Bioshock: Rapture Novel Arrives on First Day of March

Publisher Macmillan and online shop Amazon have confirmed that fans of the Bioshock series of video games will have a chance to quench their thirst for more content set in the fictional world on March 1 of this year when a novel called Bioshock: Rapture will be finally launched, after a series of delays which lead some to question whether the book would ever reach readers.

The novel is written by John Shirley, who is well known for his work in the genres of cyberpunk and horror and has been cited as an influence by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, and the novel will also have a foreword written by Ken Levine, the designer that is the creator of the Bioshock game universe.

Rapture, as the name implies, is a prequel to both the video games in the franchise; it will tell the story of how main character Andrew Ryan has founded the underwater city that players have thoroughly explored, also showing how the very ideas that stand at its foundation were also the seeds for its downfall further down the line.

Initially, Rapture was set to arrive in February of last year, when BioShock 2 was released to gamers, but the novel was delayed as the writer needed to modify some elements of the story in order to make sure that the narrative did not conflict with the plot element of the game.

After the first BioShock video game was released, Ken Levine was no longer involved in the creation of the series, which was taken over by 2K Marin.

At the moment, Levine and his team at Irrational Games are working on a new game in the series, which is called BioShock: Infinite, which will no longer take place under the sea but on a flying island.

It's not clear whether publisher Take Two is interested in delivering more games using the Rapture setting.