The Collapse — maps and 3D location views for Max Kidruk's New Dark Ages

Maps and 3D location views for The Collapse, the second novel in Max Kidruk’s New Dark Ages cycle. Where the first book set the Colonies on real Martian terrain, this volume rebuilt them from the ground up — every location reassembled on newer surface data, supported by a purpose-built GIS, rendered in a new visual language, and extended for the first time to a second world.

Acidalia Planitia.

The book

The Collapse is the second book in the New Dark Ages cycle — a story about losing control. A month before it opens, a violent uprising of the Mars-born has broken the balance of power between the planet’s dominant corporations, the equilibrium that had held political stability in Newborn for decades. On Earth, infants infected by the SDI agent undergo a metamorphosis into an oxygen-free metabolism, while a near-identical pathogen attacks plant life and shuts down oxygen production — a threat that begins to outpace even runaway warming. The scientists fighting it uncover a strange carbon world far beyond the visible universe, and find themselves wholly unprepared for what waits there.

Caption.

How it was rebuilt

The Colony locations were not merely updated — they were reassembled in full. A few months after The Colony went to print, a new and far more detailed set of Martian surface data became available, and each settlement was regrounded on that sharper terrain rather than carried over.

The new data also brought a decision. The settlements of the first book had not all been held to a single, consistent scale — a discrepancy traceable to the projections used in the original master plans. For The Collapse the choice was made, together with the author’s team, to correct this across the whole system: to bring every location to one unified scale, and to replan, refine and improve each settlement on that corrected basis.

The system behind it

Behind the maps sits a dedicated GIS for the Colonies: a structured system that holds the settlements, terrain and named features as managed spatial data rather than as one-off drawings, so locations stay consistent with one another and can be queried, revised and re-rendered as the narrative grows across the series.

The visualisation was reworked to match. Rather than a single rendered view, each map and 3D view is built from a complex combination of layers, giving the locations more depth and legibility while keeping them readable in a printed book.

New ground, and a second world

The Collapse also reaches places the first book never did — new sites across the Martian surface, and, for the first time, a second world: the Moon, at its south pole. The lunar terrain was built from LOLA laser altimetry — the same class of real, measured topography that grounds the Martian maps — with the polar relief carried down to five-metre detail.

Each new area demanded its own working scales, and the modular system developed for The Colony had to be extended to terrain and settlement types it was never designed for. The denser source material also came at a cost in volume: the finished Colony project had occupied 73 GB; The Collapse, rebuilt from the higher-resolution data, grew to 207.1 GB — close to three times the size, assembled tile by tile until the full extent needed for the book was in place.

One shared base

Because the rework touched the entire system, its results did not stay inside the second book. The reissue of The Colony was updated with the newly adapted city plans and visualisations produced for The Collapse, so that both books now stand on a single, consistent cartographic base. The two are set apart chiefly by palette: the reissued Colony holds to warm Martian earth tones — a monochrome sepia of tan and copper worked across the relief — while The Collapse shifts to a cool register of slate blue and steel grey, its highlands left pale against deeper blue-grey lowlands.

Credits

Shown here is the cartographic and 3D location work for the book — the maps and the city and location views. The narrative illustrations were made separately, as part of the team Max Kidruk assembled for the book. The Collapse is published in Ukrainian by Bearded Tamarin.

Illustrations: Kateryna Sukhetska · Author: Max Kidruk · Publisher: Bearded Tamarin

Published 2022 · 928 pages · 15 × 23.5 cm · Ukrainian · ISBN 978-617-8509-15-6

The Collapse is published in Ukrainian by Bearded Tamarin (Бородатий Тамарин), the publishing house founded by the Kidruk family in 2022. More on the series site.