Underground Airlines

I'd read this book a while back and decided now was a good time to try the audiobook. The narrator captured the first person perspective of the story in a better than average way. The story-world is thought provoking. The U.S. never had the Civil War b/c four southern states were granted the ability to carry human slavery forward to the present day. The "underground airlines" of the title is a new metaphor for an old, our world reality - an organization to move escaped slaves to freedom. The world of the story was more compelling then the characters - with the exception of the narrator, Victor. He's a complex character and his journey is fascinating and well-earned. The other characters, especially the priest, felt like sketches with unclear motivations. 3/4th of the book felt like a world which could be real. Unfortunately, the ending disappointed me as it took a turn in a direction which hadn't been established as a possibility earlier in the story. So, 3.75 stars, rather than 4 or slightly higher.

I couldn't finish this one. It was dark to begin with, but when the main character was going to go undercover...nope, that was it.

If the main character had been white, like the author, I might have been able to continue, but it just felt like so much cultural appropriation.

Meh, OK, fine. Another alternative US spec fic book, in the style of this: i.e. another book tackling America's original sin (here, slavery) through a flashy gimmick (here, slavery never ended, the Civil War never happened) that doesn't have as much substance as its promised style implies.

I mean, it was OK - but I feel like I could have LOVED it. The plot: In modern day America, a man named Victor is tracking a runaway slave. Victor himself escaped from the plantations in the South, only to be captured by the US Marshalls a few years later and turned into a double-agent. He now tries to ferret out “Underground Airlines” operatives; i.e. the hidden cross-country network of people trying to get free, and people trying to help them. With false identities and a handler back in Gaithersburg, MD, Victor acts as a bounty hunter for runaways - finding them and sending them back. He is also, unsurprisingly, a super grim dude. It was only very late in the story that I realized how much the book is modeled on a private eye/detective story. Yeah, yeah, I know. DUH. Anyway, there's the “foxy damsel in distress” archetype via the character of Martha, the white mom with an African-American kid; there's the “cynical mobster” archetype via a ruthless abolitionist priest; and so on. Yadda yadda.I dunno. Ben Winters, the author (who is a white guy btw - it shouldn't matter, of course, but it kinda does?), drops a lot of giant, not-nuanced ALTERNATIVE AMERICAN HISTORY things that are normally the best part of alt universe spec fic, but here felt heavy-handed and hum-drum. I could never really buy Victor, the main character, though I did LOVE all his “assuming false identities” stuff - and BIG kudos to the reader (since I did the audiobook of this), William DeMeritt, who was PHENOMENAL and should win an Audie Award. a friend recently told me that people try to stay away from calling people “slaves” and instead refer to them as “enslaved people”; is that a thing? i agree that it definitely sounds better, more humanizing. Or is this the euphemism treadmill?

Like a hipster who “liked them before they were cool,” I feel possessive about Ben Winters after The Last Policeman trilogy. Who knew that an alternate history novel of modern slavery could also be a dang good adventure?

I liked The Underground Railroad, but this book fascinates me with its complicated characters and alternate history - and I think it was vastly overshadowed by Whitehead's book.

Soul crushing and incredible.

Great book. Presents an alternate history exploring the idea of slavery in America having continued in some states. Recommend

What if the American Civil War had never occurred? What if one early assassination united a nation before it had a chance to be torn apart? What if slavery was still practiced in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Carolina? This is the premise of Underground Airlines. It's a great premise that elicits plenty of thought, but the execution leaves something to be desired.

Underground Airlines is a thriller: politics, cops, chase scenes, double crosses—tension in general. I'm not a big fan of this style, but I was certainly willing to give it a go because I thought the plot was intriguing. Ben H. Winters nails the mood: late night meetings in the city, the sound of cars swooshing through rainwater in the distance, faces covered in shadow—it was impossible not to see much of the novel as scenes from a movie. Underground Airlines is a thriller with a great concept, but in the end it's still a thriller; a book for fans of Grisham, Coben, Baldacci, or—hell, I don't know what I'm talking about, I've never read any of those authors. As far as I know, they write nothing like this.

My main complaint about Underground Airlines comes in the way of alternate history. In this novel, historical and political events have changed. Because the Civil War was not fought, laws were put in effect to appease Southern interests. Texas claims sovereignty and tensions between it and the States are high. Much of the world, especially Europe, has placed sanctions on the United States for its continued acceptance of people as property. Only in the last four years has Japan lifted its embargo. And yet, aside from these political differences, one would not notice a difference between the alternate history of Underground Airlines and our own: towering metropolises, luxury cars, smartphones with all the best apps. Michael Jackson was still the king of pop. Rockwell still painted a picture of little black girl in Arkansas. To Kill a Mockingbird was a sensation, with a slightly altered plot. Rap music, Ralph Ellison, James Brown, baggy pants, Martin Luther King, Jr., Zora Neale Hurston, the list goes on. I am willing to accept that some of these things might have come about in one way or another despite the existence of slavery; I cannot fathom how so little has changed, particularly given how much slavery must have had an effect on these people and American culture. And that's where the story, despite its imaginative plot, shows it lacks much imagination at all. This is an opportunity to paint the world drastically different, to show how the United States could have been a backwards nation with little culture, secluded from the outside world that moves with swiftness into the future. Instead we have our same world, with that trivial issue of slavery nagging us. It's much like our own world, I guess. Slavery does still exist in some forms, even in the US. Yet, for many, its either unknown or a nuisance. It's something that might appear on the news, or might show up in a documentary as we flip through the television channels, stopping only for the briefest moment before we realize this isn't an adaptation of a Grisham novel. And maybe that's part of what's going on in Underground Airlines. Maybe life does go on while slavery rages. But really? “Northerners” playing Michael Jackson on their Samsung phone while driving around Indianapolis in their Nissan? That's just unimaginative.

I thought this was a truly excellent work of speculative fiction that both took its time with what ifs and remained grounded in reality and real motivations. Winters writes about the poison of compromise with real insight. The compromises our country has made with white supremacy after all, are just different terms than the ones explored in Underground Airlines. I'm looking forward to reading Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad soon.

Nice little alternative history novel.

I love Ben Winters' writing; his protagonists are deeply interesting to me, and I love their flawed humanity. As usual, I had a hard time putting the book down, both because I wanted to see how the premise played out and I was concerned that the book might slide into “slavery porn,” the glorification of African American suffering for suffering's sake.

In the end, the premise was interesting enough that I simply wanted more: this book could be 100 pages longer, with more world-building, and the outcome would feel more earned. That said, I think it's a pretty impressive achievement to take a premise that could go really wrong and create such an engaging story that my biggest complaint was it's over too soon.