J. Neil Schulman's Alongside Night



Go To the Official Alongside Night--The Movie Website!
The 1979 Novel Ripped From Today's Headlines!

"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

May be even more relevant today than it was in 1979. Hopefully, this landmark work of libertarian science fiction will inspire a new generation of readers to learn more about the ideas of liberty and become active in the freedom movement.”
-- Dr. Ron Paul

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.