Max Kidruk

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Max Kidruk is the writer credited with founding the techno-thriller as a genre in Ukrainian fiction. Across his work, he is known for making complex scientific and technical material accessible without sacrificing narrative tension – a signature that has made him one of the most widely read authors of genre fiction in Ukraine today. 

His fiction has been translated into Polish, German, Czech, and Hungarian. Kidruk's novels fuse technical precision with high-stakes drama, using science – artificial intelligence, nuclear and aviation engineering, physics – as both a plot engine and a lens on how far human morality holds under extreme pressure: the techno-thrillers Bot: Guayaquil Paradox (2015) and Stronghold (2013) turn hacking and covert engineering into geopolitical suspense. Godlessness (2018) follows a group of young Ukrainians into the Peruvian jungle in search of a lost civilization, The Inner Side of Dreams (2018) and Don't Look Back and Stay Silent (2017) shift from adventure toward psychological suspense, tracing parent-child estrangement, childhood cruelty, and the pull toward escaping reality. His science-fiction series New Dark Ages extends the same instinct for hard, research-grounded speculation into a story of civilizational collapse.