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Underground Airlines
hardcover dustjacket, 1st edition (2016)
AuthorBen H. Winters
Cover artistOliver Munday in collaboration with Keith Hayes
LanguageEnglish
PublisherMulholland (Hachette)
Publication date
5 July 2016
Publication placeUnited States
Media typePrint (Hardcover)
Pages327
ISBN978-0-316-26124-1

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. Its name evokes the Underground Railroad in relations to its setting. 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.

Plot

The novel is narrated by Victor, a former Person Bound to Labor ('peeb') who, after escaping the Hard Four, has been forced to work as an undercover agent for U.S. Marshal 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.[1]

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, a consultant for Indonesian cell carrier Sulawesi Digital, looking to expand into the United States, seeking to get his wife Gentle, out of the Carolina plantation she is enslaved in, and into Little America, a suburb of Montreal mainly populated by African-Americans in exile. In reality, however, Victor is only doing this as part of reconnoitering the 'Underground Airlines' route that Father Barton is part of.

Victor befriends Martha, a white woman with a mixed-race child after they are ejected from a hotel for stealing from the breakfast buffet. 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, Inc. (GGSI), 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. Barton contends that this explosive revelation 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. In a commotion, he 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 is then coerced by Father Barton to go back to GGSI to retrieve the intel.

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 Samson, her son's (briefly-escaped peeb) father) to investigate GGSI. Furthermore, Victor decides to double-cross Father Barton, and makes another deal with Marshal Bridge. Victor does not believe the intel retrieved would make any difference, thus tries to use Marshal Service to secure his own freedom. 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.

At the Fence, run by a specialized division of the Department of Homeland Security called Internal Border and Regulation, Victor disguises himself as Martha's slave, and with papers furnished by Bridge, endures a dehumanizing inspection by the IBR agents before being waved through, and the two make their way to Green Hollow, Alabama. In Green Hollow, Victor sends Martha away and meets up with former peebs who hide out at a sympathetic old white lawyer's mansion; He is accommodated there as he prepares to insert himself into GGSI.

Martha returns to Victor's side, and they succeed in infiltrating GGSI's HQ, obtaining the intel as well as Samson’s status. He and Martha are unexpectedly abducted by Officer Cook, one of Father Barton’s colleagues from Indianapolis. It turns out Officer Cook, like Victor, is also a Marshal Service undercover agent: he double-crosses both Father Barton and Victor to secure his own freedom. In the ensuing struggle, Officer Cook is shot dead.

Father Barton has lied about the nature of the evidence. When confronted by Victor, Father Barton reveals that the evidence is much more horrifying: GGSI has been experimenting with the eggs of female slaves to genetically produce a new line of slaves who can be legally classified as non-humans, circumventing the restriction put on using slaves.

Victor decides to work with Father Barton. Telling Bridge he has the intel, they rendez-vous in a makeshift operating tent off a highway so his tracking implant can be removed and Bridge can fulfill his promise of a new identity for Victor. During the exchange, however, Father Barton ambushes Bridge, killing the medical technician he'd brought along, and about to kill Bridge, when Victor says to spare him instead. In gratitude, Bridge removes the implant himself, and Victor passes out, waking up to an empty tent.

The novel ends with Victor and Martha posing as corporate representatives checking into the Chicago headquarters of the elevator company which supplies GGSI, plotting sabotage.

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.

— Ben H. Winters, The New York Times (July 2016 review)[2]

Winters cites Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man as a strong influence on the finished novel.[3]

Recognition

The novel was a finalist for the 2017 Chautauqua Prize,[4] the 2017 Southern Book Prize,[5] the 2017 International Thriller Award,[6] and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel of the Year.[7] The book won the 2016 Sidewise Award for Alternate History.

Publication history

Cover art

The United States hardback edition cover was designed by Oliver Munday.[3][8] An alternative cover for the UK edition featured a background with the stars and bars from the Confederate Battle Flag.[9]

Reception

In an early review, Kirkus Reviews called the novel's premise "worthy of Philip K. Dick ... smart and well-paced."[10] The book debuted on the New York Times hardcover best-seller list at #20,[11] and was ranked #11 on the Indie Bestsellers list.[12]

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.[13]

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."[14] 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."[15] 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.[16]

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."[2] Corrigan wrote that a white author imagining the thoughts and experiences of a black character was potentially controversial.[15] 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.[17][18][19]

Winters had already acknowledged Butler's influence in a blog post published three weeks before the profile in the Times.[20]

Adaptation

Winters has written the pilot script for a television adaptation.[2]

References

  1. ^ Miller, Laura (13 July 2016). "Bound to Labor". Slate. Retrieved 18 July 2016.
  2. ^ a b c Alter, Alexandra (4 July 2016). "In His New Novel, Ben Winters Dares to Mix Slavery and Sci-Fi". The New York Times. Retrieved 4 March 2017.
  3. ^ a b Winters, Ben H. (8 July 2016). "Here's Where We're Heading With the Book Cover". Powell's Books. Retrieved 4 March 2017.
  4. ^ http://ciweb.org/season/literary-arts/the-chautauqua-prize
  5. ^ https://www.sibaweb.com/siba-book-award
  6. ^ http://thrillerwriters.org/2017-thriller-awards/
  7. ^ http://www.sfcenter.ku.edu/campbell-finalists.htm
  8. ^ Dan (27 November 2016). "Notable Book Covers of 2016". The Casual Optimist. Retrieved 4 March 2016.
  9. ^ "BOLO Books' Top Five covers of 2016". BOLO Books. December 2016. Retrieved 4 March 2017.
  10. ^ "Underground Airlines, by Ben H. Winters". Kirkus Reviews. 12 April 2016. Retrieved 4 March 2017.
  11. ^ "Hardcover Fiction Books - Best Sellers - July 24, 2016 - The New York Times". Retrieved 2016-07-25.
  12. ^ "Indie Bestsellers | IndieBound". www.indiebound.org. Retrieved 2016-07-25.
  13. ^ Finch, Charles (9 July 2016). "In 'Underground Airlines,' America is a modern slave state". USA Today. Retrieved 4 March 2017.
  14. ^ Michaud, Jon (1 July 2016). "'Underground Airlines' imagines a modern U.S. where slavery is still legal". The Washington Post. Retrieved 4 March 2017.
  15. ^ a b Corrigan, Maureen (7 July 2016). "'Underground Airlines' Is An Extraordinary Work Of Alternate History". NPR. Retrieved 18 July 2016.
  16. ^ Schulz, Kathryn (22 August 2016). "The perilous lure of the Underground Railroad". The New Yorker. Retrieved 4 March 2017.
  17. ^ Baker-Whitelaw, Gavia (5 July 2016). "Controversy is brewing around 'Underground Airlines,' a new novel that mixes slavery and sci-fi". The Daily Dot. Retrieved 4 March 2017.
  18. ^ Grady, Constance (4 August 2016). "You can't write a sci-fi story about slavery without citing Octavia Butler". Vox. Retrieved 4 March 2017.
  19. ^ Patrick, Bethanne (7 July 2016). "'Underground Airlines' Presents A Scarily Realistic Alternate History". National Public Radio. Retrieved 4 March 2017. It hasn't escaped me that I am a privileged white woman, reviewing a book dealing with slavery and written by a white man. For book groups who take on Underground Airlines, consider pairing it with Octavia Butler's classic Kindred for a balance of gender, race, and generation.
  20. ^ Winters, Ben (14 June 2016). "Influences". Ben H. Winters [blog]. Retrieved 4 March 2017.
  • Munday, Oliver (11 July 2016). "Mulholland, 2016". Oliver Munday Group. Retrieved 4 March 2017.

Reviews

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