J. NEIL SCHULMAN is the author of two Prometheus award-winning novels, Alongside Night and The Rainbow Cadenza, short fiction, nonfiction, and screenwritings, including the CBS Twilight Zone episode "Profile in Silver."
His new comic novel, Escape From Heaven, is winning high praise from luminaries such as Jerry Pournelle, David Brin, Colin Wilson, and Piers Anthony, and early reviews are comparing it favorably with novels by Mark Twain, C.S. Lewis, Robert A. Heinlein, and even the classic writings of Milton and Dante.
He's currently developing The Julius Schulman Center for the Living Arts in Pahrump, Nevada, a forty-five minute drive off the Las Vegas strip, as a teaching and performing arts center. It is named for his father, Julius Schulman, a concert violinist.
His new company, Duj Pepperman Enterprises, is the new parent company of the Pulpless.Com publishing imprint, as well being in development to produce and distribute original video and audio programs.
In 1987 he founded SoftServ Publishing, the first publishing company to distribute paperless books by bestselling authors such as Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg via personal computers and modems and in 1996 he founded and now operates Pulpless.Com, which preceded Stephen King by distributing the novels of bestselling authors such as Piers Anthony, Robert Silverberg, Norman Spinrad, and Simon Hawke through the World Wide Web. Pulpless.Com also electronically distributes all of Schulman's own books. He has been recognized as a pioneer in electronic publishing as far back as the January 18, 1989 Wall Street Journal, which wrote "J. Neil Schulman has seen the future, and there are no books"; and more recently explicitly named as a pioneer in this field by the New York Times web site.
He's lectured on electronic publishing for Connected Education/the New School for Social Research in New York, and Northwood University in Midland, Michigan.
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction's article about Schulman calls his books, "very influential in the LIBERTARIAN-SF movement" and says his books "are motivated by a combination of moral outrage and a fascination with the hardware of politics and economics."
During 1992, he hosted The J. Neil Schulman Show, a program of interviews and music, on the American Radio Network's Kaleidascope program, and wrote frequent articles for the Los Angeles Times and Orange County Register opinion pages which were reprinted in numerous major newspapers across the country.
Schulman is a popular speaker on a variety of topics, having delivered talks at World Science Fiction conventions and other conferences, and a frequent talk show guest coast-to-coast on subjects including his books and screenwriting, electronic publishing, and political issues, for such hosts as Dennis Prager, Michael Jackson, Oliver North, Gene Burns, Conway & Steckler, and Barry Farber. He has been interviewed on CNN, was on ABC's World News Tonight as an expert on defensive use of firearms during the 1992 Los Angeles riots, and debated one-on-one with Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block on UPN Channel 13 News Los Angeles on the topic of the repeal of the federal "assault weapons" ban. The Fox News TV Network interviewed him twice on the fifth anniversary of the Brown-Goldman murders in Brentwood. His writings on firearms have been used by witnesses on both sides of the gun-control debate in congressional hearings before the House Subcommittee on Crime. Schulman's writings have appeared in magazines and newspapers including Reader's Digest, National Review, the Los Angeles Times Book Review, Reason Magazine, Liberty, Gun Week, The American Rifleman, The Lamp-Post, and The Journal of Social and Biological Structures. In addition to media already noted, Mr. Schulman has been written about in magazines and newspapers including USA Today, Shooting Times, Analog, and Byte Magazine.
Schulman's first novel, Alongside Night (Crown hardcover 1979, Ace paperback 1982, Avon paperback 1987, SoftServ 1990, Pulpless.Comtm 1996, 1999), 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. A German-language edition is scheduled for publication by Stefan Kopp, Verlag.
The Rainbow Cadenza (Simon & Schuster hardcover 1983, New English library paperback 1984, Avon paperback 1986, SoftServ 1989, Pulpless.Comtm 1996, 1999) 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, Gregory Benford, and Robert A. Heinlein, who publicly praised it in front of a crowd at a 1983 meeting of the L-5 society. The book also got raves from Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Poul Anderson in Reason Magazine, and Jeff Riggenbach in the San Jose Mercury-News.
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. The outlines and first two drafts of the teleplay are included in, Profile In Silver And Other Screenwritings. (The first draft script of "Profile in Silver" is available in a sampler file.) The book also includes the bulk of Schulman's works written for the screen and commentaries about his adventures and trials in the film industry.
Schulman is also author of the popular Stopping Power: Why 70 Million Americans Own Guns (Synapse-Centurion hardcover 1994, Pulpless.Com 1996, 1999), which Charlton Heston called "the most cogent explanation of the gun issue I have yet read." In Stopping Power, a collection of forceful, dramatic, and often funny polemics (including four Los Angeles Times articles), Schulman challenges the distortions and misinformation that pundits ranging from network anchors to ill-informed doctors are promoting about guns. The book received rave reviews from The Los Angeles Daily News, and from talk-show hosts including Dennis Prager and Michael Jackson. One chapter from Stopping Power was excerpted in National Review as an article titled, "Medical Malpractice," then was chosen to be reprinted in the book Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Health and Society, Second Edition, Edited by Eileen K. Daniel, (Dushkin Publishing Group/Brown & Benchmark Publishers, 1996), as rebuttal to "Guns in the Household" by Jerome P. Kassirer, MD, editor of the New England Journal of Medicine. Another chapter, "Talk At Temple Beth Shir Shalom," was reprinted in the book, Guns in America : A Reader, Jan E. Dizard, editor (New York University Press, 1999), and Schulman's chapter was praised in the Village Voice's review as "a tough Jew manifesto."
His latest nonfiction book to see print in both hardcover and trade paperback, Self Control Not Gun Control (Synapse-Centurion hardcover 1995, Pulpless.Com 1996, 1999), is Schulman's magnum opus on both current controversies and timless questions, and he hits whatever he targets with magnum force, whether it's guns, revolution, New Age thinking, liberal hate speech, his vision of "The Coming Golden Age," or 226 words which give us "The Meaning of Life." Dr. Walter E. Williams says of it, "Schulman interestingly and insightfully raises a number of liberty-related issues that we ignore at the nation's peril. His ideas are precisely those that helped make our country the destination of those seeking liberty. The book's title says it all: personal responsibility, not laws and prohibitions, is the mark of a civil society."
His 1999 nonfiction book, The Frame of the Century?, asks the question, "Was O.J. Simpson framed for murder by his biggest fan?" In this work of speculative nonfiction, Schulman uses the tools of deductive logic, forensic microbiology, and analytical psychology to propose the theory that a long-time worshipper of both O.J. Simpson and Nicole Brown Simpson, a substance-abusing ex-LAPD officer, might have murdered Nicole out of rejection and rage, and used his expert knowledge of forensics to frame O.J. Simpson for the crime. Prior to print publication, Schulman has released advance reading copies of The Frame of the Century? for free download on the World Wide Web, and since its release on May 21, 1997, over 9,000 copies have been downloaded by interested readers. The book was reviewed favorably by Charles Brewer in The Cincinnati Enquirer, who called it, "a compelling circumstantial argument."
The Robert Heinlein Interview and Other Heinleiniana (SoftServ, 1990, Pulpless.Com 1996, 1999) 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 first ventures into electronic publishing are documented in his two-volume electronic book, Book Publishing in the 21st Century, which includes the transcript of the course he gave for Connected Education/The New School for Social Research, as well as material from the SoftServ RoundTable he operated on GEnie and its successor, the SoftServ Paperless Book BBS.
Seven of his published short stories (and two never-before published ones) are in his book, Nasty, Brutish, And Short Stories. It includes "The Repossessed," the lead story in Adventures in the Twilight Zone, edited by Carol Serling (Daw, 1995) and "Day of Atonement," from the libertarian shared-future anthology Free Space, edited by Brad Linaweaver and Ed Kramer, (Tor Books 1997). It also contains Schulman's short story, "The Musician," a psychological mystery about a violinist whose career takes a sudden bizarre turn, which 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. Also in the volume is his latest short story, "When Freemen Shall Stand."
Schulman's personal website, The World According to J. Neil Schulman, also contains a selection of his recent articles and poetry.
In September, 1993, the Second Amendment Foundation awarded Schulman the James Madison Award for his Los Angeles Times article, "If Gun Laws Work, Why Are We Afraid?" and in November, 1995, the 500,000-member Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms awarded Schulman its Gun Rights Defender prize.
Schulman is also webmaster for the World Wide Web Gun Defense Clock, which uses the best criminological research on the use of firearms in self defense against criminals to calculate the number of gun defenses each year. A petition to News Divisions CBS, NBC, ABC, CNN, et al, "Report the news on Defensive Gun Uses," demands that the major TV networks begin accurately reporting the frequency to which privately held firearms are used by Americans each year.
