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 maintain 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 final two weeks of the world’s last superpower through the perceptive eyes of a young man caught up in the maelstrom of the final American revolution.

“One of the most widely hailed libertarian novels since the classic works of Ayn Rand.”
–Reason Magazine

“Probably the best libertarian novel since Atlas Shrugged.”
– Science Fiction Review

“Like Ayn Rand and Robert A. Heinlein, Schulman can tell a good story!”
– Sunday Detroit News

“If Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged was the elementary school of a very effective education in freedom, then J. Neil Schulman’s Alongside Night has to be the post-graduate studies course.”
– Dan Steward, With Liberty

It reads exactly like my show … written in 1979! Phenomenal! Phenomenal!”
–Glenn Beck, Glenn Beck Show, June 2, 2010

“J. Neil Schulman’s Alongside Night 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.”
–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, author of A Clockwork Orange

“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

“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