Why this Story Now
This isn’t the first novel I started writing, but it the first one that I’m publishing. Why then, would this be the one?
Welcome. This is the home of my first novel, A Frictionless State, published here in serial form, along with occasional reflections on writing and the process behind the work.
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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 reality.
As Ari follows the evidence, he is pulled back into contact with the people his life has already failed to hold: Sharon, the estranged wife whose scientific rigor may confirm what he fears; Alene, the investigator who begins to see both the pattern and the person inside it; and Francis, the foster mother 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.