, shaping public discourse, influencing regulation, and increasingly determining who gets to write the rules everyone else has to live by. Researchers and advocacy groups alike have argued that extreme concentrations of wealth can translate into outsized political influence, although there is active debate about what policy responses are most effective.

The people at the top rarely describe this as exploitation. They call it innovation. Economic growth. Efficiency. Meritocracy. Every unequal society has a story that explains why its hierarchy is natural, deserved, or inevitable.

That's exactly what Red Rising understands so well.

The Golds don't rule Mars through brute force alone. They rule because they've convinced everyone beneath them that the system is necessary. The Reds don't know they're oppressed because they've inherited a story that tells them their suffering serves a greater purpose.

Good dystopian fiction isn't really about evil villains. It's about systems that become so normal that people stop questioning them.

That's why I think these books matter, especially for young readers.

It's easy to cheer for Darrow. It's easy to cheer for Katniss. We instinctively recognise injustice when it's dressed up in futuristic armour or hidden inside a fictional empire.

The harder question is this: what systems have become so normal in our own world that we no longer question them?

Who benefits when wealth becomes increasingly concentrated? Why do we accept that some people can possess more resources than entire nations while others struggle to afford the basics? Who writes the narratives that convince us this is simply the way the world works?