It's no secret that Bioshock is one of my favorite games in the past decade. Everything about the world of Rapture and the way it was slowly fed to us over the course of the game reeled me in. But those who have played Bioshock know that the game takes place after the fall of Rapture. We're handed small glimpses of what happened in the form of small audio diaries of the people that founded the underwater city, the people that lived through the fall. But a lot of us have always wanted to actually see what happened, witness the fall of Rapture ourselves. And that's what this novel is about: the rise and fall of Rapture, and that of Andrew Ryan.
The book starts out with a young Andrew Ryan getting the idea for Rapture, and slowly gathering the right people to make it happen. It glosses over the construction of the city, rightly so, by viewing it through a shroud of mystery in the eyes of those who are trying to figure out what Ryan is up to. The first few chapters of the book are steeped in curiosity and foreboding, slowly introducing the reader to the cast of characters that would become those audio diary voices.
It's all downhill from there.
If nothing else, this book makes me want to go and read some of author John Shirley's original, non-franchise books, to try and redeem his name and reputation. Throughout the entire thing, I could not tell if he was just an awful writer, or a decent one being corralled and throttled by Bioshock's publisher, 2K. There is a world of difference between a novel and a video game, but this novel seems to forget that, once we enter Rapture. It tries so hard to fit in direct references to things in the game, rather than just showing them to us and letting us figure out what they are. The majority of the audio diaries are captured, word for word, and worked into the dialogue. In the context of the game, it makes sense to classify and name Splicers by their abilities. That doesn't mean that I want a novelization of Bioshock to describe them with in-game terms like "Nitro Splicer" and "Thug Splicer". I don't think this book could get more game-y if it were to detail fight scenes by describing the characters' hit points or life bars.
The story of the book is bizarrely uneven. Con artist Frank Fontaine is introduced early on, but sort of fades into the background for a while, relegated to the occasional muttering of "I don't trust that guy..." Almost as soon as Rapture comes alive, author Shirley taps into a portion of the plot from Bioshock 2, in which psychologist Sofia Lamb begins to combat Ryan's ideologies by forming an underground cult of personality around herself. Granted, almost none of the other characters or plots from Bioshock 2 are introduced, but I suppose that's for the best. My love for the original Bioshock is comparable to my hate for the second game.
Just as the situation builds toward something resembling conflict, the whole plot thread is swept under the rug, and the focus snaps back to Fontaine and his new Plasmid business. For the rest of the book, Lamb is pretty much reduced to infrequent mentions of "Oh yeah. Lamb is still out there. Forgot about her." That's it.
For all that the book shoves the game down our throats with nomenclature, it leaves a lot out that I would like to have seen, and portrays things in ways I found slightly disappointing. Example: the single biggest icon of the game is the Big Daddy, right? Yeah. They don't even show up until the very end. Literally, in the last couple of chapters. The creation of the Little Sisters was an afterthought, to gather ADAM to exert control over the splicers. A lot of the amazing bronze-and-brass steampunk technology in the games? It's just there. No explanation of how they advanced this tech, or discovered it, or why they were able to push it so far past existing technology on the surface. It's just...there. But we sure know what it's called! Shirley makes sure to tell us that almost ever door is a Securis door, and every package comes from Jet Postal, and so on.
The denouement is also not at all what I expected, nor what I recall from the games. The games portrayed the fall of Rapture as being partly driven by the politics of the main players, particularly Andrew Ryan versus Atlas, but mostly driven simply by a society of perfection and excess crumbling in upon itself and cannibalizing itself. In the game and its backstory, it feels like the Splicers were a reflection of our society's obsession with beauty and perfection, with celebrities constantly tucking in their unsightly edges with plastic surgery and drugs. The splicers were the same basic idea, only instead of surgery and drugs, it was genetic modification, until they went insane with it. This was a core theme! But in the book, Splicers are nothing more than drug addicts. Fontaine provides the gene tonics and plasmids, and they're mostly grabbed by the underclasses and proletariat, not the elite high society. Splicers in the book aren't a disease devouring Rapture, they're more like annoying rats in the kitchen. They're there, they're annoying, ubiquitous, and definitely need to be dealt with, but they aren't a big concern. The book focuses almost entirely on Andrew Ryan and his great battles with Frank Fontaine and the mysterious folk hero, Atlas.
Continuing the theme of "uneven", the character of Andrew Ryan is a mess. I feel like John Shirley was never quite sure how to handle a character like this. Ryan is a God, and he is a Monster. But as a main character, he also has to be a Man, and this is sort of where the book falls short. He jumps between the three, but the transition is never smooth or natural. One scene he's trumpeting the free market of Rapture, the next he's crucifying men and putting their corpses on display, and then he's a sad old man, upset that people aren't appreciating his vision. That sweet spot is never found with Ryan. Given that he's the primary character (though whether he is the protagonist or the antagonist is up for debate), it provides a very shoddy foundation for the rest of the novel.
As I said, I'd really like to know how much of this novel was John Shirley, and how much of it was 2K Games handing him a binder full of outlines, pointers, and commandments and saying "Write this the way we want it". I lean toward the latter only because I started reading one of Shirley's Borderlands novels (also by 2K Games), and the video game elements are even more crowbarred in. I want to believe that he is a good author, but Rapture is definitely not going to convince anyone of this.
My recommendation? If you are a fan of Bioshock, just go replay the first game. Let this book sink to the bottom of the sea.
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