Pierce Brown wants to set the record straight. Red God, the highly anticipated final installment in the Red Rising series, is not finished despite speculations.
In a candid interview with Maude Garrett, the author emerged from what he called his "cave" to address questions about the book's completion status and clarify the messy reality of bringing a 225,000-word epic to life.
"I'm hard at work writing Red God, except for right now where I'm coming out of my cave to clarify what's happening with Red God and, apparently it's ‘finished,'" Brown said with obvious frustration. "I'm hard at work at it, you know. Gosh, I've got over a thousand pages easily, but it's really lacking the soul that I wait for each book to have before I feel confident that I can tell my publisher it's going to be ready."
Brown explained the unforgiving timeline authors face once they commit to a release date. "Here's what happens when I give a date: everything then gets set in stone," he said. "I have to then have the manuscript done and content copy-edited, and then I have to go through the copy editors at a certain time, and the book needs at least six months to go to print, maybe four months if you really want to rush it through."
"We're talking two, three, four drafts, especially when it gets, you know, 225,000 words and it's really complicated and you're tying up so many loose ends," Brown explained.
His philosophy remains unchanged from previous delays: "This is what I've said to you before, it's what I'll always say, I'll release the book when it's ready."
Saying goodbye to Darrow
As the planned seventh and final book in the series, Red God represents the end of Brown's nearly two-decade relationship with his protagonist.
"I understand the psychological underpinnings of taking a long time with a project like this is like a fear of death, a fear of closure, right?" Brown admitted. "And if I finish it, then I know that my story with Darrow is done because this is meant to be a seven-book series."
Brown's connection to Darrow runs deeper than most readers might realize. "That's saying goodbye to a guy that I've known since I was 22...who I created above my parents' garage and who's existed longer to me than almost any of my friends have, and certainly longer than he has to anyone else."
The creative struggle has pushed Brown to extremes. "I'll go like two days without sleep solid trying to write, and sometimes that's often because you reach a fork in the road and you're not sure which way to go," he said. "And the thing is, this is the last fork. There's these last forks, and I want to make sure that it feels right."
Not this summer
Brown confirmed what many fans suspected. The book won't arrive during the summer window mentioned in a previous interview.
"Red God… I'll let you know when it's [ready]... it's not this summer. That's from an old interview. I said I'd hoped to be out this summer, but unfortunately, it's not," he said. "And I appreciate everyone's patience on it."
When Garrett noted she's been with the series for 16 years and shares Brown's conflicting emotions, desperately wanting to know what happens while dreading the end, Brown offered a culinary metaphor.
"I'm going to make sure that when I set it down, it's going to be that. That's the best chili I ever made," he said.
A thousand pages done in draft but...
The author admitted that he has already written over a thousand pages of Red God. Unlike with Light Bringer, where Brown famously scrapped hundreds of thousands of words after realizing the book was "front-heavy" and didn't "get into the story fast enough," the issues with Red God are different.
"It's not going to be a case of me deleting, you know, the first several hundred pages," Brown clarified. He'd even created a 27-page outline for Light Bringer, yet still had to radically restructure the book during the writing process.
"Each book has its own struggle to find identity," he explained. "And often I'll be sometimes midway through my second draft and have an epiphany that the book is not about this, it's about this."
With Light Bringer, that epiphany centered on a question: "What does Darrow do with lack of progress? Rage and velocity have worked up until this point, but now they're not working. So, what do I do?"
For Red God, Brown is keeping the specific challenges close to the vest. "Since no one's read it, I'm not going to talk about what the problems are, but I know that because it's always like this," he said. "There's always just one day where I have an epiphany and before that will be, you know, sometimes weeks or months of thinking 'I don't have the answer.'"
Brown is finding inspiration in civilizational collapse history (!)
To break through the creative blocks, Brown has turned to history, specifically, the violent ends of powerful societies.
He is currently reading The End of Everything by Victor Davis Hanson, an ancient historian specializing in the Greek world from 580 BC to around 250 BC. The book examines how four powerful civilizations met their destruction, from the Roman devastation in the Punic Wars to Cortes and the fall of Tenochtitlan.
"History always, in order to understand a single story in history, you have to understand a lot of other things that attend it," Brown explained. "And I find that that's a really good source of inspiration."
He shared that he is also reading adventure novels "to remind me why I like reading". The title of Hanson's book carries obvious resonance for the finale of the seven-book saga. When Garrett noted the connection, Brown simply echoed, "The end of everything."
For fans who've invested 16 years in Darrow's journey from the mines of Mars to the halls of power across the solar system, the wait is agonizing. But Brown's update, while disappointing, at least offers clarity that there's no release date coming soon because the book isn't ready to have one.
But even with over a thousand pages written, Brown isn't ready to let go just yet. When he does finally set Red God down, he wants readers to know it was worth the wait and the best chili he ever made. Until that day arrives, Howlers everywhere will have to remain patient knowing their author is sleepless in his cave, wrestling with the last forks in Darrow's road.