Minecraft: The Crash novel now available in North America

Fiction! It can transport us to new and wondrous worlds! It can let us travel in time to forgotten ages! It can open up the mysteries of the human mind! It can inspire us to burn with rage or swoon with love! But can it achieve the ultimate goal of all art - which is, obviously, to do justice to the digital majesty of Minecraft?!

Well, of course it can! Didn’t you read Minecraft: The Island by Max Brooks?

Not content with perfecting the entire medium of literature once, we asked author Tracey Baptiste for her own fictional take on Minecraft. The result, we can reveal, is a new novel called Minecraft: The Crash! The cover of which, designed by the rather talented Ian Wilding, you can see below!

Minecraft: The Crash follows the story of Bianca and Lonnie, avid Minecraft enthusiasts, and - in a moment of sudden misfortune - car crash victims. Waking in hospital, almost paralysed by her injuries, Bianca finds herself drawn into a new VR version of Minecraft which promises her control over a world at the very moment she’s lost control over the real one. Is Lonnie in there with her too? And can Bianca help him to return to reality with her? The road to recovery may not be without its own dangers!

You may know Tracey Baptiste as the author of several works of fiction and nonfiction including The Jumbies series, The Totally Gross History of Ancient Egypt and, uh, this book on the conservation work of Al Gore. She has wide-ranging interests, that’s for sure! And who better to write about the varied world of Minecraft than someone with such a broadly inquisitive brain?

You’ll be able to whip the book off shelves on July 10th in the US (hey, that's today!) and July 12th in the UK (hey that's only a couple of days away!)

Also, if you like the cover, you should check out this interview we did with the artist! He's made loads of other cool Minecraft art.