Note: Back in June, we posted a review of Steve Bellinger’s The Chronocar, and we thought you might enjoy this follow-up interview with the author. Enjoy!
Steve Bellinger was born and raised on the West Side of Chicago by a single mom who worked nights for a printing company. She would bring home books and magazines to encourage her kids to read. This is how Steve discovered Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke and the other masters of classic science fiction. It didn’t take long for him to get the itch to write.
Steve has worked in technology for over 40 years, from cable and satellite TV to computers. He lives in the Lincoln Park community with his wife Donna. He and his wife plan to celebrate their tenth anniversary with a vow renewal ceremony Star Trek style—he will wear a dress Admiral’s uniform and she will wear a Klingon wedding dress!
After reading his exciting debut novel, The Chronocar, I had a few questions for Steve about the book, and time travel in general.
The Chronocar is first and foremost a time travel story. Where did you pick up your interest in time travel?
I have always loved science fiction, and time travel is part of the genre. I was probably most influenced by the classic Star Trek episode “City on the Edge of Forever,” which was written by Harlan Ellison and won a Hugo Award.
Much of the novel takes place in the Chicago of 1919. As you seem mostly a science fiction aficionado, I’m wondering — did you struggle with the historical portion of the novel?
Once I decided to write a time travel story, I knew I wanted to deal with the past and the history of my home town, Chicago. I did spend over a year researching. I did most of the research in the library because I wanted to read actual newspaper accounts. This was really not too challenging for me as I am a fan of Chicago history.
The novel has a rather dark opening, in 1888 Mississippi. Are you familiar with that part of the country?
I’ve never been there, but my grandfather was from that area. In fact, parts of the story of Simmie Johnson’s leaving that place looking for a better life is based on stories my grandfather told us when we were kids. It comes across as a little dark because that’s how things were back then.
Along with time travel, The Chronocar has themes of racism and how racial tensions have changed over the years. Has your own experience been more like Tony’s, a science nerd from 2015 who has only seen racism “on TV”? Or more like Simmie Johnson’s, who survived an attempted lynching and the Chicago race riots of 1919?
Definitely more like Tony’s. Although as a teen I did live though some of the race riots of the 1960s. On the night that Dr. Martin Luther King was killed, we lived a mere three blocks from Madison Street, which went up in flames. We stood on our back porch watching the red glow in the sky, valuables in hand, ready to evacuate if the fire came our way. Luckily it did not. Actually, Tony’s character is pretty much based on me. Like him, I was an IIT student (many years ago), and, oddly enough, had few overtly racist encounters. I suppose I was a little lucky. When writing the character Tony Carpenter, I simply asked myself what I would have done in any given situation.
I thought it was interesting how Ollie, Dr. Johnson’s daughter, was rather disappointed when Tony told her about the future: no flying cars, no cure for cancer, and still using the same El they had in 1919. Do you think the pace of change is faster now than in 1919? Or slower?
The pace of change now is definitely faster, much faster. Things have changed significantly since I wrote the story. But, we still have the El!
Now lets’ geek out for a minute. About your time machine – the Chronocar. How did you develop your ideas for its design? Did you approach it more like an engineering problem, or were you riffing on the DeLorean from Back to the Future?
I wanted the time machine itself to be a part of the story. The DeLorean was merely a plot device, a way to get McFly to t
he past to have his adventures. It could just as easily have been a modified telephone booth. With the Chronocar, I wanted to address the actual (fictional) physics of time travel. Someone once asked me if there was a theme to The Chronocar. My response was “It’s not nice to fool with Mother Nature!” Whether you travel by foot, car, airplane or time machine, there are consequences; some sort of energy is consumed, there is entropy, and very likely there are environmental after-effects. In The Chronocar, we learn that the simple fact of traveling through time can, itself, be a cause for concern.
Later on in The Chronocar, Dr. Johnson mentions “temporal energy”, which is expended when the Chronocar travels back in time, changing the future. In my novel The Grand Dissolute I have an analogous force, called “toc” that keeps time travelers from changing the past. Do you think there could be such forces in nature?
Good question. When I first started writing The Chronocar, I would have said no. But now, new and strange things about our Universe and how it works are being discovered all the time. If “dark matter” can exist, then why not “toc” or “temporal energy?”
Which leads to a greater question – do you think time travel to the past will ever be possible outside the pages of a sci-fi novel?
I still believe time travel like in The Chronocar is not possible. Dr. Stephen Hawking talks about traveling to the future by surfing the event horizon of a black hole. Even if you consider that to be true time travel, it puts it way out of the hands of anyone like the characters in my story.
The Chronocar was your first novel, but you mention on your website that you have completed the draft of a second novel. Does it also involve time travel? Is there any connection to the Chronocar characters?
Sorry, you’ll have to read it to find out!
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Great interview! I especially liked learning about the author’s mom bringing home books and magazines. Also, thanks for teaching me a new term: slipstream fiction. (in blogger bio)
Thanks Susan – glad you enjoyed the interview!