Underground Airlines

An engaging and thrilling novel sure to spark some intense and much needed conversations!

As good as I expected, going by the excellence of the Last Policeman series. The narrator is a fully developed character. And as bizarre as the setting is to the modern eye his reactions are always believable. The alternate history plot is gradually developed logically and is believable even though the results are bizarre. I would put Underground Airlines on the shelf next to Handmaids Tale. An outstanding novel that has a great deal to say about the world as it is.

This is a fascinating, fantastic book. Ben Winters has managed to create a suspenseful, utterly thought-provoking, and entirely original story. Taking place in an alternate United States where the Civil War never happened and slavery is still practiced in four states, Underground Airlines is the story of an escaped slave forced into a life as a kind of super-spy/bounty hunter, tracking down other escaped slaves--or PBs, short for "persons bound by law"--or risk being sent back to the plantation he escaped from, or worse. Winters creates a world that is uncomfortably close to our own, reminding us what we have and have not truly achieved as a nation. Yet despite the weightiness of the topic and the complicated details of the world he's created, Winters still manages to create compelling, flawed, and fully realized characters. Highly recommended.

This a great book, both fascinating and horrifying in the acceptance of slavery in our modern world. Another great book from Ben Winters highly recommended.

Wow. What a powerful and inventive novel. Picture an alternate United States -one with cell phones and cars and even Michael Jackson, but in which the Civil War never happened. Slavery has been protected forever by Constitutional amendments and still exists in four states in the Deep South. Some in the North fight against slavery and join the Underground Airlines to try to shepherd slaves to Canada and freedom. But the evil of slavery has infected the entire country and all its citizens. As frightening as this alternate reality is, I also found it illuminating in light of some of the awful racism and hatred we've been seeing reflected in our current politics. This alternate world didn't seem to be as far away and impossible as I want it to be.

I love everything Ben Winters does. This book is heartfelt and heartbreaking.

I will definitely recommend it to patrons who like to read something out of the ordinary.

I became a fan of Ben H. Winters back in 2012 when I first picked up his novel The Last Policeman. Since then, I’ve been following his work, subsequently reading Countdown City as well as World of Trouble as they were released. Together, those three books make up what I think is one of the most tragically underrated series I’ve ever read. So of course when I heard about Underground Airlines, I just knew I had to read it.

And wow, what an incredible book this was. If you haven’t read Winters yet, Underground Airlines is why you really need to. It’s very different from the past stuff I’ve read by him, but the writing and the storytelling both help cement in my mind that this author is entirely deserving of more attention.

His hard-hitting new book imagines what the world would look like today, if the Civil War never happened. In this alternate reality, slavery became protected in the Constitution and still exists in America in the “Hard Four” states, but even the northern parts of the country are deeply steeped in racism.

The story’s protagonist is a young black man called Victor, but that is merely one of his identities. A former slave who escaped only to be captured again, Victor was forced to make a deal with the federal government and to work as a kind of bounty hunter for the US Marshals. His handlers would set him on the trail of other runaway slaves, and then order him to track them down and bring them back to their masters. It’s a job that requires taking on a lot of aliases and putting on lots of different faces, but Victor is very good at playing whatever role is required of him. And whenever the work bothers him, he simply convinces himself that he’s just a man doing what he needs to do to survive, and that this is the price of his freedom.

But then Victor gets a new assignment to locate a runaway slave known as Jackdaw. It’s a particularly troublesome case, and from the very beginning Victor gets the sense that everything feels off. For one thing, he suspects that his boss is hiding information from him, and he doesn’t know why. As he traces the clues to find Jackdaw, he also uncovers disturbing secrets related to the Hard Four and their relationships with the government. Amidst all the pieces of this puzzle, an abolitionist movement called the Underground Airlines might be the key to solving the mystery, but Victor will need to figure out how to infiltrate them first.

The world of Underground Airlines will shake you to your core. You read about the horrific conditions in the Hard Four and the racist attitudes that are so imbedded in the culture, and sometimes it’s difficult to reconcile that with the modern setting of smartphones, laptops and GPS. At the same time though, perhaps our reality has more in common with this one than we’d like to believe. The issues in the novel may be magnified, but sadly they still exist in our world today.

Like many books in its genre, this one also made me ponder a lot about history. Namely, how fragile it is, in the sense how close events can come to turning out very differently. One change, one death, one missed opportunity, and everything can fall another way. Winters set out to explore this idea from top to bottom, working around the central premise: What if the Civil War never occurred? The America in his book is very different of course, but so is the entire world. No country exists in a vacuum, and America’s altered history not only influences its own politics, but it makes international governments perceive Americans differently as well. Within America, the culture is transformed, divided, and ailing badly; even though there are individuals, groups, government organizations, corporations, etc. standing in apparent solidarity against the evils of slavery, institutional racism is still alive and well.

Victor is an enlightening figure as well, a complicated protagonist to lead us through this story. It is clear that he recognizes the truth from the start: that he is free but not free, not a slave but still chained to the machine that keeps states like the Hard Four running. As hard as he tries to let go of his past, it comes back to haunt him every time he goes on a new assignment. A part of him hates what he does and what he has become, but denial is a powerful thing, burying the guilt most days. Little by little though, the cracks form in his armor, and he begins to question who he really is under all those different identities. He’s had to put on an act for so long, the past that he has tried so hard to escape will ultimately be the thing which helps Victor find his way back.

At the heart of it, Underground Airlines is a mystery and suspense novel, but it is still nonetheless oh so powerful. Ben H. Winters continues to impress me, going above and beyond all my expectations.

Very well written and well thought out alternate history. Chilling, and often too recognizable.

Is it better to fight for the downtrodden, or to acquiesce to bullies for the sake of peace?

It's present day. Slavery has never been abolished. The four southern states that argued successfully to continue slavery have the right - in perpetuity - to own slaves, use them, farm them, kill them. No act of Congress or executive order can ever change it. There are freedmen, though. One such is Jim. He work his job and he's very good at it. Jim, a former slave himself, captures runners and sees them returned to slavery.

The Underground Airline, the secret cooperative that moves slaves from the south to the north, is a myth folk tell each other to keep hopes for a better life alive. Or is it?

This book was a headlong rush from right to wrong and everywhere in between with twists aplenty along the way. Fans of suspense, historical fiction, or alternative history should enjoy it.

And it is. Damn good. When I would set the book down and head out to the real world, there was always a second or two of adjustment because of how immersed I was in the story. Not because I was tired. Not because my psychiatrists were adjusting my meds again. No. The story felt real. It feld grounded.

Kirkus called the book "Smart and well paced" and that's a pretty good assessment.

Victor is moving towards his prey, and the story develops as normal detective story, for the most part. We get to see the trunk of gadgets Victor uses. We listen in as Victor and his boss talk about "the plan" and so forth. We see Victor getting close and get scared when he nearly gets caught in lies or doing things he shouldn't. See, Victor works for the Marshals Service, but he still has a chip in his neck. He is, effectively, owned by them. As an escapaed slave himself, he was caught and forced into the service of catching other runaways. This is just one of many conflicts within Victor, who is as fully formed a character as I've seen in years.

Victor's original mission ends pretty early on in the novel. And then things really start to pick up. There's a secret out there that only Victor can expose. The book goes from detective novel to crime fiction to thriller to psychological drama and the reader is never the wiser -- because everything feels authentic to the story.

More: http://www.dosomedamage.com/2016/07/underground-airlines-by-ben-h-winters.html

Brilliant and timely.

Underground Airlines gets major points for creativity. The premise is America as it is today... except that slavery still exists in four states. Everywhere else is "normal," though the non-slave states boycott products from other states. The main character is a black man who serves as a bounty hunter of sorts for escaped slaves. But his latest case isn't going according to plan, and you learn all sorts of secrets as the book goes on about the abolitionists, and the U.S. government, and the slave-owning companies.

I really enjoyed the suspense of the book; it keeps you turning the pages up until the end!

Note: I received an advance reading copy of this book from the publisher for review.

“Underground Airlines” a compelling, thought-provoking work

One of the dangers inherent to working in the realm of genre fiction is the undeniable appeal of certain tropes. These concepts have become a sort of literary shorthand, a familiar framework on which to hang a narrative.

Take alternate history, for example. These sorts of books are all about tipping points - moments in time when something happens differently than it happened in our own history - that are then extrapolated forward. One of the most popular deals with war; for example, “What if the South won the Civil War?” is an idea explored by numerous speculative fiction practitioners. A powerful notion, to be sure, but one with which we’ve grown quite familiar.

Ben H. Winters takes rather a different angle in his novel “Underground Airlines.” This gripping, compelling, all-too-believable thriller does not ask what the United States – and indeed the world - would be like if the South had won the Civil War.

It asks what it would be like if the Civil War had never happened at all.

Imagine an America that largely mirrors our own, one rife with social media and smartphones and fast food chains and pop music. But this America has a decades-long darkness at its core, one that springs from the long-ago Constitutional compromise that headed off the secession of the Confederacy.

A compromise that gave states the inalienable and unwavering right to own slaves.

This is the world in which Victor lives. Long ago, Victor escaped the plantation on which he was born and the long life of servitude that was his destiny. Captured as a runaway, Victor was recruited to join the federal law enforcement organization devoted to tracking down, recapturing and extraditing runaway PBs (PB stands for Person Bound, the government euphemism for a slave). While many states have subsequently abandoned slavery, the so-called “Hard Four” remain steadfast in their devotion to their peculiar institution.

Victor has been sent on a mission to Indianapolis to track down a runaway by the name of Jackdaw. Despite some misgivings about this particular case, Victor throws himself into the work and finds himself growing closer to a cell of the loosely-organized abolitionist movement known as the Underground Airlines.

But as his pursuit of Jackdaw grows more frantic and his confusion regarding the case grows deeper, Victor is forced to confront certain realities of his situation. For while he believes himself to be a good man forced to do bad things in order to maintain the freedom that he holds so dear, the reality is that there are secrets so dark, so sinister, that the sacrifice of one man’s liberty might be a small price to pay to bring those secrets to the surface.

“Underground Airlines” is a discomfiting book in a lot of ways. The history of these alternate United States is largely offered up in piecemeal fashion, through the attributed quotes that serve as chapter epigraphs and assorted ideas and events brought forth in the context of the narrative. The picture painted is of a country that is remarkably similar to our own.

There’s a plausibility here that unsettles even as it works in service of the story. The notion of big-business plantations, massive modern corporations built on the backs of the enslaved – it doesn’t feel far-fetched. And while the rest of the world might express its disdain for America’s conciliatory attitude toward slavery, it’s clear throughout “Underground Airlines” that, well…business is business.

In Victor, Winters has created a narrator who is both sympathetic and unreliable. Both through his actions in the present day and the flashbacks that offer us a glimpse of his early plantation life, we see someone whose sole aim is to remain a free man. The choices Victor makes are often unpleasant ones, but at no point do we lose sight of why he is doing what he does; having thrown off the yoke of oppression once, he is committed to doing whatever is necessary to avoid a return – even if that means lying not only to those around him, but to himself.

All of this is laid out in a propulsive, twist-laden narrative that will leave the reader questioning every new revelation and wondering about every new turn. There’s a kinetic quality to Winters’s prose that is inescapable; the density of its central conceit pulls the reader into an ever-tightening orbit whose speed grows exponentially until all the pieces come together in a heart-stopping and spectacular climactic impact.

Speculative fiction is at its best when it uses the trappings of genre to explore complex ideas in a new way. That’s precisely what “Underground Airlines” does – this is a story unlike any other, a book whose power can’t be properly expressed no matter the superlative; it holds up a cracked mirror to our world and shows us the sinister possibilities that shimmer just beneath the surface of our country’s often-contentious history.

Underground Airlines is a modern day setting with many of the familiarities of our every day lives. But in this version of our world, slavery still exists in four southern states, referred to as The Hard Four. It’s an America that does not pretend that all people are equal. Amendments were added to the Constitution to not just make slavery legal, but also prevent those amendments from ever being updated or removed. It was a permanent decision guaranteeing The Hard Four will always be able to continue to practice slavery. The idea of any amendment being permanent and unmodifiable is really scary. When it is one that is discriminatory and inhumane, it is horrifying.

First, I love the prose of this book. The descriptive quality and pacing, all of it is incredibly well done, not too much, but definitely vivid. And for the record, I don’t consider this a fast paced book, I really think it is a book whose strengths lie in its ideas. I also never felt it was slow. It’s the type of book where it is easy to just enjoy the words, picture and atmosphere the author creates.

Victor has an interesting position. One would think that black people would be united against slavery whether they were free or not. But Victor is a young black man working for a government agency, helping to track down run away slaves. He does this because for him it is an opportunity for freedom, a chance to escape his past. A past he doesn’t remember but is coming back to him in flashbacks. Flashbacks so severe that he his body will physically react, sweating and shaking as his mind relives the haunting times of his past.

But his latest case, as he tries to track down a man by the name of Jackdaw, Victor is forced to examine his life, his past as well as his present and future. Everything comes to head in this very thought provoking tale. It is incredibly easy to draw parallels to our own reality in America today. Victor is really in a horrible position faced with a choice to either help condemn and return others to slavery or death (dashing their hopes of freedom), give up any hopes of one day being completely free.

Overall, I found this to be a very enjoyable, quite insightful and thought-provoking book with topics that are very relevant for today’s world. Definitely recommend.

I’ve been on a bit of an alternate-history kick recently, which has led me to believe that it is possibly one of the most challenging genres an author might tackle. Call it the Butterfly Effect or Domino Effect or just plain Jenga, but changing a single event in history causes a cascade of changes, and if the author misses even one of those, the book loses its believability.

Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters is an alternate reality in the present day where slavery was never outlawed in the USA, and is still practiced in four major states. It is a horrifying thought and an important topic in light of current race-relations in the USA and much of the world.

World-building is important in alternative-history fiction, but must be subtle. If the world is different to the way we know it, the reader must be able to understand why that is. Winters did this fairly well, in referring to trading sanctions which, for example, result in CDs not yet reaching American markets.

Elaborating on the events in your alternate history is also difficult because the reader does not want to be told so much as shown where history deviated from the plot, but sometimes it is so elaborate that showing is difficult. Winters tends to err on the side of telling in this regard, and it sometimes seems as though our MC is lecturing to someone who does not know the history. To be fair, I have not yet seem an author pull this off in an alternative history.

The purpose of an alternate-reality novel is not just to point out the differences between our situation and the what-ifs, but more jarringly to show the similarities. And that is what I found to be the value (and the horror) of Underground Airlines, because as I read I found myself asking, “But how is this REALLY any different from what black Americans are dealing with in our reality?”

Is Winters suggesting that the prejudice faced by persons of colour today is as bad as though slavery was never abolished? I think that is one of the most important discussion-points stemming from this book. The kind of systemic prejudice facing the free persons of colour in Underground Airlines is not so different from many situations today: you are free, but don’t wear a hoodie or look dangerous. You are free, but don’t carry a weapon if you want to live. You are free, but businesses and places of employment are also free to discriminate.

In terms of pacing and dialogue, I definitely felt that the novel could have benefited from more editing. It seemed as the majority of the novel was busy “setting up” for the plot, but the plot struggled to gain momentum. It was a whole lot of planning and back-story and double-agenting, and then the twist came before any plotting really occurred.

In terms of character development, I was told that the protagonist felt anxious and desolate, but I was never really offered the opportunity to get in his head; as though he were too far for the reader to fully grasp. This may be tactical on the author’s part, because Viktor is a mystery to everyone, including himself. Is he a good guy doing bad work? He closes himself TO himself in an effort to avoid the terror of his past and his guilt; but even so, I needed to be able to connect with the MC more.

My biggest problem was the “twist”, which suddenly turns Underground Airlines into more sci-fi than alternate contemporaneous. If you read the blurb you knew there was a secret, but tension in this regard never truly mounts – the tension is always about freedom and not about secrets. It is such a wild twist that it is incongruous with the rest of the novel, and it is jarring in a bad way. It almost feels as if it were an afterthought, and afterward little is done with it. It threatens the integrity of the entire novel.

One of my favourite hot-points suggested in Underground Airlines is that of the “couch activist”. Those who are so privileged that they can side-step dealing with the problem. From Father Barton who says, “I have spoken on it and will continue to speak on it, but speaking is all I do,” to people who won’t buy products of slavery but still benefit from the economic successes thereof.

Its issues in spite, this remains a book I would like to see read in schools and universities to open up robust dialogue. Underground Airlines may well be one of the most “woke” books that has been published this year.

This book is a masterful work of art, beautifully drawn and expertly told. Blacks in this ersatz America still listen to Prince and worry about being gunned down by killer cops. The labor that powers so much of our economy is no longer done by nameless workers overseas, but by slaves on our own shores. The novel is a biting commentary on our own lives and times as well as being a page-turning thriller. We truly feel for Victor even as we loathe his actions, all the time asking ourselves what we would do in his position.

Sometimes we need the power of fiction and alternate realities to force us to confront the choices our own society makes in our name. “Underground Airlines” holds up a distorted mirror to modern America, and we ask what could be much worse or different than what is?

Ben Winters imagines a world in which the Civil War never happened in this extremely relevant and intelligent novel. Through the eyes of an ex-slave, now bounty hunter we view an America where slavery still exists in some places. This important social commentary is presented in a book that reads in part like a thriller and is hard to put down. The narrative is propelled by flawed and deeply interesting characters. This book would make a great book club pick as it provides much material for discussion.