I have waited for this stupid book for a fifth of my life.

This feels like such an outlandish statement to make, and yet it’s entirely true. Teased about six years ago, against my 26 years on this planet, means I have waited just over a fifth of my life for this book.

The Paradox Paradox is a sci fi novel written by Daniel Hardcastle, most known for being a youtuber under the moniker NerdCubed. Previously, he’d published a part-autobiography part-condensed-and-lightly-tongue-and-cheek-recap-of-games-history Fuck Yeah, Video Games, and one of the official Dr Who audio drama shortstories, which he was rightfully quite excited about.

FY,VG was fun, and showed he could tell a story with a solid voice. The audio drama showed he could do it in fiction. So, I was partially interested in hopefully seeing a new author blossom into their own style, and partially interested in seeing if my taste in online media at 12 years of age would be vindicated.

It’s also impossible to talk about Paradox without the controversy it was born from. On seeing the words “youtuber” and “controversy” in the same vicinity, your first thought is probably: “Alright, how many children were involved?” Refreshingly, the controversy around this book has nothing to do with the person who wrote it.

Paradox was originally published through Unbound, a publisher best known for its crowd-funding model, and financing that crowd-funding model by not paying their authors. As you might expect, they decided to not advertise the latter half.

FY,VG was successfully crowdfunded and then published through them as well. Apparently having a good enough time, Dan also decided to publish his grand debut with them. The campaign was funded several times over in 2019, writing commenced, and it was finally out and published, 6 years later.

And then, it wasn’t out. Backer copies were not being shipped. The book almost immediately went on sale, and those sales were not reaching their buyers. Dan, before lawyers zipped his mouth shut, did not have very many good things to say through his Patreon updates. Unbound had no money.

Seeing writing on the wall, I resigned this book never getting into people’s hands, and looked for any means to grab the scant few out in the wild, being in the fortunate position of not backing the original campaign due to a chronic financial condition called “being a student”. Somehow, rising through nine layers of production hell, copies had ended up in Waterstones. A few were in Manchester. Unfortunately, as I arrived, a fan more dedicated than I was had already scooped them up. The teller asked if I’d like to request an order to be made, which I politely declined.

Knowing the horror show happening on the publisher backend, not trusting an online order to even have an existing copy, I broadened the search area. The nearest: Preston. An hour and two trains away. I learned from my previous trip, made a click and collect reservation, and made the trip. And that’s the copy I have today.

If you’d like to hear Dan’s own words about this entire thing, you can listen to them here.

That said, as much as I feel it would be a disservice to not mention the context Paradox exists in, and my fun little journey does give me an attachment to the actual object in my house, it ultimately doesn’t affect my opinion of the novel as a novel. How does it serve as a debut in fiction? Does it hold up to prior expectations, both my own and of others? Is it, in short, good?

It’s Fine

Yeah.

I’m almost a little sad it wasn’t outrageously shit. That would have been a funny end to the saga and my own little adventure I went on. Or how satisfying it would have been if it was exceptional. Instead it’s… fine. I am thoroughly whelmed.

I remember during the runup of this book being written, Dan mentioned how beta readers said his writing reminded them of Terry Pratchett. Curious, he started to read him, and then almost immediately stopped because he was worried it would make too much of an impact on his voice.

And you know what? I wish he’d finished. My own take, you will only ever become a better writer by taking in as much other work as possible. You should be doing that whenever you have the chance to, especially someone who’s essentially perfected the same technique you’re using.

A personal gripe of mine in writing, is when a funny quip is made just for the sake of being funny, with no bearing on the rest of the narrative it surrounds. They’re fine if you’re making an offhand joke to a friend or over Twitch, but a book isn’t a live medium where the moment is potentially more important than the message, and instead you have the forethought and opportunity to make every single word serve a greater whole. And given the opportunity to do that, why wouldn’t you? There are some instances when he does this, which obviously means he has a handle on it, but it would have been nice for him to get proper exposure to someone who’s perfected that over several decades. Critically, in the form of a novel.

This book also made me realise how absolutely sick I am of the liberal bent of queer “liberation”. One thing mentioned about this book is that it’s “inherently queer”, with queerness a fact of everyone’s lives rather than a point of contention. In a sense, that’s true, but it’s a very particular mode of queerness that seeks comfort in current circumstances without looking beyond them. A standout point is a planetary luxury spa, which is female-only; a footnote happily tells you that it rotates through all kinds of genders, even making space for genderfluid individuals. In the current year, in our current society, wouldn’t it feel great if those oppressive structures recognised every potential container of identity and formed itself around them? Not even considering a utopia that’s post-gender segregation and post-misogyny; if it is, why do those guardrails still exist?

And speaking of post-s, this is a world that doesn’t seem to take a single leaf from post-colonialism. There’s a telling note that says that Earth is, simply, “Earth”. National identity has dissolved, and if anyone says where they come from, they would only say Earth. Of course, throwing out a tired joke about Scotland, all Scottish people still say they’re Scottish. My immediate response was one comment: “What happened to Turtle Island?”

So it’s a utopia that leaves… questions. It’s a utopia of someone who sees ills in the world but doesn’t realise their perspective may perpetuate them. It’s the utopia of a Tumblr user who hasn’t asked a single tobacco question about wâhkôtowin.¹

And for a minute, I thought that would get addressed towards the climax. Needing to spoil a plot point to explain why: One of the main twists is that through computer implants, cheekily called NPCs, the main villain Austin is able to directly control almost every person alive, and it turns out he’s been influencing the course of history for hundreds of years to varying degrees of subtlety. It gives a perfect jumping point for all these quibbles I had to be the product of Austin’s views of the world and humanity, and people never questioned it because he’s never given them the means to.

That’s interesting! How would the far-future look if it subscribed to one guy’s view of social order and peace? What would hundreds of years of personal justification carved into societal structure look like? How are acts of resistance crushed, or placated to make people think they’re resisting? I found, throughout the entire book, by far the most interesting section was the brief moment we see of Austin and his alt-timeline counterpart. The universe (and each other) unable to decide which is the original and “correct” version, manifest in the physical and psychological. If that whole dynamic was expanded into a novella I’d eat that shit up.

But, it’s not, leaving me raising eyebrows on things left critically unexamined, and considering the ending is as close to back-to-business as it could be, I can only assume this was all supposed to be taken as a face-value utopia. There’s an argument that you aren’t meant to think about it and it’s simple staging for characters to exist as the author wants and make a few mindless jokes, but, come on. That’s lazy. Utopic or utopic-adjacent fiction is always going to get bodied if you don’t tackle what “utopia” actually means and to who, thanks to Le Guin pushing the bar so high it might as well be in Heaven.

In Paradox specifically, one of the biggest utopic-fiction traps it falls for is this desire to see the current moment as nothing but a hellish waste. To be mocked and endlessly ridiculed, to contrast a future that’s so much better, and a world where you just don’t have to consider the horrors of the past anymore. As I’ve pulled apart in previous paragraphs, that starts to fall apart, no small part due to the relative short-scale this all happens on, creating a future that is painfully present. Jon Bois is the only person to really crack that by giving humanity a 10,000-year runway, and even that utopia is living in the eternal question of how utopic it really is.

And, just, a serious note for a moment. This is absolutely the anti-psych in me jumping out, which I fully recognise. You can really tell that therapy has made a massive impact on how Dan writes. This seems like a weird criticism, which would be weird if I was talking about him as a person, but this is a work of fiction. Every character has coping mechanisms, and they talk through their feelings in full public view. Everyone knows how to handle someone having a panic attack. It makes the complexities of everyone feel a bit… flat. The rough edges and “bad traits” everyone has ultimately don’t matter, because when shit hits the fan everyone will respond in the same way.

My biggest gripe, however, is that juts right against the casual use of “psychopath” to describe Austin. This sits uncomfortably whenever I see it uncritically expressed in contemporary settings, but it really sits uncomfortably in what’s supposed to be a far-future utopia. The heavily implied subtext of society-wide therapy for the masses, while also freely denouncing anyone who doesn’t fit their single model of being mentally healthy. Again, that would be a very interesting thing to explore with the recontextualised background that this is all varying degrees of one person’s view of the world. People who have been through therapy are Good People; those who have syndromes 23 and 64 are Bad. 

But that’s never hit on. Instead we’re just adding to that same pile of trite that psychopaths and narcissists are inherently Bad People, and only they can be (or influence others to be) evil.² I know several people with varying degrees of psycho- and sociopathy and a mutual of mine has NPD. Shockingly, all of them are humans with as complex internal lives as everyone else, and are more often than not the victims of abuse because of these conditions being stigmatised to such extreme degrees. It should not take me, the guy who has not and will never be institutionalised for any of those, to tell you this.

Austin isn’t evil because he may or may not have psychopathic traits. He’s evil because he’s a billionaire.

All that said, it’s not a terrible book. Me laying out all the grievances I had (particularly that last point) makes it sound that way, but it’s really not. The pacing is initially slow, but not to the point it made me put the book down forever, and definitely picks up towards the later third. The time travel elements didn’t feel overly contrived, and callbacks to previous scenes tied a loose thread or felt like pleasant, but sensical, surprises. You do get the sense that Dan knows how ambitious this is as a debut, which means he falls back on what he thinks he’s strongest at to carry it, which seems to be characters. And the characters are… likeable, I guess. They’re for a certain brand of people to fall in love with, and I am not that person.

Saying it’s “not bad” for a first crack at a hefty-length novel feels condescending, but, for a first crack at a hefty-length novel it’s not bad, and it does make me interested where his book ambitions will go next. I still think he should cut more teeth on shorter stuff, though.

Due to the length, unfortunately it’s not something I can casually recommend to everyone. If you’re a full sci-fi head, I would like to give this a solid “yeah, sure”, but given the whole deal with Unbound this might genuinely be one of the rarest books I own. And given that I have 3 Xoanon books, that’s saying something.³