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 * AUTHOR: Prometheus-Award-Winning novelist of \Alongside Night\ and \The Rainbow Cadenza\. Listed in \International Who's Who of Authors and Writers\ & \Contemporary American Authors\. * ENTREPRENEUR: Founder of SoftServ Publishing and the SoftServ Paperless Bookstore * TEACHER: Taught graduate course "Book Publishing in the 21st Century" for New School for Social Research/Connect-Ed. * ACTIVIST: Founder and Chair of the Committee to Enforce the Second Amendment * MEDIA EXPERT: Screenwriter for CBS' Twilight Zone series Radio Producer & Host on the American Radio Network Producer of Classical Recital for Cable Television Consultant to Public Television Frequent interview guest on TV and radio ___________________________________________________________________ J. NEIL SCHULMAN PUBLIC SPEAKING TOPICS: * Writing Novels & Screenplays That Sell Freedom * Electronic Publishing: Freedom From Censorship * Using Computer Networks to Organize * Keeping Adults Juvenile: How to Enslave a Society * The Fully Privatized Society: Could it Happen? * Libertarian Futurism: The Technology of Freedom * Three Paladins of Liberty: Ayn Rand, Robert Heinlein, C.S. Lewis * Libertarian Science Fiction: Rewriting the Future * Informational Property: Logorights * Firearms and the Free Society * Artistic Inhumanism and the Destruction of the Human Spirit Speaking fee: $1,500 + expenses Copyright (c) 1993 by J. Neil Schulman. All rights reserved.