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J. Neil Schulman
P.O. Box 94
Long Beach, CA 90801-0094
Voice, Fax & Modem: 310-839-7653
GEnie Address: SOFTSERV
ABOUT J. NEIL SCHULMAN
J. NEIL SCHULMAN is the author of two previous novels, short
fiction, nonfiction, and screenwritings, as well as having been
the founder of SoftServ Publishing, the first publishing company
to distribute "paperless books" via personal computers and
modems.
Most recently he's hosted \The J. Neil Schulman Show\, a
program of interviews and music, on the American Radio Network's
Kaleidascope program, and has been writing frequent articles for
the \Los Angeles Times\ Op-Ed page which have been reprinted in
numerous major daily newspapers across the country.
Schulman's first novel, \Alongside Night\ (Crown hardcover
1979, Ace paperback 1982, Avon paperback 1987, SoftServ 1990), a
prophetic story of an America beset by inflation and revolution,
was endorsed by Anthony Burgess and Nobel laureate Milton
Friedman, and received widely positive reviews, including the
\Los Angeles Times\ and \Publisher's Weekly\. The novel,
published in 1979, anticipated such 1980's and 1990's problems as
increased gang violence and homelessness, economic chaos such as
the 1980's stock market crash and S&L crisis, and political
trends such as the economic and political unification of Europe.
In 1989, \Alongside Night\ was entered into the "Prometheus Hall
of Fame" for classic works of fiction promoting liberty.
\The Rainbow Cadenza\ (Simon & Schuster hardcover 1983, New
English library paperback 1984, Avon paperback 1986, SoftServ
1989) was his second novel, winning the 1984 Prometheus Award,
and was the basis for an all-classical-music LASERIUM concert
which played for several years in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and
Boston. It's the story of a young girl in the 22nd Century who
must fight the sexual exploitation of her era to pursue a career
as a performer of "lasegraphy," a classical form of visual music
evolved from the current laser shows. The book received
favorable comments from such diverse authors as psychologist/
bestseller Nathaniel Branden, British author Colin Wilson, and
the late Robert A. Heinlein.
Schulman also wrote the "Profile in Silver" episode,
exploring the JFK assassination, for \The Twilight Zone\ TV
series on CBS, which was run three times in network prime time in
1986 and 1987, and which can now be seen in syndication.
\No Strings Attached: A Screenplay\ (SoftServ, 1990)
is an original screenplay Schulman wrote about the artistic
and cultural differences between classical and rock music.
It tells the story of a young violinist who, because of an
injury to his hand, attempts secretly to play an electronic
violin in a symphony orchestra, at the same time he's involved
romantically with the female lead singer of a rock band. The
story draws on Schulman's knowledge of both classical and
8rock music drawn from family members who have been
professionally involved in both.
\The Robert Heinlein Interview and Other Heinleiniana\
(SoftServ, 1990) collected Schulman's writings on an author
who was not only particularly influential on Schulman but
also a friend for fifteen years, and features Schulman's
25,000 word interview with Heinlein for the \New York Daily
News\, in 1973.
Schulman's short story, "The Musician," a psychological
mystery about a violinist whose career takes a sudden bizarre
turn, was dramatized for Los Angeles radio, broadcast several
times in 1980 on Pacifica/ KPFK FM's "Hour 25" show, read by the
late Mike Hodel, and with classical violin accompaniment by the
author's father, Julius Schulman.
In addition to his opinion pieces for the \La Times\' Op-Ed
page, which have been syndicated in major newspapers nationwide,
Schulman's writings have appeared in magazines and newspapers
including \Reader's Digest\, the \Los Angeles Times Book Review\,
\Reason\ Magazine, \Liberty\, \Gun Week\, \The Lamp-Post\, and
\The Journal of Social and Biological Structures\, and he's
delivered talks at World Science Fiction conventions and other
conferences. Mr. Schulman has been written about in magazines
and newspapers including the \Wall Street Journal\, \USA Today\,
\Shooting Times\, \Analog\, and \Byte\ Magazine, and has been
interviewed on CNN, ABC's \World News Tonight\, and numerous radio
talk shows coast to coast on subjects ranging from his novels and
screenwriting, to electronic publishing, to firearms issues. He
has also taught a course entitled "Book Publishing in the 21st
Century" for the New School for Social Research/Connect-Ed.
___________________________________________________________________
About J. Neil Schulman's \ALONGSIDE NIGHT\:
In 1973, shortly after he had interviewed his favorite
science fiction author, Robert Heinlein, for the \New York Daily
News\, J. Neil Schulman got an idea for a short story that would
capture the spirit of the times. It would be a near-future story
in which New York City was in such economic collapse that even
getting across town to a stash of gold was a major problem. In
February 1974, he started writing the idea as a novel. Schulman
finished his first draft on May Day, 1976. The novel wasn't
published, however, until October, 1979.
In 1989, the Libertarian Futurist Society awarded it a
Prometheus "Hall of Fame" gold medallion for classic works of
fiction promoting liberty.
In the years since \Alongside Night\ was written, much of
its short-term projections have come to pass. New York City's
Fifth Avenue is now the home to the homeless and the drug gang.
The end of the Cold War is bringing to pass the "European Common
Market Treaty Organization" portrayed in the novel. As the U.S.
federal debt cripples the economy, major banks collapse, working
people lose their jobs and end up on the street, foreigners buy
up American corporations and landmarks at fire-sale prices, and
U.S. foreign policy makes desperate efforts to prevent the world
from regarding it as a paper tiger.
But what of the novel's longer-term projections? Can a book
which ends with the collapse of the United States really have a
happy ending?
J. Neil Schulman thought so in 1974, and he still does.
This book projects the collapse of the United States ... and
a way for America to save itself as a free land.
If you're interested in seeing liberty prevail, this book is
a blueprint to the future. If you're not ... it's the face of
the nemesis you can't escape.
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
"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\
"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
___________________________________________________________________
About J. Neil Schulman's \THE RAINBOW CADENZA\
This 1984 Prometheus-award-winning novel is fiction not
about the future of machines, but about the future of the human
soul: the story of Joan Darris, a brilliant young artist in the
medium of laser concerts, who swore she would tell the colors how
to make a rainbow.
Was it her destiny to play music for men's eyes, or to make
herself a plaything for their desires? Why did her love for her
mother threaten to subject her to three years of legalized rape,
and why did her family -- the very politics on Earth in her time
-- tell her it was her duty to comply? How did the murder she
witnessed at five years old make legalized rape seem the lesser
of evils twelve years later -- and how did the lingering horror
of that murder threaten not only to rob her of her artistic
triumph but threaten the life of a man she loved but who could
not give himself to her without betraying everything he believed
in?
Structured as carefully as one of the visual fugues it
describes -- beginning slowly and accelerating faster with each
movement -- \The Rainbow Cadenza\ conducts unforgettable
characters through a complex drama of human motive and variation
from Joan's mother, Eleanor, who learns the tragedy of trying to
live through a daughter -- to Joan's older sister Vera, the twin
daughter of Eleanor, whose struggle to find herself threatens to
destroy both her mother and sister -- to the elderly maestro,
Wolfgang Jaeger, who doesn't know whether Joan is a worthy
artistic heir or a cheap sensationalizer -- to the politician who
uses his power to make Joan his private love slave, and subject
her to his darkest desires -- to the secret Christian missionary
sent to Earth to teach the meaning of love, but who must learn
from Joan the ultimate meaning of his sermons.
Joan Darris's world is an eccentric one, an Earth with seven
men for every woman, with Marnies who hunt Touchables, with
Gaylords and Ladies, with games shows that try people for capital
crimes and sentence them to death in microwave ovens -- an Earth
that has eliminated war, but which has found new outlets for
violence.
Like the cautionary tales of Orwell and Huxley, the
philosophical novels of Ayn Rand, the realistic speculation of
Heinlein, the satiric fiction of Anthony Burgess, \The Rainbow
Cadenza\ uses the device of futuristic fiction to ask fundamental
questions about the personal, political, and religious values to
which we dedicate our lives, and to shed light on the problems we
face today.
Praise for \THE RAINBOW CADENZA\:
"Every libertarian should read it. It should win the
Prometheus Award."
--Robert A. Heinlein, at the 1983 L-5 Society Conference, to
Libertarian Futurist Society Chairman Michael Grossberg
"I found it absolutely fascinating ... A splendid
book."
--Colin Wilson
"A thoughtful, unusually well-written book that raises the
most important questions about life and art."
--Michael Medved, host of PBS's \Sneak Previews\
"Particular praise is due to Schulman for the detailed
working out of the heroine's profession of laser-graphics
composer. Future art forms are seldom handled wih the
intelligence and vividness seen here."
--\Booklist\
"Engrossingly suspenseful ... wickedly funny and chilling at
the same time."
--\Publishers Weekly\
"A sonata of rational discourse ... A highly recommended
feast of invention and serious speculation."
--\Library Journal\
"It is that rare thing, a genuinely intellectual thriller."
--\San Jose Mercury News\
"The book left me feeling for three days that I wished I'd
been born without a penis."
--Larry Niven, to the author
"The damn book haunted me."
--Poul Anderson, \Reason Magazine\
"An original and thoughtful book which raises questions that
have not appeared in fiction before."
--Gregory Benford
"An intensively interesting evocation of complex
psychological realities. Imaginative and original. Mr. Schulman
is a remarkably gifted writer."
--Nathaniel Branden, author of \The Psychology of Self
Esteem\ and \Judgment Day: My Life With Ayn Rand\
___________________________________________________________________
About J. Neil Schulman's
\THE ROBERT HEINLEIN INTERVIEW AND OTHER HEINLEINIANA\
In 1973, Robert A. Heinlein was sixty-six and at the height
of his literary career, and J. Neil Schulman was twenty and
hadn't yet started his first novel. And because he was looking
for a way to meet his idol, Schulman wangled an assignment from
the \New York Daily News\ -- at the time the largest circulation
newspaper in the U.S. -- to interview Heinlein for its Sunday
Book Supplement. The resulting interview lasted six hours, four-
and-a-half hours of which were on tape, and when edited by
Schulman and Heinlein for later serialization in a libertarian
magazine came to 25,000 words.
This turned out to be the longest interview Heinlein ever
granted, and the only one in which he talked freely and
extensively about his personal philosophy and ideology.
"The Robert Heinlein Interview" contains Heinlein you won't
find anywhere else -- even in \Expanded Universe\. If you want
to know what Heinlein had to say about UFO's, life after death,
epistemology, or libertarianism, this interview is virtually the
only source available. It is available in this book for the
first time since 1974.
Also included in this collection are articles, reviews, and
letters J. Neil Schulman wrote about Heinlein, including the
original article written for the \Daily News\, about which the
Heinleins wrote Schulman that it was, "The best article -- in
style, content, and accuracy -- of the many, many written about
him over the years."
This book is must-reading for any serious student of
Heinlein, or any reader of his seeking to know him better.
Praise for
\THE ROBERT HEINLEIN INTERVIEW AND OTHER HEINLEINIANA\:
"Once in a while you find a writer who says with
almost perfect clarity the things you have been thinking about
and the things you would like to say if you only had the skill
and artistry. This series of writings by and about RAH by J.
Neil Schulman have done that for me. A very articulate
proponent of the libertarian philosophy in his own right ...
he sheds light on RAH's libertarian feelings and beliefs.
... The interview with RAH is the crown jewel of the book.
... On my scale of 0 to 5, this is a 5. Worth reading, worth
rereading, and worth keeping to read again."
--Darryl Kenning
\Reading For Pleasure\
"Schulman's book helps put the great master's work and
life in context, helps us to see the magnitude and beauty of
Heinlein's accomplishments. And, through the feelings of
admiration and respect for Heinlein that come through in
Schulman's writings, we come to appreciate Heinlein more
ourselves. For Schulman seems to have absorbed all Heinlein's
writings, and admires him with good reason, and presents it
to us."
--Stephan Kinsella
GEnie, Science Fiction and Fantasy RoundTable
___________________________________________________________________
J. NEIL SCHULMAN