Underground Airlines is a 2016 novel by Ben Winters which is set in a contemporary alternate-history United States where the American Civil War never occurred because Abraham Lincoln was assassinated prior to his 1861 inauguration and a version of the Crittenden Compromise was adopted instead. As a result, slavery has remained legal in the "Hard Four" (a group of southern states which have kept slavery): Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and a unified Carolina. The novel attracted praise for exploring racism through the alternate-history mechanism, but also engendered criticism for coverage that seemingly ignored similar contributions by Octavia Butler.
Maps, Directions, and Place Reviews
Plot
The novel is narrated by Victor, a former Person Bound to Labor (nicknamed 'peeb' in the alternate history) who, after escaping life in a Hard Four state, has been forced to work as an undercover agent for a mysterious federal marshal named Mr. Bridge, infiltrating and gathering evidence to prosecute fellow escapees and the people and organizations helping peebs escape slavery. If Victor refuses to help, the agent has threatened to return him to the plantation from which he escaped; and he can be tracked by a device implanted in his spine if he tries to run.
As the novel opens, Victor is tracking down the peeb escapee Jackdaw, whose last known whereabouts have led Victor to Indianapolis. His trail ends at Saint Anselm's Catholic Promise, a seemingly derelict community center run by Father Barton. Victor poses as Jim Dirkson, an excruciatingly mild-mannered consultant for Indonesian mobile carrier Sulawesi Digital, looking to expand into the United States. He seeks to get his wife, a slave in Carolina codenamed Darling, out beyond the Fence (a nickname for the frontier between free and slave states in the U.S.) and into Little America, a suburb of Montreal founded specifically for African-Americans. In reality, however, Victor is only doing this as part of recceing the specific 'Underground Airlines' route that Father Barton is part of.
Victor quickly befriends a white woman named Martha and her mixed-race son after an altercation between her and the manager of the hotel Victor is staying at (who'd just 'requested' that he hand over his name and Social Security number as S.O.P. for colored persons) over stealing food from the breakfast buffet. He gives them something to eat, and the personage of Jim Dirkson becomes acquainted with the two.
Eventually, Victor locates Jackdaw, which is revealed to be a freeborn African-American college student named Kevin. He was sent by Father Barton to infiltrate Garments of the Greater South, purportedly to expose how they have been illegally selling slave-made goods to the rest of the United States (where 'Clean Hands' laws that forbid the purchase of any slave-made good or service apply) through shell companies located in Malaysia. This, the good father contends, could bring down slavery, or at least assassinate the credibility of its proponents.
Kevin, however, refuses to give up the location of the 'evidence' unless they also extract a slave girl he'd fallen for during his year behind the Fence gathering intel. In a commotion, Kevin is shot dead by an Indianapolis police officer who is working with Father Barton after he became enraged at the news that the girl was probably dead.
Victor deduces something larger is at play and gets Martha to play his 'Missus' through the deeply racist Hard Four (by promising her access to TorchLight through GGSI's network, a centralized registry of every Person Bound to Labor in the U.S. and their vital statistics, so that she could find out what happened to her son's (briefly-escaped peeb) father) to investigate GGSI. Marshal Bridge is compelled to play along after Victor bluffs that he 'knows' that there is something in the evidence that Kevin collected that would be potentially damaging to the Marshal Service. They pass through the Alabama border with no tsuris with papers furnished by Bridge, and make their way to Green Hollow, Alabama.
Invisible Fence Indianapolis Video
Development history
Our country is still dealing with the legacy of slavery. As I researched the subject, I realized I wanted to take this figurative idea that slavery is still with us, and make it literal.
Winters cites Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as a strong influence on the finished novel.
Recognition
The novel was a finalist for the 2017 Chautauqua Prize, the 2017 Southern Book Prize, the 2017 International Thriller Award, and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year. The book won the 2016 Sidewise Award for Alternate History.
Publication history
- -- (5 July 2016). Underground Airlines (1st hardcover ed.). Mulholland Books. ISBN 978-0-316-26124-1. Retrieved 4 March 2017.
- -- (5 July 2016). Underground Airlines (ebook ed.). Mulholland Books. ISBN 978-0-316-26123-4.
- -- (18 July 2017). Underground Airlines (trade pbk. ed.). Mulholland Books. ISBN 978-0-316-26125-8.
Cover art
The United States hardback edition cover was designed by Oliver Munday. An alternative cover for the UK edition featured a background with the stars and bars from the Confederate Battle Flag.
Reception
In an early review, Kirkus Reviews called the novel's premise "worthy of Philip K. Dick ... smart and well-paced." The book debuted on the New York Times hardcover best-seller list at #20, and was ranked #11 on the Indie Bestsellers list.
Charles Finch wrote, in a review for USA Today, the novel had a "rather prosaic plotline" and "many of [the novel's] big turns are anticlimactic" but overall, it was "a swift, smart, angry new novel [that] illuminates all the ways that slavery has endured into the present day -- by depicting an alternate world in which it has endured" and called it an astonishing feat of world-building.
In a review for The Washington Post, Jon Michaud found the "alternate history that does not feel fully realized [in] its rendering of popular culture" was "slightly distracting" but overall, the novel was a success "because its fiction is disturbingly close to our present reality." Many reviewers probed the novel's premise and found it reasonable. Maureen Corrigan, writing for National Public Radio, called the novel "one suspenseful tale filled with double crosses and dangerous expeditions" set in "a disturbing but plausible alternate reality for the United States." Kathryn Schulz, reviewing the novel for The New Yorker, said "Winters gets the balance right. He is careful to set up a plausible case for how history shifted off-kilter ... and he paints a convincing picture of what fugitive life would look like in our own era.
Racial controversy
A profile in The New York Times called the novel "creatively and professionally risky" for Winters, as fellow author Lev Grossman was quoted describing Winters as "fearless" for being "a white writer going after questions of what it's like to be black in America." Corrigan wrote that a white author imagining the thoughts and experiences of a black character was potentially controversial. Other critics of the Times profile felt that Winters was being unfairly lionized, especially since the themes of science fiction, racism and slavery had in fact been explored before, most notably by African-American author Octavia Butler in her 1979 novel Kindred.
Winters had already acknowledged Butler's influence in a blog post published three weeks before the profile in the Times.
Adaptation
Winters has written the pilot script for a television adaptation.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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