Why I Chose this Story as My First Novel
It began as a screenplay called Utopia that I wrote 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 and a world governing system that maintained peace through economic constraints. It was thematically thin, but it explored the idea that a perfect world might not be perfect for everyone.
The COVID-19 pandemic had been running for about a year when I pulled Utopia out again. I hadn’t thought about it in a while—not seriously. I’d returned to it a few times over the intervening years, read through it, felt a connection to that time in my life when I wrote it, and set it down again. I had other priorities.