Yeah, I know. My only run in with videogame literature in the past has been the series of Resident Evil novels put out by S.D. Perry, which are (with the exception of two all new stories) novelizations of the events of the games. The books were good in a junk food kind of way; fun to read but not really containing any intellectual merit. As Saturday Simon noted when he finished reading them, ‘It’ll be nice to read something that doesn’t end in a self destruction sequence’.
So, when I heard that Bioshock: Rapture was coming out, I was a bit worried. Bioshock (as I have shouted about before) has one of the best stories in gaming. No. Hush you. It has. It managed to establish an entire city and its residents, making you care about the people who were left behind there when the proverbial hit the fan. Could a previously unconnected writer pull off the same feat in a different format?
Well, for this book they pulled out the big guns. John Shirley is a Bram Stoker Award winning writer, and has worked on several high profile projects, including The Crow. Sunday Matt kindly gave me the book for my birthday, so I got stuck in.
The writing itself is great. Shirley bounces around from character to character, using cockney Bill McDonagh as his main focus. I think it would depend on personal tastes, but I really enjoyed hearing from so many characters of Rapture. It meant the story never became stale, and we gained a bigger picture of the world of the underwater city before its demise.
What is handled really well is the destruction of the lives of the underclass, those who eventually became the splicers. In the game, they were more often than not just waves of bad guys to be mindlessly gunned down. In the book, they are depicted as those who had been lied to and imprisoned, and had reached the end of their tether. They aren’t shown as being simply mad, more pushed to their limits, and I think it was handled very well.
However, some of the main characters do suffer a bit. Several become mere cultural stereotypes at some points, especially McDonagh, Tennenbaum and Suchong (Suchong’s habit of speaking of himself in the third person is especially irritating on paper). Andrew Ryan is possibly the worst offender too. It’s not all Shirley’s fault of course, he was given this videogame staple of the Ultimate Bad Guy to work with. In the game, you need to be told he is awful and evil and needs to be killed, but the prequel should have given him some motivation to do so. Now, it does, in the form the atomic bombs that prompt Ryan into building Rapture, but that’s pretty much it. Throughout the entire decline of the city, and despite the repeated warnings of various characters, he refuses to believe what he’s doing is wrong. Now, I know people in real life can be pig headed, but surely he would express even a little bit of self doubt after people are murdering each other in his utopia? I’m just saying.
It’s not Shirley’s fault entirely, though. The problem is these people aren’t his creations. He’s been given the tools and been told to get on with it, and he has done so with admirable aplomb. 99% of the time the system works, and he manages to weave a fascinating tale out of the material. However, during that 1% the tale is tripped up be fan service and unbelievable characters, which is a crying shame.
I’ve given the book a bit of a bashing, but honestly, it’s still a brilliant read. I would say you should play the games first to read it. You don’t NEED to, but it’ll help you understand the hidden layers to the story. So, yeah, a thumbs up to this.
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