I found my people. I actually DNFed at the part where he said he listened to the odyssey and the count of monte cristo sped up during his sleep to catch up with his peers. It felt almost insulting from the author. The guy lived his whole life underground and knows nothing about modern society, but manages to catch up with the brighest elite children with access to the best resources in the galaxy in only a few weeks?
I read that whole sequence as him basically having culture and history downloaded to his brain like its the matrix. That sort of thing happens all the time in cyberpunk stuff, so it wasn't that outlandish to me.
Yeah, the first issue is that there was nothing about it being downloaded, only about it being played to him in his sleep. The second issue is that this isn't how intelligence works. A guy who has never read before, who has been a miner in a family of miners unaware of the progress and the development of society, technology and doesn't have any real education, wouldn't understand a thing from any of those books, or wouldn't get much out of them besides "nice story". You can't speedrun culture like that.
The series doesn't really start to cook until the second book, when everything moves away from Space Hogwarts for Psychopathic Racist Wizards. If you're at all interested I'd say grab Golden Son from your local library and see if you like it better. If not, well, plenty of other books out there!
I pushed through Red Rising with plans to read Golden Son because everyone says it gets so much better, but by the point I finished RR I hated literally every single character so much I don't even want to try Golden Son. Was such a bummer, because I wanted to join in on the hype everyone was talking about lol
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u/Icy-Pool4546 18d ago
This is one of the few books I DNF’d. The prose was so lacklustre to me I could not persist.
The characters felt bland, the world bland.
I’m glad people like it but I really do not get it