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.
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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 argues with books. Someone 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… -
On Releasing This Novel for Free, One Chapter at a Time
The manuscript was just about finished. I’d been having so much fun and frustration while writing it, along with many nights when I couldn’t stop writing in my head when I should have been sleeping. The question, then, was what came next. The expected answer is familiar. Find a literary agent, submit to publishers, wait for an institution with the right credentials to decide… -
Why I Chose this Story as My First Novel
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? Here’s a little background. The COVID19 pandemic had been running for about a year when I went looking for a speculative feature-length screenplay I’d written in my twenties. I hadn’t thought about it in a while—not seriously. I’d returned to…