Alongside Night

The federal government is shut down from lack of money in the budget. Foreigners are buying up everything in America while Europeans, now united, gloat over the fall of a once great nation. Homeless people and youth gangs roam the streets of New York. Money is worthless, markets collapse, and businesses fail. Smugglers use the latest computer encryption technology to operate bold enterprises that the government is powerless to stop, even with totalitarian control of news and private communication. A private mercenary army protecting a vast black-market empire, headed by a former Green Beret and his ex-CIA sidekick, battles an FBI run by a ruthless Director who's blackmailing the president with an old scandal and putting radicals in a secret prison, in a desperate bid maintain power.

And caught in the middle of it all are the brilliant 17-year-old son of a missing Nobel-prizewinning economist, his best friend from prep school whose uncle was once a guerrilla fighter, and the beautiful but mysterious 17-year-old girl he meets in a secret underground ... a girl who carries a pistol with a silencer.

The setting could be the day after tomorrow, based on headlines drawn from our daily news. But the novel was written two decades ago by a 23-year-old college drop-out who crafted his particular brand of prophecy from combining the techniques of science fiction with projections based on an obscure economic theory.

Building on the prophetic novels of Orwell, Rand, and Heinlein, J. Neil Schulman created in Alongside Night the first of a new generation of libertarian novels, telling the story of the final two weeks of the world's last superpower through the perceptive eyes of a young man caught up in the maelstrom of the final American revolution.

Prometheus Award Hall of Fame Winner!

J. Neil Schulman is the author of two Prometheus award-winning novels, Alongside Night and The Rainbow Cadenza, short fiction, nonfiction, and screenwritings, including the CBS Twilight Zone episode "Profile in Silver."

In 1987 he founded SoftServ Publishing, the first publishing company to distribute paperless books by bestselling authors such as Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg via personal computers and modems and in 1996 he founded and now operates Pulpless.Com, which is distributing the works of bestselling authors such as Piers Anthony through the World Wide Web. Pulpless.Com also electronically distributes all of Schulman's own books. He has been recognized as a pioneer in electronic publishing as far back as the January 18, 1989 Wall Street Journal, which wrote "J. Neil Schulman has seen the future, and there are no books"; and more recently explicitly named as a pioneer in this field by the New York Times web site.

Schulman is a popular speaker on a variety of topics, having delivered talks at World Science Fiction conventions and other conferences, and is a frequent talk show guest coast-to-coast on subjects including his books and screenwriting, electronic publishing, and political issues, for such hosts as Dennis Prager, Michael Jackson, Oliver North, Gene Burns, and Barry Farber. He has been interviewed on CNN, was on ABC's World News Tonight as an expert on defensive use of firearms during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and debated one-on-one with Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block on UPN Channel 13 News Los Angeles on the topic of repealing the federal "assault weapons" ban. His writings on firearms have been used by witnesses on both sides of the gun-control debate in congressional hearings before the House Subcommittee on Crime. Schulman's writings have appeared in magazines and newspapers including Reader's Digest, National Review, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Reason Magazine, Liberty, Gun Week, The American Rifleman, The Lamp-Post, and The Journal of Social and Biological Structures. In addition to media already noted, Mr. Schulman has been written about in magazines and newspapers including USA Today, Shooting Times, Analog, and Byte Magazine.

Schulman's first novel, Alongside Night (Crown hardcover 1979, Ace paperback 1982, Avon paperback 1987, SoftServ 1990, Pulpless.Com 1996), a prophetic story of an America beset by inflation and revolution, was endorsed by Anthony Burgess and Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, and received widely positive reviews, including the Los Angeles Times and Publisher's Weekly. The novel, published in 1979, anticipated such 1980's and 1990's problems as increased gang violence and homelessness, economic chaos such as the 1980's stock market crash and S&L crisis, and political trends such as the economic and political unification of Europe. In 1989, Alongside Night was entered into the "Prometheus Hall of Fame" for classic works of fiction promoting liberty.

Schulman also wrote the "Profile in Silver" episode, exploring the JFK assassination, for The Twilight Zone TV series on CBS, which was run three times in network prime time in 1986 and 1987, and which can now be seen in syndication. The outlines and first two drafts of the teleplay are included in Schulman's latest book to be released on Pulpless.Com, Profile In Silver And Other Screenwritings. The book also includes the bulk of Schulman's works written for the screen and commentaries about his adventures and trials in the film industry.

Schulman is also author of the popular Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns (Synapse-Centurion hardcover 1994, Pulpless.Com 1996), which Charlton Heston called "the most cogent explanation of the gun issue I have yet read." In Stopping Power, a collection of forceful, dramatic, and often funny polemics (including four Los Angeles Times articles), Schulman challenges the distortions and misinformation that pundits ranging from network anchors to ill-informed doctors are promoting about guns. The book received rave reviews from The Los Angeles Daily News, and from talk-show hosts including Dennis Prager and Michael Jackson. One chapter from Stopping Power was excerpted in National Review as an article titled, "Medical Malpractice," then was chosen to be reprinted in the book Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Health and Society, Second, Edition, Edited by Eileen K. Daniel, (Dushkin Publishing Group/Brown & Benchmark Publishers, 1996), as rebuttal to "Guns in the Household" by Jerome P. Kassirer, MD, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The Robert Heinlein Interview and Other Heinleiniana (SoftServ, 1990, Pulpless.Com 1996) collected Schulman's writings on an author who was not only particularly influential on Schulman but also a friend for fifteen years, and features Schulman's 25,000 word interview with Heinlein for the New York Daily News, in 1973.

Schulman's first ventures into electronic publishing are documented in his two-volume electronic book, Book Publishing in the 21st Century, which includes the transcript of the course he gave for Connected Education/The New School for Social Research, as well as material from the SoftServ RoundTable he operated on GEnie and its successor, the SoftServ Paperless Book BBS.

In September, 1993, the Second Amendment Foundation awarded Schulman the James Madison Award for his Los Angeles Times article, "If Gun Laws Work, Why Are We Afraid?" and in November, 1995, the 500,000-member Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms awarded Schulman its Gun Rights Defender prize.

Schulman is also webmaster for the World Wide Web Gun Defense Clock, which uses the best criminological research on the use of firearms in self defense against criminals to calculate the number of gun defenses each year. INSIDEFLAP: It is 1999 in New York City. A night at the Hilton costs $11,500. Fifth Avenue resembles a North African marketplace, its sidewalks thronged with thieves and degenerates, its goods bartered for with five different kinds of money, its shops protected by hired armed guards. The subways, the buses, all public services, have ceased to run. And the fashionable residential neighborhoods of the past are now desolate and forsaken.

These are the projections of Alongside Night, a novel that brilliantly spells out the logical outcome of today's economic situation, should it continue. Against a backdrop of doomsday, it tells the story of an outspoken Nobel Prize-winning economist imprisoned by the government for his views, and of his son, whose search for the key to free his father leads him to a revolutionary group determined to overthrow the government, and stabilize the system. Like the novels of Paul Erdman, Alongside Night takes the givens of the present day and envisions the way they will affect our future. That future, as portrayed here, is a real and frightening one.