The federal government is shut down from lack of money in the budget. Foreigners are buying up everything in America while Europeans, now united, gloat over the fall of a once great nation. Homeless people and youth gangs roam the streets of New York.
Money is worthless, markets collapse, and businesses fail.
Smugglers use the latest computer encryption technology to operate bold enterprises that the government is powerless to stop, even with totalitarian control of news and private communication. The setting could be the day after tomorrow, based on headlines drawn from our daily news. Building on the prophetic novels of Orwell, Rand, and Heinlein, J. Neil Schulman created in Alongside Night the first of a new generation of libertarian novels, telling the story of the last two weeks of the world's greatest superpower through the perceptive eyes of a young man caught up in the maelstrom of the final American revolution. Alongside Night scored lavish praise for a first novel when it appeared in 1979, winning accolades from luminaries such as the English novelist many consider the greatest of his generation, and from the first American to win a Nobel Prize in Economics. The last time the novel saw print was in 1987.