Paradox Inc. is a satirical and dystopian sci-fi novel by Forrest Brazeal, imagining realistic tech bros with the power of time travel.
In an extremely familiar near-future, the tech industry has developed consumer time travel. Blebs, the branding for time-travel bubbles, allow anyone who can afford it to go back in time. Of course, there are limits and safety precautions, and of course, those are ignored.
My main read is that this is humorous and mocking take on tech bros and startup culture. But there’s also a sad and darker thread about how the amazing power of time travel becomes a product and then is used for the most annoying purposes. We never see dramatic time-travel rescues or love, just profit and trophy hunting. No one in Paradox Inc is setting things right or emotionally learning from the past, as in This Time Tomorrow, The Day Tripper, or the Limited Wish trilogy, or other timey-wimey fiction.
Instead, there’s a 90s-themed tech party full of discontinued 1990s snacks and drinks, all looted from the past, which is a hilarious take on OTT themed tech parties. Wouldn’t that fit in perfectly as a SxSW or CES afterparty? Just throw in some branded t-shirts! But it’s also a reflection of how time-travel is used in Paradox, Inc. These recipes and ingredients aren’t lost ancient secrets, there’s no reason caterers couldn’t have whipped up 90s snacks, but instead, they’re looted from the past, not recreated in the present. It’s time travel as a service, for the whims of the very wealthy.
Paradox Inc. begins with an obnoxious tech job interview, but instead of asking goofy riddles and giving secret cup tests, the interviewer requires solving time travel puzzles just to get to the meeting. It’s bizarre and oddly realistic — as you read it, one of those self-congratulatory LinkedIn posts about how this unique methodology leads to the best candidates basically writes itself.
There’s a surveillance aspect of time travel that reminded me of Arthur C Clarke and Stephen Baxter’s The Light of Other Days. In both, new time-travel eliminates privacy, since anyone curious can just pop back and see what anyone else was doing, at any time.
I’ve been reading and rereading retro scifi recently, and noticed that in The Light of Other Days, one egomaniacal billionaire wants to use the wormholes for personal gain, while many others use the wormholes to the past to research historical figures, watch historical moments, and learn from the past. Ok, sure, some teen girls watch and re-watch The Beatles, but the overall atmosphere is about the possibilities of wormhole time travel viewing for discovery. In Paradox Inc., time-travel is for personal gain, first and foremost, in a particularly techbro way, whether that’s going back in time to spy in a horrible divorce, using alternate timestreams to fake photos, or just inventing time-travel adventure sports. It’s an interesting shift. Where classic Clarke sci-fi envisioned future tech with curiosity and discovery for most people, even with one self-centered villain powering a lot of the plot, Paradox Inc. shows the future tech is accessible to a certain class, for personal greed and personal convenience.
The narrative moves between different POV characters, telling their stories in a documentary-ish style. This does make it feel like a retrospective on a failed iPhone app or other tech startup, but the pacing is just slightly off. There were a few moments when I felt like, yeah, we get it, let’s go on, and other times when we picked up with a new character when I wanted a moment for an emotional reaction, especially as the story got weirder and the time-travel began to have strange side effects.
Paradox Inc. blends satire and specfic for a look at unchecked tech bros with time-travel technology.
Paradox Inc will be released on January 19, 2027, I received an advance copy from NetGalley for review. (Free books have never stopped me from snarking about a bad novel.)