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Rating: 
Summary: Praise for Alongside Night
Review: 'I received Alongside Night at noon today. It is now eight inthe evening and I just finished it. I think I am entitled to somedinner 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
Rating: 
Summary: A winner then, a winner NOW!
Review: I first read Alongside Night not long after it came out in 1979. I could surely see then the conditions that Mr. Schulman describes so elequently, and today we have extremely similar circumstances, minus only the double-digit inflation. Mr. Schulman wrote a book that captures most capably the essence of what a FREE society could be like, and does so without preaching. His story is well-written and INTERESTING. Give a copy to your statist friends and watch their reactions to it! HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
Rating:
Summary: A winner then, a winner NOW!
Review: I first read Alongside Night not long after it came out in 1979. I could surely see then the conditions that Mr. Schulman describes so elequently, and today we have extremely similar circumstances, minus only the double-digit inflation. Mr. Schulman wrote a book that captures most capably the essence of what a FREE society could be like, and does so without preaching. His story is well-written and INTERESTING. Give a copy to your statist friends and watch their reactions to it! HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!
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Summary: A Free Society Imagined
Review: I first read this novel in 1983, and I now re-read it periodically because (1) it gives me hope for a better, freer society, and (2) it's so damn much fun. Without being preachy, Schulman's great libertarian sci-fi novel is like one of the terrific, old Heinlein juveniles -- simple, to the point, and fast-moving. Read it yourself, hand it off to friends (I keep a stock of tattered paperback copies just for that purpose), then re-read it yourself when you get in the dumps from too much statist TV exposure.
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Summary: Libertarian classic
Review: I rank this with Rand's Atlas Shrugged in terms of important libertarian fiction. It was inspiring to see how a free society could survive despite the attempts of government to control it.
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Summary: A ripping good tale.
Review: L. Neil Schulman was known to me as the best interviewer of my hero, Robert A. Heinlein. I'd recently re-read his "The Heinlein Interview (and other Heinleinalia)", and decided it was time to read some of Neil's fiction, and get a better sense of what he has to say in his own voice. But it was with some trepidation that I approached his work. I'm a fan of RAH, and, like many Heinlein fans, I've run out of new material to discover for the first time. So, my feelings were about equal parts of "Gee, I hope his writing is a lot like Heinlein's," and "Gee, I hope his writing isn't _exactly_ like Heinlein's." But, about sixty pages into Alongside Night, I realized two things; first, that I wasn't thinking about whether it was too much or too little like a Heinlein story, and second, that I was well and truly hooked into a ripping good tale, and enjoying it immensely. Though it is possible to recognize the mark Heinlein's writing has left upon him, Neil's voice and style are all his own. If you, like me, reached the end of Heinlein's work and are searching for more like it, you will not be disappointed in Alongside Night. If you want a sci-fi thriller which will keep you guessing to the end, this is for you. If you just want something to keep your mind occupied for a few hours, then by all means, read this book. Some of the ideas in it might just make an impression. Thanks Neil. See you at the TANSTAAFL Caf?. ~Rick Berry
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Summary: The Prophetic Novel of the Final American Revolution!
Review: 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, Pulpless.Com, Inc., 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.
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