The Paradox Paradox Review - A Paradox of a Novel

05 Nov, 2025

Edited May 18, 2026

A science fiction novel featuring multiple alien races, half a dozen protagonists, futuristic technology, and a complex time travel plot might sound like a lot for a first-time author. Overambitious, to those uninterested in diplomacy. Daniel Hardcastle disagrees, biting off all that and more with his first novel, The Paradox Paradox. If that name sounds familiar, you may know him better as NerdCubed on YouTube. This is not a “YouTuber book” by any means, but because of the author’s background, we have insight in the creation of the book we must address before discussing the book itself.

Funded on crowdfunding platform Unbound in 2020, it took Hardcastle five years to write The Paradox Paradox. As the book hit shelves earlier this year, Unbound collapsed. Hardcastle, and dozens of other authors published by them, never got paid. You’ll note the lack of “allegedly” there because Unbound (at that time renamed as Boundless) themselves admitted to not paying their writers. Hardcastle also claimed in his podcast (Patreon-only, so I can’t link it) that he has proof that Unbound used an AI program to edit the book. While he did later secure the rights to the novel, this left him with a warehouse packed with thousands of printed copies of the book with no way of selling them. Stuck with a monkey’s paw of his publisher’s creation, the book is currently unavailable for purchase in any form.

These are difficult conditions to release a book for any author, much less a first-timer. It’s enough of an extenuating circumstance that I’m willing to be more lenient on the book than I otherwise would have been. I’m a fan of Hardcastle and his YouTube channel, and I’ve been looking forward to this book since he announced it. Still, I went into the book recognizing that bias and tried to separate my feelings about the creator from the book.

The Paradox Paradox itself is no easier to explain. There’s the distinct impression that this is two novels awkwardly stitched together. The first half is a lighthearted, satirical take on a time travel adventure, featuring an ensemble cast. The second half is a dark and gritty revenge thriller told through the point of view a singular protagonist and antagonist. It’s difficult to decipher how many of the book’s problems come down to a young writer finding his voice, how much he struggled with a complex time travel plot, whether the publisher’s alleged AI editing impacted the book, and if a publisher on the brink of financial ruin forced the book out the door before it was ready, hoping a big YouTuber’s name will drum up desperately needed revenue.

Here’s the best summary I can manage. Kez is a flunky student at a college intended for training pilots and commanders for the Affinity, a Utopian society consisting of several alien species across space. With E-NA’s help, an AI living in a chip in her brain, Kez cheats on her final exam, getting the highest score the academy has ever seen. Kez panics, realizing they probably overdid it. Meanwhile, a mysterious message reaches Affinity command simply reading “Kill Austin Lang before he wipes out the universe.” They discover that there is no record of anyone with that name having ever lived. Also, the message originates millions of years before humanity even existed. With no leads, eccentric inventor Osheen Shupple builds a time machine to trace the origins of the signal, find out who Austin Lang is, and what they’re doing that puts the universe in jeopardy.

Osheen is only able to build the time machine thanks to his future self sending back a schematic that showed how the machine works. When questioned how that’s possible, Osheen calls this a “paradox paradox,” and leaves it at that. To the book’s credit this is fleshed out later, but even then it’s an unsatisfactory explanation. Equally unsatisfactory is a list of names sent along with the schematic that will make up Osheen’s team of time travelers. Osheen can't go himself, again for reasons that aren’t well-explained. The team includes Kez, a famous space captain who’s been dead for hundreds of years, a daredevil type, and an archaeologist currently serving an 800-year prison sentence.

The crew go on all manner of wacky adventures across time and space searching for a MacGuffin, and this is where the plot unravels. How the time machine works is explained in a hand wave. What people can or can’t do in the past regarding their potential to change the future is often contradictory. Some characters aren’t who you think they are. Some die only to come back to life, only to then die again. There are betrayals and double-agents. All this capped by an utterly bizarre ending that works as well as a square wheel. The chapter numbers are also out of order, keeping with the time travel theme, but it’s less a Memento style re-arranging of the plot and more like a child eating ice cream before dinner and thinking they’re Guy Fawkes. Reading the chapters in numbered order makes less sense than reading them in the presented order.

As your brain struggles to wrap itself around the time travel machinations, it’ll also have to cope with the grating tone plaguing most of the first half. This section is written like a Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett-style comedy. Unlike their writing, however, there’s no room to breathe. It’s one joke scenario after another in rapid succession. Characters often don’t get time to express themselves, usually acting more like stand-up comedians than three-dimensional people. The book plays Kez’s incompetency for laughs, Osheen is the stereotypical capital-W Wacky scientist, and every line of a dialog is wisecrack or snarky comeback.

The worst example of this is in one scene where a character has to shimmy across a ledge to reach an open window to get into an office and unlock the door for the others. Below is a several hundred foot drop into razor-sharp crystals on a high-gravity world. It’s a tense, three-page thriller where you feel the fear and despair of the character, as they question why they’re there, why they volunteered for this, and whether its all even worth it. They sum up courage from somewhere and force their way through, nearly falling, before triumphantly reaching the window and hoisting themselves in. She gets inside and finds the others are there waiting for her, having gotten in by just picking the lock. She shrugs as the camera zooms on her, the live studio audience laughing on cue, and “That’s All, Folks!” pops onto the screen. A well-written, impactful character scene obliterated for the sake of a clichéd joke.

The bad guys capture three of the crew in another scene. They’re rescued by the fourth who crawls through the sewers to escape their captors. The crew’s reaction to being rescued is complaining about how bad their savior smells., The “joke” is pounded into the ground when the crew chose to stay in the cell, until the stinky one literally drags them out, each of them holding their nose the whole time. Crimes against humor are then committed when the group pass a shower, and force their rescuer to stop—as they’re being chased by several armed guards and are in a race against time to secure a MacGuffin—to take a shower. Do you get it? It’s because they smell like poo! Raucous laughter shakes the room as men in suits roll out a Pulitzer, a Nobel, and a FIFA Peace Prize for the author.

The book also frequently employs footnotes, sometimes to explain how a piece of technology works or how an alien society functions, but mostly to drive jokes further into the ground. I cannot begin to describe how frustrating it is to start feeling invested in the story, chuckle at a halfway funny joke, then have to stop to read a several-paragraph long footnote explaining the joke in gratuitous detail by referencing a movie or video game.

I was quite happy when, around the middle of act two, the book suddenly dropped its jokey tone and took a dark turn. It’s such a dramatic juxtaposition I have to wonder if the author also took inspiration from Watership Down. I appreciate a narrative that raises the stakes and the tension as the villain’s plan becomes apparent, maybe a character dies, and the situation becomes more dire. That’s not the case here. The crew already knew who the bad guy was, had a basic understating of their plan, and how to stop them when this tonal shift drops out of nowhere.

This would be a problem in any other book, but in The Paradox Paradox, it’s a boon. This shift in tone meant less of the sarcastic one-liners and quips, characters stopped acting like children and were more consistent, and there were more of the well-written action scenes and compelling character moments. Kez finally takes the situation seriously, and we see her struggle with the fact that she’s been an abject failure all her life and now has to save the universe and is totally out of her depth.

Conversely, it’s also around this point that the attention turns away from the crew as a whole and more towards Kez. She ended up being a great character, but it has that late-stage Discworld City Watch series feel, where it gradually became less about the Watch and more like “The Adventures of Sam Vimes.” You enjoy spending time with that character, sure, but you’re wondering where everyone else wandered off to. The crew do return for the end, but I have to wonder if so much of the book had to be exclusively about Kez for it all to work. And while the plot’s ending was a flop, the individual endings for these characters was satisfying.

The villain is also a problem. Their real goal isn’t explained until the last possible moment, and it’s an off-the-shelf “buy one, get one free” one from the used cliché store. Yes, this is one of those villains that wants peace via mass murder and manipulation. The type that laughs as they kill someone to let you know how evil they are. That wasn’t snark, by the way, there is a scene where they laugh manically as they kill somebody. And their plan, their method of achieving this peace, is equally unsatisfying – like with Osheen, they simply traveled back in time and told their past self what to do.

This review so far hasn’t conveyed the fact that Hardcastle is a talented writer. There are a lot of great moments in The Paradox Paradox’s second half, mostly relating to character moments and action set pieces. The alien species are inventive, with detailed societal structures and cultures, which is always difficult for any sci-fi writer. There are innovative ideas about how humans live in space and interact with these aliens. I love the representation here too, every race, gender, sexual orientation is present here. There are great characters in general, truly gut-wrenching scenes and the occasional funny joke.

But great moments do not make a great novel. The first half is rough, more interested in telling inane jokes than a meaningful story or establishing interesting characters. The villain, while intimidating, is flat, their plan is confusing, and how they devised their plan feels lazy. There are also too many twists that don’t land, and some plot conveniences that feel like the author wrote himself into a corner and couldn’t think how else to get himself out without a sledgehammer.

The Paradox Paradox has high highs and low lows. Given the unique circumstances of its creation, we have to wonder how much of it was out of the author’s control. There’s no question the book would have been better with a better (human) editor at the helm to guide Hardcastle. As it stands, The Paradox Paradox feels like it’s not as good as it should be, and better than it is. Perhaps that is the greatest paradox.