RT In His New Novel, Ben Winters Dares to Mix Slavery and Sci-Fi - Saeed Jones July 5, 2016 It ran under the headline “ In His New Novel, Ben Winters Dares to Mix Slavery and Sci-Fi ” and praised Winters’s “risky” and “brazen” choice to use science fiction to write about slavery, especially as a white man. But the profile came with a less-than-ideal angle. Underground Airlines is a smart, well-crafted book with a big, attention-grabbing conceit, and the Times profile could have been the crown jewel in a perfect publicity run. The structure is all very Philip Marlowe meets The Man in the High Castle, but the conceit is clearly indebted to Octavia Butler, the great African-American science fiction writer whose most celebrated work, 1979’s Kindred, marries science fiction with slavery. Now he’s a bounty hunter, responsible for tracking down escaped slaves and surrendering them to the US Marshals Service. Our main character, Victor, grew up as a slave in a Southern factory. It’s 2016, the Civil War never happened, and slavery is legal in four US states. Winters is the author of Underground Airlines, a noirish thriller that takes place in an alternate history. Winters received what every young writer with a big splashy new novel wants: a profile in the New York Times.
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