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 a study in how power rolls and shifts, or read Octavia Butler’s Kindred and found it harder to be comfortable afterward—you’re probably the kind of reader I wrote this for. That’s not exclusion. It’s calibration.

A Frictionless State is a literary speculative novel. It has a plot—a real one, with investigation, pursuit, and consequence. It has political manoeuvring and an underclass. But the plot is in service of question the novel keeps asking, in different registers, across its full length: what does it mean to do the most beneficial thing when beneficial and right are not the same? There are no clean hands in this novel.

The characters in A Frictionless State are operating inside circumstances where the options are consistently bad or worse, where the right thing to do is often illegible until it’s too late, and where the systems designed to preserve stability are themselves implicated in the harm they were built to prevent. The armchair version of ethics—the kind we perform when we’re reading about difficult decisions in comfort and safety, after the fact, with full information—doesn’t really apply here. I’m interested in the version where you’re inside it, with incomplete information and choices you can’t fully evaluate, and you have to live with what you decide.

The reader I’m hoping to find is comfortable with that kind of discomfort.

There are also pleasures here that aren’t only intellectual. The novel has a real investigation at its centre, and that investigation generates real tension. Characters whose relationships shift and press against one another in ways that won’t always resolve cleanly. A world that is unfamiliar enough to make familiar problems look different—which is what speculative fiction does at its best. The writers who influenced me—Herbert, Butler, Jemisin, Neil Gaiman, Orson Scott Card—didn’t treat entertainment and challenge as opposing values, and neither do I. You’ll be engaged. I take that seriously. The point is that the engagement asks of you as much as it gives.

A few things worth knowing before you begin:

The novel moves at the pace of a literary novel, not a commercial thriller. The early chapters establish character and world before the investigation opens fully. If you’re willing to let that unfold rather than push through it, the accumulation matters. Certain scenes that seem only atmospheric early on turn out to be structural. Readers who pay close attention to what characters don’t say will understand the ending differently from those who don’t.

The world-building is specific. The Council of Global Stability, the governing system of 2074, has its own logic, its own history, and its own contradictions. You don’t need to understand all of it immediately. But how it works is what the novel is about, and it rewards the reader who treats it as a real system rather than backdrop.

The moral questions don’t resolve. The novel ends. The questions stay open. If you finish it wanting a definitive verdict on who was right, you may be frustrated. If you finish it wanting to argue about it—with someone else, with yourself—I’d call that a win for both of us.

Start with Chapter One → or send this to one reader you know would engage with it.