Bethesda Softworks and Del Ray Books announce plans for a novel based on RAGE, id Software's upcoming first-person shooter. The book is being written by author and game writer Matt Costello and is planned for release on August 30, 2011, two weeks before the game's planned release date. Here's word:

The novel delves even deeper into this world and its characters through the pen of Matt Costello--the same person who helped write the story for the game. The world was doomed and only some of the population could be saved. That was what the scientists were saying, at least. So the best and brightest were gathered and put into stasis deep beneath the surface of the Earth--buried so that man could live.

When Lt. Nick Raine emerges from his Ark, he finds the human race has not been wiped out. And people, as resilient as they are, are scraping together a new world from the rubble of the old. This was not what anyone in the Arks expected--a new society where might is right, mutants plague the Earth, and “friend” is a term for the person who hasn't stabbed you in the back.