J. Neil Schulman's alongside Night [Paperback]

Back in 1987, a friend gave me a copy of the Avon paperback of "Alongside Night." I read it with great interest.

This novel reminded me a great deal of Robert Heinlein "juveniles" such as "Have Spacesuit, Will Travel." It is a bildungsroman following young Elliot Vreeland as he comes of age in New York City.

In the thirty years since J. Neil Schulman wrote the book, the dollar has been inflated more and more. The government has become larger, more corrupt, and much more like the government portrayed in the book. So, coming of age has gotten more and more difficult.

The great appeal for me in this book was its deliberate depiction of parts of society where government interference is not only gone, but actively prevented from getting involved. Free markets as part of an underground culture where people behaved without coercion had always appealed to me. In this book these markets were shown as real, vibrant, and substantial.

Nor is the future depicted any sort of utopia. There are problems in the Revolutionary Agorist Cadre with abuse of power and authority. There are problems with the government, too, which are far more pernicious. Yet, people manage their affairs and get by. Some thrive. Others suffer and die. Life's rich tapestry.

A decade ago, few would have believed that the monetisation of the government debt was threatening a hyperinflation of the dollar. Today it seems much more likely than ever. Who could have believed General Motors would be nationalised? Or Lehman Brothers and dozens of other companies would go under? Yet, today these are facts.

Alongside Night does an excellent job of showing a troubled world as a place to grow up. It also showcases agorism and individualism in ways never before or since.

The minor characters here poop in their pants when faced with a crisis. A young boy has had his parents and his sisters kidnapped, but in the middle of the novel, instead of daily being at the task of rescuing them, he is exploring a new Utopia. The author seems to think he's set up the suspense dramatically enough that the reader will keep turning the pages despite the long deviation into a "better of way of life" scenario. Reading this novel is like reading the newspaper, only the facts are not as disturbing.

The characters' names, all those who are not major characters that is, eventually meld together confusedly and meaninglessly in the rushing onslaught of the novel's denouement. The near-end and actual end of the story is action-packed and neatly ties together and resolves all the loose ends.

First off, most reviewers are describing this book as "libertarian" when it is more accurately described as anarcho-capitalist: the Revolutionary Agorist Cadre *rejects* the notion of being the "one government" for the US in the end.

But that's nitpicking. I'm an AnCap and there's far too little literature out there for me to read, so stumbling across this book many years after it was written was a nice surprise for me (thanks Amazon for your excellent Similarities! Interested readers may want to check out Matthew Alexander's "Withur We" for a very recent AnCap book that would probably interest people that liked this book). The author clearly has an excellent grasp and fondness for AnCap concepts and the book shines the most when he focuses on how the people that have adopted an AnCap lifestyle function and get along.

Unfortunately, there's a couple of complaints about the book. For one, the above part that I liked was too short. In fact, the whole book is too short: nothing really has time to play out in a level of depth that satisfied me. And for a short book, too much of it was spent on things that just weren't that interesting, e.g. the entire raid on Utopia near the end of the book didn't do anything for me. What was the point of the various action scenes? A book that is trying to illustrate how different societal structures influence the resulting society doesn't need to become a Ludlum book for half of it. There really wasn't even a clear message or theme tying the raid into the rest of the book: was there a point to the fact that the raid was only partially successful? Other than perhaps trying to say "even for our 'heroes', not everything ends up exactly the way they want it", I'm not sure there was... and that point could have been in far fewer words.

A couple of other points: why do most "libertarian" novels focus on their "revolutions" rather than what happens *after* the revolution? The whole process of Schulman's revolution reads too much like a teenaged male's fantasies rather than a sober reflection on what they are actually advocating. Again, Schulman hits *some* of this and that's where the book shines, but I think that by stopping when the revolution hits and not exploring the mundane of the world that happens afterwards, he isn't going to bring in anyone who wasn't already sold.

There's too much coincidence for my tastes: Elliott just happens to start a giant riot simply by being spotted by one policeman, the school he goes to just happens to be the secret headquarters of the underground movement and his teachers just happen to be the movements' leaders, he just happens to stumble upon the daughter of the FBI and fall in love with her, etc. The world is too big for all of those coincidences, but ok, that's just my taste.

I think the thing I disliked the most is a common complaint I have in this kind of literature: the various AnCap organizations in Schulman's book *are all populated with people versed in and devoted to AnCap/libertarian philosophy*. Sure, Galt's Gulch works if it is populated by people who are intensely self aware of libertarian philosophy, but if your AnCap society can only work if it populated by experts in the philosophy, it's never going to work. No matter how much one hopes that the entire world will be educated on the finer points of Objectivism/libertarianism/etc, *it's never going to happen*. What needs to be imagined is an AnCap/libertarian world *in which the vast majority of people have no more understanding of why it works than they do of why today's system is flawed*. The vast majority of the population are not going to become experts on economics and political theory. AnCap/libertarianism *doesn't require them to*. It just is not realistic to think that this underground of hyper-aware supermen is going to form up and more or less defeat the government. It's a nice fantasy, that all of these smart and principled people are working unbeknownst to us to remake the world in a better image, but it just reads a little too much like fantasy.

That's a lot of negative things I'm saying and I'm rating this book 4 stars: it's easier to talk about the negatives than the positives. I enjoyed this book! And I'll recommend it to others. I just think it could have been better... But I also realize that this is a really hard genre to write in with *any* success at all, and I give Schulman credit for having done so.

At a writing level, I thought Schulman's prose was acceptable, not great but certainly not bad. The characters didn't have a lot of time to grow because of the shortness of the book, but within that constraint the characterizations were acceptable (we really could have had more insight into the FBI director's motivations: why exactly was he that way? What would drive a father and husband to do the horrible things he did to his daughter and mother? I felt a little empty in that one).

It appears that Schulman may have some other fiction and I liked this enough to check that out as well; perhaps his writing matured with experience, and I'd look forward to it.

As a final postscript, since the author appears to sometimes read these reviews: I think you're wrong on IP. Go read Kinsella. I think it's pretty devastating to your point of view (and he does reference you, in case you haven't read him). The fact that IP as you envision it rips apart physical property concepts is just devastating. If I have a paper and a pencil that are my property, somehow your writing a book in your home reaches into my household and prevents me from using that paper and pencil as I wish (I am not allowed to write down the same things you did)? It's proof by contradiction. I say this as someone who leaned pro-IP until I decided to spend some time researching it over the last couple of years, but the arguments against it have swayed me. If nothing else, since I know you'll still disagree, you probably should understand that your condescension towards anyone who doesn't agree with you does not do your point well. I'm not a statist, I'm an AnCap/libertarian, and my stance against IP isn't because I'm some greedy thief out to steal your work, it's based on logic rooted in the very concepts of AnCap/libertarianism. IOW: there's a valid debate here, and to pretend there isn't just kind of removes you from the debate.