An immersive thriller as well as a provocative alternative history, Underground Airlines showcases a fully realized central character who believes his own disturbing past can be kept safely buried. But history has a way of bubbling to the surface of the present. Winters succeeds in rendering the slave catcher monstrous but capable of redemption as Victor’s sympathies shift to the underground side.
Winters brilliantly and horrifyingly imagines how the pairing of corporate capitalism and slavery might look in the modern era ... Underground Airlines honors its genre antecedents by presenting us with an unexpected way of looking at the history of race relations in this country. The novel succeeds so well in part because its fiction is disturbingly close to our present reality ... The one facet of Winters’s alternate history that does not feel fully realized is its rendering of popular culture...But [that is] only slightly distracting. With Underground Airlines, Winters has written a book that will make you see the world in a new light.
An extraordinary new novel of alternate history...Underground Airlines jolts readers to a heightened awareness, making us see just how much of the nightmare of what could have been is part of the all-too-familiar reality of what is ... Like all great works of suspense - and this is one suspenseful tale filled with double crosses and dangerous expeditions down drainage tunnels and into plantations - Underground Airlines is hyperattentive to details. The world Winters conjures up is chillingly credible.
Underground Airlines boasts plenty of priceless details ... imbuing the proceedings with a deep sense of morality, sparing neither North nor South, Winters allows himself to cut loose in preacherly fashion ... That Winters is white adds a layer of complexity to the book. Perhaps acknowledging his audacity in taking authorial ownership of the slavery narrative, he has a black Indiana cop who works with Barton criticize the priest for having a 'Mockingbird’ mentality' — believing that 'the white man is the saver, the black man gets saved.'
With Underground Airlines I enjoyed a fun science fiction book but I am disappointed in the author and publishing industry’s selfish intent yet I’m also moved to tears by the visceral reaction to seeing my people’s stories being told, no matter who is doing the telling ... I didn’t just love this book; I felt it. Victor tunneled into my brain and heart. It’s been almost a week since I finished it and my thoughts keep turning back to Victor’s ordeal. Few books have burrowed under my skin like that, but this is definitely one of them ... The end of the book wanders into some pretty heavy science fiction, but it’s rooted in reality. Winters hasn’t entirely succeeded in his goal, but he clearly thought through the most of the ramifications of his alt-history.
Winters thoroughly considers technology, culture, and the global economy in his evolution of America's system of captivity ... Winters offers up subtle parallels to modern society ... This alternate United States is well thought out, reflecting both superficial differences and startlingly deep-seated similarities to reality ... Underground Airlines is a masterful work of art with a gripping mystery at its most basic level. It's also a complex allegory woven throughout with sparking rich dialogue and multiple shades of awareness.
Winters reels readers in with details like Victor's tiny tracking implant and letting another character reference a 'Mockingbird mentality' referring to 'that novel' — quiet ways of letting us in on the changed future ... Most readers will happily overlook the cookie-cutter details as they'll be caught up in the alternate nation the author has created, one in which Texas went to war against the Union to fight for abolition, in which Montreal has become a Francophile haven for escaped slaves, in which some states have old-fashioned towns that keep Jim Crow statutes.
...[a] vivid, moving novel ... The carefully worked-out politics and mores of Winters’ fictional America mock our own, slyly satirising our blind-spots and compromises ... The story often strains credibility, but it’s never less than compelling. What distinguishes Underground Airlines as literature is the acuity and penetration of Winters’ moral vision — a perception that goes far beyond any specific historical injustice ... Winters allows Victor to exquisitely express our moral unease.
[Winters builds] a vividly detailed alternate world that seems disturbingly plausible and exploring it through the eyes of a wounded truth seeker on the trail of long-delayed redemption ... Underground Airlines proves to be more than just a clever mashup of popular genres. By making the issue of slavery explicit, the novel demands to be read with one eye to how racism operates in our baseline reality ... Disturbing, absorbing and accomplished, Underground Airlines looks to be only the first leg of a trip that soars far above the ordinary.
Winters’ nightmarish mystery, set in a modern-day U.S. where the Civil War never happened, somehow manages to tap-dance around every potential pothole ... Winters crafts his thriller so deftly that the ingenious details of his sideways timeline often fly under the radar, blurring the line between Victor’s world and ours.
...a swift, smart, angry new novel ... as a feat of world-building, Underground Airlines is astonishing, immediately taking its place in the genre’s very first rank. Its success lies in the accumulation of subtle details, whose unintrusive presence gradually give the book its own, powerful reality, at once completely familiar and completely alien ... [Victor's] journey is supposed to be epic, but many of its big turns are anticlimactic, and Winters never truly develops the idea of an underground movement that he initially promises. It’s a strangely underpopulated novel, too, and doesn’t quite succeed in integrating Jim’s personal history with the mystery he’s solving. But its vibrant imagination never slackens, and its savage attunement to the evil of slavery feels important, in a moment when our cultural focus is on the black community, which traces so many of its difficulties to our nation’s original sin.
Underground Airlines is one of those social-minded alternate histories that takes a terrifying premise and uses it to hold up a mirror to the flaws we ignore in our own world, and it performs that function stunningly well ...The differences between the real world and the one of the book are subtly woven into the framework of a fugitive pursuit procedural, rarely using big exposition dumps to fill in the gaps. Underground Airlines is a masterwork of world-building ... Underground Airlines fabricates a fascinating fictional world and gives you an incredibly complex character to explore it with, ensuring that your attention is well-spent down to the last page.
