Freedom Book Club's May 2009 Book of the Month!Fiction in 1979... Non-fiction in 2009!!!
"Elliot turned west onto Fifty-ninth Street, past the plywood and soaped plate glass at General Motors Plaza ..." Alongside Night, 1979
"The process began early Monday with a bankruptcy filing by a G.M. affiliate, a dealership in New York City, which described the automaker as 'a debtor in possession under Chapter 11.' The move by a New York affiliate will enable G.M. itself to file its own bankruptcy petition in New York." The New York Times, June 1, 2009
"The Chancellor’s eleven o’clock call from Paris informed the President that in a closed emergency session thirty minutes earlier, EUCOMTO had voted no longer to accept the American New Dollar. The vote was final; the announcement would be made in Paris, 10 A.M. Monday,. at the opening of EUCOMTO’s trading session. Alongside Night, 1979
"STRASBOURG, France – Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek, whose country currently holds the rotating EU presidency, told the European Parliament that President Barack Obama's massive stimulus package and banking bailout "will undermine the liquidity of the global financial market." Associated Press, March 25, 2009
The American economy is in freefall. Markets are crashing. Inflation is soaring. Bankruptcies, foreclosures and unemployment are up, and even defense contracts are going overseas. Foreigners are buying up everything in America at firesale prices while gloating over the fall of a once great nation. Homeless people and gangs own the streets. Smugglers use the latest technology to operate bold enterprises that the government is powerless to stop, even with totalitarian spying on private communications. Anyone declared a terrorist by the administration is being sent to a secret federal prison where constitutional rights don't exist.
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 next week. But this novel was written three 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 American to win a Bicentennial 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.
J. Neil Schulman's classic novel of the last and first days of America is available once again, and perhaps, this time, its prophetic clarion call will be heard ... if there's still time.
Downloadable 30th Anniversary Adobe PDF EditionFile Size: 3.18 MB
Price: Free!
“J. Neil Schulman’s Alongside Night may be even more relevant today than it was in 1979. Hopefully, the special thirtieth anniversary edition of this landmark work of libertarian sciencefiction will inspire a new generation of readers to learn more about the ideas of liberty and become active in the freedom movement.” --Congressman Ron Paul
"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
"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
"Alongside Night is terribly accurate. Whenever the American crack-up boom happens, few libertarians would disagree with his outline of the scenarios. But Neil went one step farther than most of the libertarians of the time. He integrated the new science of countereconomics and the economic philosophy of Agorism, which I had onlybegun to develop in 1974.... When? You decide, dear reader; but you are now well armed to see the signs and know what actions to take. Thanks to Ludwig von Mises, a small band of rational revolutionary students, and J. Neil Schulman, artist." --Samuel Edward Konkin III
"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
"The narrative is fast-paced, the plot well-developed... [T]he book reads extremely well and its intellectual thrust is clear and is not belabored. I was too engrossed in the novel to read it critically." -- Thomas S. Szasz, MD
"Those who don't remember the future described in great science fiction are condemned to live the bad parts. Alongside Night was a warning when it first came out. Now it is contemporary reality and prophecy with a vengeance. America needs this novel more than ever."
-- Brad Linaweaver Prometheus Award winning author
"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
"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
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