Photo of J. Neil Schulman


About
J. NEIL SCHULMAN

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 bookstm by bestselling authors such as Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg via personal computers and modems and in 1996 he founded and now operates Pulpless.Comtm, which is distributing the works of bestselling authors such as Piers Anthony through the World Wide Web. Pulpless.Comtm will also electronically distribute all of Schulman's own books.

He's lectured on electronic publishing for Connected Education/the New School for Social Research in New York, and Northwood University in Midland, Michigan. He's currently at work on a third novel, Escape From Heaven.

The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction's article about Schulman calls his books, "very influential in the LIBERTARIAN-SF movement" and says his books "are motivated by a combination of moral outrage and a fascination with the hardware of politics and economics."

During 1992, he hosted The J. Neil Schulman Show, a program of interviews and music, on the American Radio Network's Kaleidascope program, and wrote frequent articles for the Los Angeles Times and Orange County Register opinion pages which were reprinted in numerous major newspapers across the country.

Schulman's first novel, Alongside Night (Crown hardcover 1979, Ace paperback 1982, Avon paperback 1987, SoftServ 1990, Pulpless.Comtm 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.

The Rainbow Cadenza (Simon & Schuster hardcover 1983, New English library paperback 1984, Avon paperback 1986, SoftServ 1989, Pulpless.Comtm 1996) was his second novel, winning the 1984 Prometheus Award, and was the basis for an all-classical-music LASERIUM concert which played for several years in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston. It's the story of a young girl in the 22nd Century who must fight the sexual exploitation of her era to pursue a career as a performer of "lasegraphy," a classical form of visual music evolved from the current laser shows. The book received favorable comments from such diverse authors as psychologist/bestseller Nathaniel Branden, British author Colin Wilson, and Robert A. Heinlein.

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.

Schulman is also author of the popular Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns (Synapse-Centurion hardcover 1994, Pulpless.Comtm 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.

His latest book, Self Control Not Gun Control (Synapse-Centurion hardcover 1995, Pulpless.Comtm 1996), is Schulman's magnum opus on both current controversies and timless questions, and he hits whatever he targets with magnum force, whether it's guns, revolution, New Age thinking, liberal hate speech, his vision of "The Coming Golden Age," or 226 words which give us "The Meaning of Life." Dr. Walter E. Williams says of it, "Schulman interestingly and insightfully raises a number of liberty-related issues that we ignore at the nation's peril. His ideas are precisely those that helped make our country the destination of those seeking liberty. The book's title says it all: personal responsibility, not laws and prohibitions, is the mark of a civil society."

The Robert Heinlein Interview and Other Heinleiniana (SoftServ, 1990, Pulpless.Comtm 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.

His latest published short fiction is "The Repossessed," the lead story in Adventures in the Twilight Zone, edited by Carol Serling (Daw, 1995). His story "Day of Atonement" will be in the libertarian shared-future anthology Free Space, edited by Brad Linaweaver and Ed Kramer, a hardcover coming from Tor Books in June, 1997. Schulman's short story, "The Musician," a psychological mystery about a violinist whose career takes a sudden bizarre turn, was dramatized for Los Angeles radio, broadcast several times in 1980 on Pacifica/ KPFK FM's "Hour 25" show, read by the late Mike Hodel, and with classical violin accompaniment by the author's father, Julius Schulman.

In addition to his opinion pieces for the LA Times and Orange County Register opinion pages, some of which have been syndicated in major newspapers nationwide, 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, and he's delivered talks at World Science Fiction conventions and other conferences. Mr. Schulman has been written about in magazines and newspapers including the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Shooting Times, Analog, and Byte Magazine, and has been interviewed on CNN, ABC's World News Tonight, and numerous radio talk shows coast to coast on subjects ranging from his novels and screenwriting, to electronic publishing, to firearms issues.

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.

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