Their stories and character depth become watered down due to other characters’ perspectives competing for page count, so it isn’t all that it could have been but the threads are there. Fontaine is the engine by which the fall comes about, but Bill's story is essentially that of the novel. These could have sufficed to tell the entire story by themselves and been made to play off one another. As a novel it would have been more successful had it remained focused on the two contrasting characters it starts with: Bill the plumber, who becomes a significant figure in Rapture's maintenance and Ryan's most trusted advisor, the kind of person Rapture was intended for and Fontaine the mobster, who represents the darker side of people who are drawn by what Rapture has to offer. Scenes of horror ensue.I wondered whether this novel would be openly judgemental of Ayn Rand (represented in the person of Andrew Ryan) but it is only a straightforward exploration of how her envisioned utopia’s rise and fall might play out, building on the premise that a fall would indeed happen. Layered over this is the necessary setup for the video games that will carry the story forward past this novel's end: we see bizarre new technologies being employed in this 1950s setting that are still the stuff of sci-fi today, arising from a complete lack of regulation and regard for morality.

With large numbers of its citizens feeling trapped in this enclosed society where hand-outs are frowned upon, trouble is soon brewing. Meanwhile the underclass swells and quickly reaches a dead end. The flaws of Rapture are soon evident, when it becomes riddled with immoral characters who have no problem stomping on the rights of others and can't be sufficiently controlled. Its only downside is that once you're in, you can't leave. Industrialist Andrew Ryan is tired of government interference, so he sets up his own city outside of national boundaries to create a tax-free libertarian utopia. Rapture is an equivalent of the Atlantis valley from Ayn Rand's 'Atlas Shrugged', moved to an underwater setting where everything goes tragically wrong. I've never played the Bioshock game, but I was drawn by the novel's premise.

Bioshock rapture john shirley