Max Kidruk to Go on Tour With the Sequel to Colony: What We Know
Max Kidruk's charity tour will cover 16 Ukrainian cities and introduce the sequel in the New Dark Ages series.
Max Kidruk announced a charity tour supporting the second book in his New Dark Ages sci-fi series — the novel Collapse. The tour kicks off April 19 in Kyiv and will cover Zhytomyr, Rivne, Lutsk, Lviv, Ternopil, Ivano-Frankivsk, Chernivtsi, Khmelnytskyi, Vinnytsia, Cherkasy, Odesa, Kharkiv, Dnipro, Poltava, and Sumy.
During the events, he plans to talk about the novel's scientific foundation, the series' future direction, and previously unpublished insights. The tour will run in a charity format.
More on the author and his New Dark Ages series — read on in this DeTalks article.
Kidruk's Literary Career
Max Kidruk is a Ukrainian writer, publisher, and researcher, trained as an energy engineer. His first books were travelogues, written after journeys through Europe, Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Oceania.
Kidruk's debut work, Mexican Chronicles: The Story of One Dream, came out in 2009. Thereafter, in 2012, Max published the sci-fi thriller Bot, which launched the techno-thriller genre in contemporary Ukrainian prose and went through numerous reprints.
In the years that followed, Kidruk turned to psychological and social themes. His novels Zazyrny u Moi Sny ('Peek Into My Dreams') and De Nemaie Boha ('Where There Is No God') made the BBC Book of the Year shortlist, and Ne Ozyraisia i Movchy ('Don't Look Back and Stay Silent') became a long-running bestseller thanks to a nationwide tour.
In late 2022, the writer and his wife also founded the publishing house Borodatyi Tamaryn ('The Bearded Tamarin'). Max's first book as a publisher was the novel Colony, which opened the New Dark Ages series, about the colonization of Mars in the 22nd century.
Colony: Where the Story Begins
Colony is the first book in the New Dark Ages series. The novel takes place in 2141, in the aftermath of a pandemic caused by a disease called clodis. A new pathogen emerges, dangerous for pregnant women. Immunologists try to determine its nature and investigate a possible link to neutrino bursts around the planet.
In the novel, Mars is home to over a hundred thousand people, a third of whom were born in the Colonies. Highly skilled specialists from Earth control the key sectors of the economy, while Martians are forced into low-paying jobs. Social tension grows. A generation that came of age under different gravity wants change capable of shaking the fragile balance.
After its first week of sales, the novel topped Knyharnia Ye's top 20 chart. It stayed on the list for 24 straight weeks. By the end of 2025, total print runs had reached 68,000 copies. The series is planned to run four novels, released roughly once every three years.
Collapse: The Story Continues for a Civilization on the Brink
Collapse is the second book in the New Dark Ages series. The events take place after a bloody uprising by Mars-born citizens that upends the balance of power among the Martian corporations in Newborn. The system of checks that maintained relative stability for decades begins to collapse.
On Earth, meanwhile, the situation also takes on an existential scale. Infants infected with the SDI agent undergo a radical transformation, shifting to oxygen-free metabolism. A similar pathogen affects plants and blocks oxygen production. O₂ levels drop, threatening a planetary collapse.
The climate crisis takes a back seat to the danger of a total restructuring of the biosphere. Scientists' attempts to find an answer lead to the discovery of a carbon world beyond the visible universe. Contact with the unknown calls into question the origin of the threat and the limits of human understanding.
Collapse unfolds a story of losing control and a civilization approaching a point of no return. At the center of the plot are questions of responsibility for technological decisions, the cost of hubris, and the fragility of order amid global change.
Within the first 24 hours of preorders, sold 5,931 copies of Collapse. For comparison, in 2022, preorders for Colony ran for a month and a half and gathered around 5,800 orders. That means Collapse's single-day result exceeded the total preorder volume Colony had gathered over its entire preorder period.
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