Search Results for: The Underground Railroad

The Underground Railroad: A moving, substantive, mature work of fiction

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead’s new novel, The Underground Railroad, is a brilliantly realized blend of magical and literary realism that grabs one hard at the start and rarely lets go. The magical aspect appears via Whitehead’s decision to make the railroad literal as opposed to a metaphor and in the way he has his protagonist Cora journey through an alternate history version of the South. The literary realism is seen in his searingly graphic depiction of the slave trade in all its gruesome aspects.

Underground Airlines: A chilling alternate history thriller

Underground Airlines by Ben H. Winters

“Time makes things worse; bad is faster than good; wickedness is a weed and does not wither on its own — it grows and spreads.”

Imagine that Abe Lincoln was assassinated before the Civil War started and that the North and South, instead of fighting, compromised, drawing up an agreement that allowed slavery to exist in perpetuity in four Southern states. Fast forward to the modern day and imagine that you were a black man in one of those states, that you had escaped your slavery in a cattle slaughterhouse,

Harlem Shuffle: Another twist from a master storyteller

Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead

One thing we can be sure to expect from Colson Whitehead is the unexpected. The double Pulitzer Prize winner shot to fame with the alternate history (and FanLit favourite) The Underground Railroad. He debuted with speculative fiction, later wrote a zombie novel, and his work now takes another twist: a heist novel, in the form of his latest release, Harlem Shuffle (2021).

The book follows Ray Carney, a furniture salesman in 1950s –

Trouble the Saints: A deeply, darkly magical Americana novel

Trouble the Saints by Alaya Dawn Johnson

Trouble the Saints (2020), by Alaya Dawn Johnson, follows three people of color — Phyllis (whose friends call her Pea), Tamara and Dev — from the late 1930s into the American involvement in World War II. Not one of them is “ordinary”; Pea and Dev have “saint’s hands” that bestow a gift … or a curse. Tamara has inherited a deck of playing cards, and she’s an oracle. When the story opens, all three are trying to make a living working for the white gangster Victor in New York City.

The Conductors: Slow and muddy

The Conductors by Nicole Glover

The Conductors (2021), by Nicole Glover, has lots of elements I’d normally eat up like a buffet: a historical setting (late 1800s Philadelphia), a focus on social injustice, a murder mystery, magic systems. Unfortunately, the elements never cohered into a story that held my attention, making the novel a real struggle. I thought about giving up on it relatively early, but kept pushing through despite my instincts, probably helped by the fact that my Kindle wasn’t showing my progress despite my repeated attempts to force it to do so.

March 1st, 2021. Bill Capossere´s rating: 2 | Nicole Glover | SFF Reviews | 4 comments |

Thoughtful Thursday: Can speculative fiction help fight racism?

Leave your name in the comments if you’d like a copy of one of these books. We’ll choose at least 30 commenters with US addresses.
Winners will choose one of these:
The New Jim Crow (Kindle, paperback, or Audible)
How to Be an Antiracist (Kindle or Audible)
The Underground Railroad (Kindle, paperback, or Audible).

Recently I’ve been deluged with suggestions for books to read about race and racism. Most are non-fiction works (Stamped from the Beginning,

June 11th, 2020. Bill Capossere | Giveaway!, Thoughtful Thursday | 47 comments |

The Water Dancer: Sharply moving but also oddly distant

The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates

Ta-Nehisi Coates is, of course, supremely well-known, and justifiably so, for his non-fiction, whether that be his essays/columns, or his long-form works such as We Were Eight Years in Power or Between the World and Me. Now he’s out with his first fiction work, The Water Dancer (2019), a blend of realism and the supernatural set in the antebellum period. While Coates’ already-documented strengths as a writer are evident, particularly on a sentence level,

WWWednesday: November 8, 2017

This week’s word for Wednesday: Resistentialism is the belief that inanimate objects can hold (and express) malice toward humans. Well, admit it, you’ve thought that about a few objects, haven’t you?

I suspect this is fake news, but I hope not, because it’s so cute. A sheepdog puppy proudly herded nine sheep into its human’s house. Because, c’mon, the gate was open!

Awards:

Colson Whitehead won the Zora Neale Thurston/Richard Wright Foundation award for The Underground Railroad.

File 770 delivers a pithy public service announcement about Hugo-vote eligibility in 2018.

November 8th, 2017. Marion Deeds | World Wide Wednesday | 4 comments |

WWWednesday: May 17, 2017

On Sunday, in honor of Mother’s Day, Syfy Wire posted a list of the best moms from Star Trek.

Awards:

Locus has published the finalists for the Locus Awards, which will be awarded at the Locus Weekend, June 23-25, 2017, in Seattle, Washington. Locus has more categories so more winners: best SF novel, best fantasy novel, best horror novel and best first novel as an example. Some of our favorites made the lists, including Malka Older’s Infomocracy in the Best First Novel category,

May 17th, 2017. Marion Deeds | World Wide Wednesday | 8 comments |

Arrowood: Creepy, tragic Gothic mystery

Arrowood by Laura McHugh

When Arden Arrowood was a little girl, her younger twin sisters vanished without a trace. The last Arden saw of them was a flash of blonde hair, speeding away in the back of a gold car. A local man with a car fitting the description was questioned; nothing could ever be pinned on him, but the whole town thought he was guilty anyway.

The girls were never found, and their loss became a wound that destroyed the Arrowood family and continues to haunt Arden, now in her twenties.

Next SFF Author: Ben Aaronovitch

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