Are We
Alongside Night?

Description of PhotoPhoto of J. Neil Schulman in 1979
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 for maintaining 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 last two weeks of the world's greatest superpower through the perceptive eyes of a young man caught up in the maelstrom of the final American revolution.

Alongside Night scored lavish praise for a first novel when it appeared in 1979, winning accolades from luminaries such as the English novelist many consider the greatest of his generation, and from the first American to win a Nobel Prize in Economics. Ten years later the Libertarian Futurist Society voted the book into the Prometheus Hall of Fame for novels embodying the spirit of liberty, alongside Orwell's 1984, Rand's Atlas Shrugged, Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451.

The last time the novel saw print was in 1987. Now, the World Wide Web is making J. Neil Schulman's classic novel of the last and first days of America available once again, and perhaps, this time, its prophetic clarion call will be heard ... while there's still time.



Praise for Alongside Night:

"I received Alongside Night at noon today. It is now eight in the evening and I just finished it. I think I am entitled to some dinner now as I had no lunch. The unputdownability of the book ensured that. It is a remarkable and original story, and the picture it presents of an inflation- crippled America on the verge of revolution is all too acceptable. I wish, and so will many novelists, that I, or they, had thought of the idea first. A thrilling novel, crisply written, that fires the imagination as effectively as it stimulates the feelings."
--Anthony Burgess

"One of the most widely hailed libertarian novels since the classic works of Ayn Rand."
--Reason Magazine

"High Drama ... A story of high adventure, close escapes, mistaken identities, and thrilling rescues. ... A fast-moving tale of a future which is uncomfortably close at hand."
-- Los Angeles Times Book Review

"An absorbing novel--science fiction, yet also a cautionary tale with a disturbing resemblance to past history and future possibilities."
-- Milton Friedman, Nobel laureate in Economics

"Engrossing."
-- Thomas S. Szasz, MD

"Probably the best libertarian novel since Atlas Shrugged."
-- Science Fiction Review

"Let me begin with a disclaimer: I don't really agree with many of J. Neil Schulman's ideas about society or politics or money. But his first book, Alongside Night, is as enjoyable piece of cautionary fiction as I have read in some years ... Like Ayn Rand and Robert A. Heinlein, Schulman can tell a good story!"
-- Sunday Detroit News

"An unabashedly polemical , libertarian novel which packages its message in a fast, effectively told action adventure."
-- Publishers Weekly

"This is a radical novel. It pulls no punches, offers no compromises. It effectively presents a social, moral, and political point of view without polemic, without stridency. Without hysteria, it projects a bleak future for us all, but not without hope, for there's a deep affection for humanity despite its foibles underlying every sentence."
-- F. Paul Wilson

"Here is a frightening and all too plausible picture of the near future. America is already a long way down the road that leads to it. Yet there is also a hopefulness in the story, for the author develops a philosophy, in considerable practical detail, that we could begin living by today, if we will choose to be free."
-- Poul Anderson

"Anyone interested in freedom will find this more than readable."
-- Jerry Pournelle

"Not only a first-rate suspense thriller, but also a brilliant exposition of libertarian ideas. I read it with great enjoyment and heartily recommend it."
-- Robert Anton Wilson

"As the seventies ended ... the time seemed ripe for a great libertarian novel to appear, and so it did. The novel was Alongside Night ..."
--Liberty Magazine

About the Author

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