Why this Story Now
This isn’t the first novel I started writing, but it is the first one that I’m publishing. Why then, would this be the one?
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.
