Tie-in novels are a weird breed, aren't they? They run the gamut from "glorified fanfic" to "literature snobs don't know what they're missing." I've read a lot of these things in my time; if I'm being honest, it's probably the vast majority of what I've historically read outside of William Gibson and Stephen King. That's not even getting into the vast library of Warhammer stuff... anyway, when I was younger and the functional illiteracy that came with graduating college hadn't set in yet, I was also a big BioShock fan and it made all too much sense to grab the tie-in novel. BioShock: Rapture, written by established genre author John Shirley, is the big prequel novel to one of the biggest games of the late Aughts. I read it voraciously fifteen years ago; does it hold up now? Well... if you're a fan of the first two games, sure, why not?
As is the case with most tie-in fiction, it's silly to try to approach BioShock: Rapture outside of the context of the games it was written for. If you're not already a fan of BioShock (especially the first one) then you're probably not going to get much out of it. But let's pretend for a moment that you don't know what BioShock is:
In the aftermath of World War II and the use of the atomic bomb, a wealthy Russian-American industrialist, Andrew Ryan (a thinly-veiled analog of Ayn Rand, albeit one who went into business instead of writing bad books) enacts a plan he'd been sketching out for some time: to build a city at the bottom of the sea and fill it with forward-thinking people: industrialists, engineers, scientists, artists, anyone who ever chafed under government or social control and believed, more or less, in a philosophy of self-reliance and free market economics. By the end of the 1940s, the city is more or less established at the bottom of the North Sea, a shining jewel of art deco, a monument to ingenuity and progress. Its name? Rapture. But problems set in almost right away: Ryan's idea of progress leaves no room for people who fall through the cracks, and the obvious question of who's going to clean the toilets in a city full of go-getters leads to a permanent underclass. Add to this mix a mobster-like grifter who sees an opportunity to take the city for himself, and a collectivist cult leader with her own plans for the city's future, and you've got a powderkeg of resentment. The introduction of ADAM, a kind of super-serum made out of unstable stem cells that can grant all kinds of abilities, throws the city into disarray. All this is pretty much the background lore of BioShock (and to a lesser extent BioShock 2) — in the games, it's told almost entirely through tape recordings, discovered by the player after the city's society has already completely collapsed, with Rapture now a haven for "splicers," violently unstable ADAM addicts with dangerous superpowers.
The book attempts to tie together all the various little moments caught on tape and fill in some of the gaps; most of it was written before BioShock 2 was released, and it shows, as the lore elements introduced in that game, such as Sophia Lamb and her cult, were edited in but otherwise don't play a major role. Written as it was before BioShock Infinite, it's pretty much directly contradicted by the Burial at Sea expansion, which was likely on purpose as Ken Levine resented the novel and BioShock 2, neither of which he had much involvement in. But at the same time, Burial at Sea not just contradicts BioShock: Rapture and BioShock 2, it also contradicts BioShock 1 and BioShock Infinite, so, you know, you pick which one you think is more canon. I think it's probably possible to make it all work together, but maybe it's easier to just pretend that Burial at Sea's version of Rapture is not the same one from the first two games, nevermind what Levine says. I don't particularly give a rip for Levine's opinion, anyway.
But I digress.
BioShock: Rapture is an engaging read for the most part. Most of it follows Bill McDonagh, a British-American engineer, from his career fixing toilets for New York's high muckety mucks to becoming Ryan's general contractor and helping build Rapture, all the way to Rapture's final collapse as a functioning society. The narrative sometimes jumps around; sometimes we get a glimpse of some of the ordinary folk of Rapture, sometimes we follow one of the major characters from the game, particularly Frank Fontaine, the aforementioned grifter. But reading through it again I was struck by how much it sticks to the bones of the games. It almost feels as if most of the action is just there to serve as connective tissue between the various audio diaries strewn throughout the games, though the novel tries to provide an explanation for this frankly absurd storytelling trope (one that was far from new when BioShock did it) by saying Ryan encouraged citizens to record their thoughts for a planned Rapture memorial museum. This is what I mean when I say the book is glorified fanfiction; there's nothing inherently wrong with fanfiction in and of itself, but Rapture does little to elevate or transform its source material. There have been Aliens novels from the Dark Horse days that I would recommend to people not familiar with the franchise; I can't say the same for BioShock: Rapture. It's one of those things that are strictly for enthusiasts only.
This is on top of Shirley's writing style being lightly grating. He is generally pretty direct, straightforward, but his tendency to pepper dialogue with exclamation points made my eye twitch. There was something almost comic-book-y to how he wrote dialogue; I kept thinking to myself, "Real people don't talk like this." His greatest strengths are when he's writing what characters are thinking or feeling; as soon as they open their mouths, I imagine Stan Lee (or Steve Ditko, in Ryan's case) at the typewriter. I'm also not completely sold on how he wrote Lamb; she comes off much more obviously like a stereotypical cult leader, and less like the sharp, manipulative psychotherapist she actually is.
Nevertheless, though I am older and hopefully wiser, I still found BioShock: Rapture to be a quick, entertaining read. The book itself, at least my copy, is a nice, fat hardcover, with artwork by none other than Craig Mullins, one of my favorite concept artists (you may recognize his work for Halo 1 and 2, BioShock 2, Fallout 3, and the games that most brought him to my attention, Marathon and its sequels.) And while my memories of BioShock are a little fuzzy these days, it was fun reading about these old familiar places from two of my favorite games of the era.
I guess next is to actually play them again, yeah?
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