• 05 Nov, 2025 *

A science fiction story featuring multiple alien races, half a dozen protagonists, currently nonexistent technology, and a complex time travel plot might sound like a lot for a first-time author. That’s a nice way of saying overambitious. Daniel Hardcastle disagrees, as that’s exactly what he’s done 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 great insight into the creation of the book that must be addressed before discussing the book itself.

Funded on crowdfunding platform Unbound in 2020, it took Hardcastle five years to write the novel. As the book was hitting shelves earlier this year, Unbound collapsed. Thanks to capitalist nonsense, its creators just created a new company, Boundless, and purchased all of their former assets for pennies on the dollar, without any of their prior obligations or debts. They’re so bad at business, however, that they managed to go bankrupt again in a matter of months. Hardcastle, and dozens of other authors published by Unbound, were never paid. I’m not saying any variation on “allege” there, because this is something Unbound/Boundless admitted to themselves.

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. He was eventually able to secure the rights to the book, but with thousands of copies sitting in a warehouse he now has to take possession of with no way of selling them, this news is a curse as much as it is a blessing. As such, the book is currently unavailable for purchase in any form.

These are difficult conditions to release a book for 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. I am a fan of Hardcastle and his YouTube channel, and I’ve eagerly anticipated this book since it was announced. Still, I went into the book recognizing that bias and tried to separate my feelings of the creator from the book.

All that said, The Paradox Paradox is a difficult book to explain. It feels like two separate novels stitched together. One half is a light-hearted, satirical take on a time travel adventure, featuring an ensemble cast. The other half is a dark and gritty revenge thriller told through the point of view of just the protagonist and antagonist. That leads to the big problem I had writing this review. It’s difficult to decipher how many of the book’s problems come down to a young writer finding his voice, and how much is due to the poor editing thanks to the book’s questionable publisher.

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. Humanity is a relatively new member, and they want to prove themselves worthy. Living inside her brain is E-NA, a race of sentient AI beings that can exist in a number of computers, including chips inside human brains. With E-NA’s help, Kez cheats on her final exam, getting the highest score the academy has ever seen. She immediately panics, realizing she probably overdid it.

Meanwhile, Osheen Shupple is creating a time machine. A mysterious message reached the Affinity simply saying “Kill Austin Lang before he wipes out the universe.” When they try to investigate who Austin Lang could be, they discover something odd: there is no record of any human having ever lived with that name. Also, the message originates millions of years before humanity even existed. With no leads, Osheen constructs 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. It’s a silly reaction to what most would brush off as a prank call, but this is a comedy, so, sure.

It’s all straightforward enough so far, but it does not take long for the plot to go off the rails. Osheen was 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. At first blush, this feels like lazy writing, but to the book’s credit, it is somewhat better explained later. Along with the schematic is a list of names that will make up Osheen’s team of time travelers, since he can’t go himself. 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.

From there, the crew go on all manner of wacky adventures across time and space. As you’d expect for a time travel tale, a lot of it doesn’t make sense. How the time machine works is explained in a hand wave, and what people can or can’t do in the past regarding their potential to change the future is often contradictory. Characters aren’t who you think they are, some die only to come back to life, only to die again, there are betrayals and double-agents, and an utterly bizarre ending that works about as well as a square tire. 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 the order they’re presented makes more sense than reading them in the correct numbered order.

As your brain struggles to wrap itself around the time travel machinations, it’ll also have to cope with the tonal inconsistencies plaguing most of the first half. The first act and much of the second is written like a Douglas Adams or Terry Pratchett-style comedy, verging on parody. But unlike their writing, there’s no room to breathe, no reason to empathize with or relate to these characters because they themselves brush everything off as a joke. Kez’s incompetence is played 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 when 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. A great scene completely ruined when she finds that everyone else already got in by just picking the lock. They shrug as the camera zooms on them, the live studio audience laughing on cue, and “That’s All, Folks!” pops onto the screen.

As someone who enjoys Hardcastle’s humor on YouTube, I was surprised to find he didn’t attempt to replicate his style here. Instead of the fast, whip-smart jokes in rapid succession, it’s mostly sarcastic one-liners or the aforementioned multi-page set up to a joke that undercuts all the tension of an otherwise well-written scene.

There are also plenty of scenes where the author trades a character’s intelligence for a cheap laugh. At one point, three of the crew are captured. They’re rescued by the fourth who crawled their way through the sewers to escape their captors. Their reaction to being rescued was to complain about how bad their savior smelled, choosing to stay in the cell until being dragged out, kept twenty feet back from them, holding their noses, and literally forced them to stop the mission – as they were being chased by armed guards and were on a deadline to get the MacGuffin before the time machine left without them – to take a shower. All because “haha, smelly!”

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 be into the story, chuckle at a halfway funny joke, then have to stop to read a massive footnote that takes up half the page to explain the joke and why its funny, while referencing a real life movie or video game in the process. That’s not my own joke, by the way, some of these footnotes actually take up half a page.

I was quite happy when, around the middle of act two, the book suddenly dropped its jokey tone and took a dark turn. I appreciate a narrative that gets more serious and darker as the villain’s plan becomes apparent and the situation becomes more dire. But that’s not really the case here. They already knew who the bad guy was, had a basic understating of his plan, and how to stop him when this tonal shift dropped out of nowhere. This is one of those things that would be a problem in any other book, but here ends up being a boon. This shift in tone meant less of the sarcastic one-liners and quips, characters stopped acting so stupid, and there were more of the much better written action scenes and compelling character moments.

In the second half, the crew became much more three dimensional, with fully developed backstories, motivations, and excellent interactions with each other and their inner selves. By the end, this was my favorite “crew of rejects” I’ve read in a long time, which I did not expect from what were essentially vessels for bad jokes and stupidity at the start.

Conversely, it’s also around this point that the attention turns away from the crew as a whole and more towards Kez specifically. Kez 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 itself and more “The Adventures of Captain Vimes.” You like spending time with that character, sure, but you’re wondering where everyone else wandered off to. Perhaps that’s a tad unfair, the book does explain where they went, and its part of what makes their characters so compelling. And they do come back 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 something of a flop, the individual endings for these characters was satisfying.

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

This review ended up being more harsh than I intended, but it’s because I care. This review so far hasn’t expressed the fact that Hardcastle clearly has talent as a writer. There are a lot of great moments in The Paradox Paradox’s second half, mostly relating to character moments that I can’t talk about without spoiling. It has fun and inventive aliens 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 funny jokes, intense action set-pieces, and snappy dialog.

But that’s all mostly in the second half. 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 this plan feels lazy. There are also a few 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.

The Paradox Paradox has high highs and low lows. Because it’s so much better in the second half, I get the impression Hardcastle was finding his voice as he went. This also isn’t a book published under normal circumstances, with a publisher that didn’t pay its writers and who used some AI software to edit their books. I can’t help but wonder how the book would have turned out with one final pass and an actual human editor to guide it. I have hope that his next book will be incredible. But as it stands, The Paradox Paradox feels both like it’s not as good as it should be, but better than it is. Perhaps that is the greatest paradox.