Alongside Night

I'm not exactly a member of the Movement for the Libertarian Left, but I'm certainly a fellow traveller. It was reading J. Neil Schulman's Alongside Night that introduced me to Agorism, and through Agorism to gold and monetary economics, and eventually to Rothbard.

This past weekend, Wally Conger posted his review of Alongside Night. Because I never shy away from ripping off the ideas of my comrades, I've decided to post my own review. This is from the currently defunct BlackCrayon book reviews (1st, 2nd , 3rd, 4th):

Unlike Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress or Ken MacLeod's Stone Canal, J. Neil Schulman's Alongside Night shows how a free society might happen here and now (assuming that the Revolutionary Agorist Cadre has been spending the past few decades preparing for it).

I discovered Agorism and Alongside Night within the same week. What they finally offer is an image of non-aggressive, anti-political revolution within our lifetimes.

But Schulman's novel is also a fast-paced, exciting adventure story that manages to touch on all the basics of free-market anarchism and libertarian philosophy without ever slowing down to lecture or preach.

I have no idea what I would have made of this novel had I read it before my own (anti-)political conversion -- as I did with The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress and Illuminatus! Trilogy -- but I'm sorry I didn't discover it much sooner.