Pierce Brown recently announced that Red God, the seventh and last book of his Red Rising series, will not be released this summer. This is annoying, but even more annoying is that Brown has written one of the finer pieces of fiction on caste politics and he probably has not even heard of Bhim Rao Ambedkar. A young American author, Brown published the first book of the series, Red Rising, in 2014. The plot points were simple. In a near future, humanity has colonised and terraformed much of the solar system based on the mining of “Helium 3,” which is its main energy source and largely found underground in Mars. More importantly, humanity has changed itself. This is the central ‘MacGuffin,’ or plot device, around which everything revolves. Humans have been biologically engineered to be different, separated into eight different ‘colours’ or castes, which all have their own specific advantages, with the Golds ruling over everybody.Red Rising, Pierce Brown, Del Rey, 2014.The Red Rising series takes the delusion of racism/casteism seriously, asking what would happen to a society where there was an actual biological difference in capabilities dependent on the colour/caste of your birth. Brown is deeply influenced by Roman ideas, and this is very clearly an adaptation of the Noble Lie or myth found in The Republic, in which Socrates justifies social hierarchy by saying that politics must be dominated by those who have the (mythical) quality of gold or silver, and the producing classes have something of the quality of bronze, and the two should not mix. Brown takes this further by dividing the Society (with a capital ‘S’) further into the governors (Golds), the moneymakers (Silvers), the shock troops (Obsidians), the policing units (Greys), and so on until you get to the labour/servant class, the Reds. (This is also where it becomes clear that Brown has not really read anything of caste because there are no Dalits or outcastes.)In the first book, Darrow, a Red, is reshaped and retrained into a Gold, given a false identity, and smuggled into the training Institute where the top rank of Gold – the Peerless Scarred – graduate, before rising in rank through the Society. It was frank, brutal, quite often juvenile in its humour, and frenetic in its violence. It received mixed reviews, but quickly found its way to the bestseller lists. By the second book, Golden Sun, the reviews were more flattering, but still mixed, saying things like, “It sounds stupid, I know. But trust me — you’ve just got to take a deep breath, accept the hackneyed, trope-ridden world Brown has assembled, and dive straight in.” Now that Brown has published six books, selling millions of copies, that disdain has been transmuted into great enthusiasm by the magic of the market. Brown, himself, has become a better writer as the series has progressed, and the second trilogy is markedly darker and more thoughtful than the first one. Nonetheless, he has retained two things throughout – a fantastic pace of action that is marked by the confusion and abrupt changes of fortune that are common in combat, and the gnawing question of how one changes a deeply stratified society where differences are bred into the bone and backed up by centuries of propaganda.While the first makes for a gripping read, with cliffhanger after cliffhanger, the second is the soul of the series, and it is a troubled, scarred soul. There are many answers. In a society built on social apartheid, there are many rebellions, while those at the top – the Gold – are endlessly divided by their own ambition. Brown does a splendid job in teasing out the reasons for rebellion, due to logic, heartbreak, vanity, friendship, love, economic stagnation, but he also does a great job in showing the logic of the rulers and their considerations. The whole of the second trilogy is, in fact, an insight on how revolutions can fail their own people and their own principles, while illustrating how those addicted to power may profess the highest of morals, but when push comes to push, cannot resist the corruption of power for its own sake.It is impossible to adequately review a six-book series without giving away important plot points, especially as the shortest is over 380 pages in length and the longest, almost 800. Most examples will not make sense without them, but one of the most devastating points that Brown makes is when Darrow confronts one of his foremost adversaries at the end of the fourth book, and the adversary tells him how Darrow has merely changed masters, from the Society to his revolution.That is part of your Red genetic character. Your yearning, your need to sacrifice. Brave pioneer. Toil, dig, die for the good of humanity. To make Mars green. We designed you to be the perfect slave. And that’s what you are, Darrow. A slave with many masters. Change your eyes. Take our scar. Break our reign. It won’t change what you are at your core. A slave.I only discovered the series last year and read through the six books of the series in less than two weeks, marvelling – and annoyed – that some young American author had done such a good job at getting to how difficult undoing caste discrimination can be. Another way to look at it, though, is how obviously corrupt social stratification by the accident of birth is, and how even somebody total oblivious of how it works in a region like South Asia can strike at the heart of the matter as long as they centre their writing on our common humanity. Omair Ahmad has worked as a political analyst and journalist in India, the US and the UK.