My version: Hardback
Genre: Science Fiction, Alternate history, USA
Publisher: Century
First published: 2016
ISBN: 978-1-780-89430-0
Pages: 322
Bought, signed
From the cover:
Victor has escaped his life as a slave, but his freedon came at a high price. Striking a bargain with the government, he has to live his life working as a bounty hunter. And he is the best they have ever trained.
A mystery to himself, Victor tries to suppress the memories of his own childhood and convinces himself that he is just a good man doing bad work, unwilling to give up the freedom he is so desperate to preserve. But in tracking his latest target, he can sense that something isn’t quite right.
For this fugitive is a runaway holding something extraordinary; something that could change the state of the country forever.
And in his pursuit, Victor discovers secrets at the core of his country’s arrangement with the system than imprisoned him; secrets that will be preserved at any cost.
So, there’s this bestselling book called Underground Airlines that asks an interesting question: What would modern-day America look like if the Civil War never happened?
It’s a high-concept, provocative alternate-history thriller that trades heavily in moral ambiguity and social critique. The novel is set in a modern-day United States, but where the Civil War was averted through a series of congressional compromises, leaving human chattel slavery legal in four Southern states known as the “Hard Four”. Slavery has adapted to the 21st century, integrated into corporate conglomerates and sugar/cotton production with chilling bureaucratic and industrial efficiency.
The protagonist is Victor, a Black former slave who now forced to work as an undercover bounty hunter for the U.S. Marshals, tracking down runaways to protect his own freedom. Victor gets sent to Indianapolis to track down a runaway slave named Jackdaw and to infiltrate an underground abolitionist group. But the closer he gets to his prize, the more he realizes the government is hiding some massive, dark secrets about how the whole country actually runs.
It is a fast, thought-provoking read that uses the tropes of pulp crime fiction to look at the lingering stains of American history and it successfully merges the gritty, hard-boiled tone of a classic noir detective story with speculative fiction, moving at a fast, gripping pace once the central mystery becomes clear. While it occasionally struggles to balance the heavy emotional weight of its premise with standard thriller dynamics (but then I suppose, why should it?), its sheer imagination makes it an excellent speculative piece.
It’s part fast-paced gritty, noir thriller, part alternate history, and honestly, perhaps, given all the mess going on over there at the moment, a little too close to reality for comfort. Definitely worth a read, I really enjoyed it.
You can buy Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters from Amazon
*They’ve changed the cover somewhat from my version, be warned
**Yes, the main image is AI generated
Couldn't I Just Tell You 