A Frictionless State is a literary speculative novel being published here in serial form, one chapter at a time. New chapters go out weekly. You can start reading now or subscribe to receive each new instalment by email.
A Frictionless State
A literary speculative novel, published serially online
Truth is a contagion
In 2074, Ari Feld, a technician who has learned to trust systems more than people, finds evidence suggesting that the pandemic may have been engineered. What begins as private suspicion widens into something far more dangerous—a struggle over truth, concealment, and control inside a governing order that preserves peace through constraint, dependence, and managed truth.
As Ari follows the evidence, he is driven into contact with his estranged wife Sharon, whose scientific rigour may confirm what he fears; Alene, the investigator who begins to see both the pattern and the person inside it; and his foster mother Francis, who helped build the world now closing around him.
A Frictionless State is literary speculative fiction about political order, damaged intimacy, and what human beings become inside systems designed to eliminate friction at any cost.
About David Barach
David Barach studied screenwriting at Tel Aviv University, where he wrote the first version of this story as a feature-length screenplay in 1996. He later completed an MFA in fiction writing at Johns Hopkins University.
For the next two decades, the novel stayed unfinished while he built and sold three technology companies focused on philanthropy infrastructure. He returned to fiction when the world the screenplay had imagined—a pandemic, managed reality, the question of who gets to control what is allowed to be known—stopped feeling like invention.
A Frictionless State is his first novel.
A note on the writing process
I used AI as part of my writing process — for analysis, iteration, and editing. The narrative, characters, themes, and voice are entirely my own. Learn more
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New Chapters
Essays
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The Kind of Readers I’m Hoping to Find
There is a kind of reader who reads fiction not to have their existing judgments confirmed but to test them. Someone willing to stay inside moral complexity long enough to understand it, rather than resolving it quickly into a verdict. If you’ve read N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season and felt unsettled for days, or read Frank Herbert’s Dune as a study in how power… -
On Releasing This Novel for Free, One Chapter at a Time
I’d been having so much fun and frustration writing A Frictionless State, including many nights when I couldn’t stop writing in my head when I should have been sleeping. There was just one problem. I am an unknown novelist asking strangers to trust me with their time. How I addressed that challenge shaped everything about how I decided to publish. The traditional approach is:… -
AI in my Inkwell
In the summer of 2025, I was advising founders at a business accelerator in Vancouver on how to incorporate AI into their companies and products. I had thoughts about workflow, about the categories of use that were likely to produce real returns versus the ones that were mostly theatre. What I did not have was a personal use case. I had founded and sold… -
Why I Chose this Story as My First Novel
It began as a screenplay called Utopia that I’d written in 1996 while studying screenwriting at Tel Aviv University—plot-heavy and built for momentum. Action and then some more action, and a villain who explains their scheme to the hero just before the climactic, you guessed it, action. For a student project, the screenplay was pretty creative. At the centre of it was a pandemic…