Publication Order of Red Rising Books
| Red Rising | 2014 |
| Golden Son | 2015 |
| Morning Star | 2016 |
| Iron Gold | 2018 |
| Dark Age | 2019 |
| Light Bringer | 2023 |
Publication Order of Graphic Novels
| Red Rising: Sons of Ares (With: Rik Hoskin) | 2018 |
| Red Rising: Sons of Ares: Wrath (With: Rik Hoskin) | 2020 |
| Red Rising: Sons of Ares: Forbidden Song (With: Rik Hoskin) | 2023 |
About Pierce Brown
Pierce Brown is an American science fiction author, born in Denver, Colorado, on 28 January 1988. He is the writer of the Red Rising saga, a series of six novels so far that began with “Red Rising” in 2014 and has sold more than six million copies.
Brown grew up in seven different states and graduated from Pepperdine University, where he majored in political science and economics. He then worked in politics and for technology start-ups, and was in the NBC Page Programme in Burbank, California, when his first book came out. He had written six earlier novels and been turned down by more than 110 agents before “Red Rising”, which he wrote in two months above his parents’ garage in Seattle.
“Red Rising” is set on a future Mars in a society divided into colour-coded castes ruled by the Golds. Its hero Darrow, a Red miner from the lowest caste, is remade as a Gold by a rebel group, the Sons of Ares, and sent to infiltrate the elite. The novel reached number 20 on the New York Times bestseller list. “Golden Son” (2015) reached number six and “Morning Star” (2016), which closed the original trilogy, reached number two and topped the USA Today list.
A second sequence opened with “Iron Gold” in 2018 and continued with “Dark Age” (2019) and “Light Bringer” (2023). A seventh novel, “Red God”, is forthcoming. Brown also co-wrote the prequel comic “Red Rising: Sons of Ares” with Rik Hoskin, about the founding of the rebel group, which Dynamite has collected in three volumes.
Brown was voted best debut author in the 2014 Goodreads Choice Awards, and “Golden Son” and “Morning Star” won the Goodreads science fiction category in 2015 and 2016. Universal Pictures bought the film rights to “Red Rising” in 2014 with Brown writing the screenplay, but the film was not made and the rights returned to him. He began developing a television series in 2018 and said in March 2026 that it was no longer moving forward. In 2025 he announced “The Book of Lorn”, an illustrated Red Rising story serialised on Patreon.
Photo: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons (cropped).