Manuel Batsching reviewed BioShock: Rapture by John Shirley
Review of 'BioShock: Rapture' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
What do you expect from a novel that was written to squeeze a few more coins out of a video game franchise? In this particular case I expected a few hours of cheap excitement and some reminiscence of one of the best video games I have ever played (speaking for Bioshock 1 only, Bioshock 2 did just suck). And this is exactly what I found in this book.
I gathered from other reviews that people had a hard time to be left unannoyed by the authors writing style and dialog design. This is where I am happy that I read the book in a language that is not my mother tongue. I found it well written in places where the author didn't try to be too poetic.
There is not much to be said about the story. Shirley connects the tape recorder fragments known from the game to a narration …
What do you expect from a novel that was written to squeeze a few more coins out of a video game franchise? In this particular case I expected a few hours of cheap excitement and some reminiscence of one of the best video games I have ever played (speaking for Bioshock 1 only, Bioshock 2 did just suck). And this is exactly what I found in this book.
I gathered from other reviews that people had a hard time to be left unannoyed by the authors writing style and dialog design. This is where I am happy that I read the book in a language that is not my mother tongue. I found it well written in places where the author didn't try to be too poetic.
There is not much to be said about the story. Shirley connects the tape recorder fragments known from the game to a narration that describes the rise and fall of Andrew Ryan's objectivistic utopia, (no coincidence that "And. Ryan" anagrams to "[a:Ayn Rand|432|Ayn Rand|http://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/authors/1168729178p2/432.jpg]",) in a foreseeable and unsurprising way.
Actually I think a dystopian fantasy would have been the right medium for a comment on Rand's politic philosophy which was itself developed in her novels, but in my opinion this opportunity was left unused in the video games as well as in the present book. There are certainly some thoughts present about people's need for religion and how poverty and hardship is the grounding soil of socialistic ideas, but still the real reason for the fall of Rapture was apparently ADAM.
What I found to be a bit neglected in the story is the proper introduction of those technical achievements like autonomous drones and big daddies, that made Rapture technically much more advanced than the outside world. The explanations for these things given in the book seem to be too halfhearted and too silly to be authentic. But probably that is exactly what gives Shirley's Rapture the charm of a cheap pulp scifi novel, which is what I like most about it.
