In an article earlier this week, Andy Duncan mentioned
a gem of a novel about this potential paper money breakdown scenario by J. Neil Schulman, entitled Alongside Night
Later that day, we were delighted to hear from Mr Schulman himself, who sent this update:
Back in the mid 70’s when I was writing my first novel Alongside Night — published in 1979 with endorsements on the dust jacket from Anthony Burgess and Milton Friedman — I portrayed a distant future where a European union called EUCOMTO had gone through a Weimar-Germany-type hyperinflation a decade earlier and now had a stable gold-backed currency called the Eurofranc; while the United States was now experiencing its own hyperinflationary economic meltdown with General Motors having gone bankrupt, and the European Chancellor chided the President of the United States for having a “New Dollar” the daily value of which decayed more rapidly than the bananas in a banana republic. In 1979 Alongside Night was reviewed as science fiction. Today I’m lucky if it’s not tomorrow morning’s report on the Fox Business Network. Pulpless.Com released a 30th Anniversary PDF edition of Alongside Night on June 13, 2009; as of this morning 221,830 copies have been downloaded for free from alongsidenight.net. Now international movie/TV star Kevin Sorbo and I are in development to produce Alongside Night as a feature film, from my own screenplay adaptation; I’ll be directing it as my second feature film. Still looking to complete financing — what’s $3.5 million converted from pounds or euros? Script and budget available on request.
Update on the Alongside Night Book-to-Movie project:
Bestselling author Tom Woods blogged on on November 20th, 2010:
“The libertarian world has been doing a good job writing and publishing in economics, history, and philosophy. But to reach a wider audience, we need to go where the people are. For one thing, people read much more fiction than nonfiction. J. Neil Schulman’s Alongside Night is an excellent example of the possibilities for libertarian fiction. And now there’s a move to get his book adapted into a motion picture. Fiction writing and the movies are two areas where we are getting killed. We’re not even putting up a fight. A project like this can change that.
“Alongside Night, with major endorsements from Ron Paul and Milton Friedman, its libertarian awards and rave reviews, and the intention of Free to Choose media to use the film in its teaching modules distributed to high schools, is an extremely rare opportunity to make inroads into the mass entertainment media. It would be great to see people of means get behind this important project.”
Tom linked to the new Alongside Night Official Movie website at http://www.alongsidenightmovie.com.