Red Rising Reading Order: Pierce Brown's Complete Series Guide
June 5, 2026
Discussing the differences between books and their adaptations may reveal plot points for both.
Pierce Brown’s Red Rising is one of the defining science-fiction series of the last decade — a brutal, operatic story that starts as a dystopian survival tale and expands into full-blown interplanetary war. The good news for new readers: the reading order is refreshingly simple. It’s all one continuous story, told in publication order.
The complete reading order
The saga is best understood as two connected arcs.
Arc One — The Rising (the original trilogy)
- Red Rising (2014)
- Golden Son (2015)
- Morning Star (2016)
This trilogy follows Darrow, a lowborn “Red” miner on Mars who infiltrates the ruling “Gold” caste. It’s a complete, satisfying story in its own right — if you only ever read these three, you’ll have read a full arc.
Arc Two — The Reaping
- Iron Gold (2018)
- Dark Age (2019)
- Light Bringer (2023)
Set roughly a decade after Morning Star, this arc widens the lens dramatically — multiple point-of-view characters, a fractured Republic, and consequences for everything won in the first trilogy. It’s darker, denser, and more ambitious.
A seventh book, Red God, is planned as the finale of the second arc. Until then, Light Bringer is the most recent installment and the current stopping point.
Do you need to read the second arc?
No — and that’s worth saying clearly. The original trilogy is a clean, complete experience. The Reaping arc is for readers who finished Morning Star and immediately wanted more of this world. If that’s you, keep going. If you wanted a tidy, self-contained space opera, you can stop after book three with no regrets.
What about the graphic novels?
There’s a companion comic series, Sons of Ares, set before Red Rising and dealing with Darrow’s world before the events of the main saga. It’s strictly optional and best treated as supplementary — read it after the main books if you want more backstory, never as a starting point.
Where to start
Start at the beginning. Red Rising throws you straight into a harsh, beautifully realised world, and the payoff across the trilogy is enormous. Just be warned: the violence is real and the emotional gut-punches are frequent — this is a series that earns its devoted fanbase by refusing to play it safe.