Minecraft

Minecraft is a novel by the American writer Max Brooks, published by Del Rey in 2017. It is an official tie-in to the video game Minecraft, and it tells its story as a survival narrative.

The narrator of the book is a castaway on an island, alone at first, with no memory of the journey and no instructions. The world they have landed in behaves in ways that have to be learned from scratch: what can be eaten, what can be mined, what comes out after dark and what will happen if the day's work is not finished before nightfall. The book is written as a practical account of that learning, and the island's mysteries, of which there are several, are uncovered in the course of building the shelter and the tools that keep the narrator alive. Brooks wrote the protagonist without gender, leaving the character vague so that readers could place themselves in the situation, and the book is the first of a sequence of Minecraft novels.

The author is best known for his writing about survival in invented disasters, and the novel applies the same attention to water, food, shelter and the value of knowing what killed the last person to try this.