If you search for Minecraft ($6.99) novels on Amazon, you get quite a lot of results, but you’ll notice that almost all of them include “unofficial" in their title because up until today, there was no official Minecraft novel. The honor of being the first official novel based on the legendary game goes to Max Brooks’ (of World War Z) Minecraft: The Island, published today in both Kindle format and hardcover. The novel is written “in the tradition of iconic adventures like Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island" according to the official description, although I doubt the novel spends 10 pages on the protagonist putting together a table. The story is about a lone castaway washed up on a beach in a world that is made of blocks. His first priority is finding food and the next is not becoming food, so he gets to crafting and discovering the strange rules of this new world.

Despite Minecraft‘s lack of an actual storyline, it does offer plenty of material for all kinds of stories, and that of a castaway trying to survive was probably the easiest one to write. I will definitely read it to see what kind of narrative they came up with. Telltale has been doing some great stuff in its take on the Minecraft world, so I’m curious to see how Max Brooks went about creating his own narrative. He has pointed out in the past that he’s not writing the Minecraft novel, he’s just writing a Minecraft novel. You can read an excerpt from the book in case you’re wondering how it reads. Are you going to give the novel a chance?