Underground Airlines (Winters)

Underground Airlines
Ben H. Winters, 2016
Little, Brown and Co.
336 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780316261241


Summary
It is the present-day, and the world is as we know it: smartphones, social networking and Happy Meals. Save for one thing: the Civil War never occurred.

A gifted young black man calling himself Victor has struck a bargain with federal law enforcement, working as a bounty hunter for the US Marshall Service. He's got plenty of work.

In this version of America, slavery continues in four states called "the Hard Four." On the trail of a runaway known as Jackdaw, Victor arrives in Indianapolis knowing that something isn't right—with the case file, with his work, and with the country itself.

A mystery to himself, Victor suppresses his memories of his childhood on a plantation, and works to infiltrate the local cell of a abolitionist movement called the Underground Airlines. Tracking Jackdaw through the back rooms of churches, empty parking garages, hotels, and medical offices, Victor believes he's hot on the trail.

But his strange, increasingly uncanny pursuit is complicated by a boss who won't reveal the extraordinary stakes of Jackdaw's case, as well as by a heartbreaking young woman and her child who may be Victor's salvation. Victor himself may be the biggest obstacle of all—though his true self remains buried, it threatens to surface.

Victor believes himself to be a good man doing bad work, unwilling to give up the freedom he has worked so hard to earn. But in pursuing Jackdaw, Victor discovers secrets at the core of the country's arrangement with the Hard Four, secrets the government will preserve at any cost.

Underground Airlines is a ground-breaking novel, a wickedly imaginative thriller, and a story of an America that is more like our own than we'd like to believe. (Adapted from the publisher. Retrieved 7/19/2016.)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1975-76
• Where—Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C., USA
• Education—Washington University, St. Louis
• Awards—Philip K. Dick Award; Edgar Award
• Currently—lives in Los Angeles, California


Ben Winters, an American author, journalist, teacher and playwright, was born in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. In high school, Winters played in the punk band Corm alongside John Davis, now of Title Tracks. In 1998, he graduated from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where he was active in the comedy group Mama's Pot Roast. He is married and now lives in Los Angeles, California, with his wife and three children.

Career
Winters was first known as the author of the 2009 New York Times bestseller Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters. In June 2010, Android Karenina was released. Next came his two-book series for young adults, The Secret Life of Ms. Finkleman in 2010 followed by The Mystery of the Missing Everything in 2011. He also published Bedbugs in 2011, a horror novel for adults.

In 2012, Winters published The Last Policeman, the first in a trilogy of detective novels set in a pre-apocalyptic United States; that book won the Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America in the category Best Paperback Original. The second novel in the trilogy, Countdown City, came out in July 2013 and won the 2014 Philip K. Dick Award for Distinguished Science Fiction. The third and final book, World of Trouble, was released in 2014.

Winters' 2016 novel, Underground Airlines, is set in a present-day alternate universe in which the American Civil War never happened and four states continue to practice human slavery—legally. The book's protagonist, a U.S. government bounty hunter, and former slave, attempts to infiltrate an abolitionist group known as the "Underground Airlines."

Winters is also a playwright. His work includes the Off-Broadway musical Slut (2005), as well as four children's musicals The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere (2006), A (Tooth) Fairy Tale (2009), Uncle Pirate (2010), and the Neil Sedaka juke-box musical, Breaking Up Is Hard to Do (2005).  (Adapted from Wikipedia. Retrieved 7/19/2016. Retrieved 2/19/2016.)

Book Reviews
Ben H. Winters’s chilling new thriller....tackles the thorny subject of racial injustice in America. It takes place in a contemporary United States where the Civil War never happened, and slavery remains legal in four states, and it’s narrated by a former slave who has paid a steep moral price for his freedom.... Attica Locke, a mystery novelist and a writer for the television show Empire, said she was taken aback at first when she picked up the book.... "For me, as a black writer, I have to be like, ‘What’s Ben trying to do here?" Then she got sucked into the story and was "blown away," she said.
Alexandra Alter - New York Times


[A] terrifying conceit at its heart...[t]he book is set in a country that largely resembles the contemporary United States....  A little past its halfway point this novel takes a surprising, but wholly necessary turn, directing Victor and the reader straight into the darkness that persists in [the remaining] four slaveholding states.... [Yet the] he novel succeeds so well in part because its fiction is disturbingly close to our present reality.... Winters has written a book that will make you see the world in a new light.
Jon Michaud - Washington Post


Underground Airlines will start a lot of conversations. A lot.... Most readers will happily overlook [some of] the cookie-cutter details as they'll be caught up in the alternate nation the author has created, one in which...some states have old-fashioned towns that keep Jim Crow statutes. If the denouement comes too late for us to care, well, we've learned along the way that this alternate nation...is ugly and evil.
Bethanne Patrick - NPR.org


(Starred review.) Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man meets Blade Runner in this outstanding alternate history thriller..... The novel’s closing section contains several breathtaking reversals, a genuinely disturbing revelation, and an exhilarating final course of action for Victor.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) In this alternative history, President Abraham Lincoln is assassinated en route to his inauguration. His death leads legislators to come together with one last proposal to keep the Union intact.... Explosive, well plotted, and impossible to put down.
Library Journal

 For the most part, Winters neatly blends dystopian fiction with old-fashioned procedural.... If it lacks all the dramatic punch it might have had... [it's] smart and well paced. The story could use a little fine-tuning, but it moves deftly from a terrific premise and builds to a satisfying conclusion.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add the publisher's questions if and when they're available; in the meantime use these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Underground Airlines...then take off on your own:

1. Why does Victor refer to himself as having no name...

As being not really a person at all. A man was missing, that's all, missing and hiding, and I was not a person but a manifestation of will. I was a mechanism — a device. That's all I was.

2. (Follow-up to Question #1) Victor is a complex character with layers of emotion and history. Talk about Victor and his conflicted nature regarding his past and his present self.

3. This book falls under the genre of "alternate history." Describe the America as presented in Underground Airlines. What is it like, particularly the Four Hard" states?

4. The novel presents the idea that societal change is difficult if not impossible. According to Victor, "shit does not change." Absent a bloody, hard-fought civil war would it have been possible to transform our society? Consider that many in this alternate reality oppose the Hard Four's continuation of slavery. Consider, too, that slavery still exists in the Hard Four.

5.Talk about Victor's own change by the novel's end. Does he achieve redemption?

6. Should a white man have even attempted to write this book?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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