UNDERGROUND AIRLINES (audiobook) by Ben H. Winters

 

Underground Airlines is set in the year 2015 in an alternate historical timeline. This is a world where the American Civil War almost happened but did not. In the real historical timeline, an amendment to the Constitution called the Crittenden Compromise was proposed in December of 1860 as the first Confederate states were seceding. It preserved slavery, limited its spread and clarified the role of the federal government in returning runaway slaves. The Crittenden Compromise was not taken seriously by most people and it failed.

In this alternate history, the Crittenden Compromise was taken  seriously because President-elect Lincoln was assassinated in Indianapolis as he was traveling to his inauguration in Washington, D.C. The shock of the assassination brought all of the states back together to negotiate and a version of the Crittenden Compromise passed. There was no Civil War and American slavery continues in 4 states on into the 21st century (Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and a combined North/South Carolina.

The protagonist of the book is an escaped slave turned into a hunter of escaped slaves. He is working undercover using the name Jim in Indianapolis, Indiana tracking down an escaped slave. He's bothered a bit because the paperwork for this slave is very incomplete and this is rare. Usually, slaves are meticulously tracked, literally tattooed, bar coded and even chipped. 

Jim is nervous because the incomplete file. But, as you can imagine, he's not happy being an escaped slave who hunts down escaped slaves - but he has no choice. He is chipped with a device in his neck that tracks him and, with the flip of a switch, can kill him. It puts him an emotionally painful paradox - in order to maintain his freedom he must catch others.

Jim meets all kinds of people as he searches through Indianapolis - members of the Underground Airlines (the modern successor to the Underground Railroad movement of the 1800s), militant anti-slavers, militant pro-slavers, a white woman searching for the love of her life (an escaped slave), members of the black market that exists in freedman neighborhoods, and more. 

Still, once he finds out what is going on, it involves more than he could ever imagine and makes him go where he never thought he would go...

My review:

I am a fan of:

1) alternate histories,
2) study of the Civil War,
3) my adopted hometown - Indianapolis.

This means I was pretty much perfectly set up to enjoy this book and I did. This was a well-told story. I enjoyed learning about how this alternate world was different and the same. For example, Michael Jackson is a big deal in this alternate world, too.

But, the United States is technologically behind the rest of the world by a few years due to anti-slavery boycotts by the rest of the world and lack of technical innovation coming from America itself. It's about 20 years behind and not really an economic leader in anything except the production of cotton and cotton clothing.  America's big ally is South Africa, with its policy of apartheid.

It's clear that Ben H. Winters knows his way around Indianapolis. Indy is my adopted hometown - I've lived here for 30 years. Every bit of Indianapolis he describes makes sense historically. 

I enjoyed this book. I rate it 5 stars out of 5. It can be found on Amazon.com here: UNDERGROUND AIRLINES by Ben H. Winters.

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