Paradox, Inc
exciting book news!
TL;DR - you can now pre-order PARADOX INC, my ridiculous novel about the Silicon Valley time travel bubble, coming in January 2027 from Ballantine Books.
“How a manuscript becomes a book” would be the most boring possible episode of Schoolhouse Rock, and also the longest.
I am used to things happening on tech timescales, which go like this: “Claude Code was invented two weeks ago and has $30 billion in run rate, so obviously our own product, invented three weeks ago, is obsolete; but never fear, we’ve vibe-coded a pivot to a completely different product, it releases tomorrow, can we get 100 million users by Friday?”
The timescale for the production of PARADOX INC is basically a geologic epoch by comparison and has proceeded thus:
August of 2023: Forrest thinks it would be funny to write a novel about the tech industry trying to invent a time machine.
September 2023-July 2024: Forrest writes the novel, then rewrites it, then rewrites it again. It makes him laugh a lot. It’s cathartic.
June-October 2024: Forrest searches for and eventually finds a literary agent who agrees to represent the book to publishers.
October-December 2024: Forrest and his agent make some further edits to the book, which at this point is titled THE BLEB PROJECT.
January 2025: Forrest’s agent submits the book to several publishers.
February 2025: Ballantine Books/Penguin Random House purchases the worldwide rights to the book. This is very, very exciting.
March-June 2025: Forrest and his editor at Ballantine do several more rounds of deep edits on the book: fixing loopholes in the time-travel logic, making some characters come into focus more clearly, etc.
July 2025: An “authenticity reader” appointed by Ballantine recommends a few additional tweaks.
August-September 2025: A “line editor” from Ballantine makes nitpick/typo-level edits to the book. Title is changed to PARADOX INC.
Fall 2025: The book design team at Penguin Random House produces the digital proofs of the book, essentially a PDF of what will go between the covers. Lots of back-and-forth here on fonts, layout, etc. You would think this is the last step before publication. It is closer to the midpoint than the end.
January-March 2026: We chase “blurbs”, a humbling process of sending a bunch of cold emails to busy people who are much more successful authors than you, in the hopes that at least a few of them will take their time to 1) read your unpublished book and 2) publicly say something nice about it. Incredibly, several people have done this, not least among them ANDY FREAKING WEIR, who calls the book “funny and distressingly realistic”. I’ll take it!
April 22 (today!) We have a preorder page and a cover!
I did a short interview with People Magazine, out today, explaining some of why I wrote this book and what you can expect from it. Essentially, this novel is my way of “talking about AI without talking about AI.” If you’ve been in the tech industry at all over the last few years, I hope you’ll find the story funny and thought-provoking.
Although the book is physically finished, we still have several months to go before the hardcover is on shelves. One of the things I’ve learned over the past year and change is that Big Five publishers are mostly in the enterprise sales business—a lot of the time leading up to publication is spent trying to get book distributors to purchase wholesale piles of the book and bookstores and libraries to stock it.
If I had chosen to self-publish PARADOX INC, it would have been available nearly two years ago. On tech timescales, that’s literally a lifetime. This book is older than my 25-person company.
But I chose to go through the traditional publishing process for a reason. I’ve met and learned from lots of interesting people, I’ve been able to see how a large, legacy industry works from the inside, and of course the finished book is also much better and more beautiful than I could have produced on my own.
I am very excited for you to read PARADOX INC. I think, if you subscribe to this newsletter, the odds are that you’ll really enjoy it. Pre-orders help a lot with convincing those bookstores and libraries to stock the book, so please do order from your preferred retailer and tell your friends.
Thank you so much for your support!