The Chronocar

An Urban Adventure In Time

Fiction - Science Fiction
146 Pages
Reviewed on 10/22/2015
Buy on Amazon

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Author Biography

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. Over the years he has written everything from newspaper articles, comic strips and radio drama to short stories and fan fiction.

One of the original Trekkies, Steve and his wife plan to renew their wedding vows in a couple of years with a full Star Trek-themed ceremony; he’ll wear an admiral’s dress uniform, and she will be decked out in a leather-and-lace Klingon wedding dress. Steve lives in the Lincoln Park community in Chicago, Illinois with his wife Donna and a cat to be named later. Find out more about him at his website www.SteveBellinger.com or on Facebook.

    Book Review

Reviewed by Francine Zane for Readers' Favorite

In The Chronocar, science fiction meets history in a dynamic tale of time travel. When Tony finds a science journal about time travel, he combines this new found knowledge with his own near genius talents to design a Chronocar. His first trip is to meet the gentleman who wrote the paper, a Dr. Semmie Johnson who was once a slave but escaped a harrowing ordeal in search of an education. Through trial and error, Tony learns the true dangers of time travel on both history and the future.

I enjoyed both the plot and the history and science that were introduced into the story to provide the validity to the time travel theories. Combined with interesting characters and believable scenes, I found The Chronocar an excellent read that I would recommend especially to teens and young adults.

Steve Bellinger’s story also fills a much-needed niche by featuring black main characters. While Bellinger used racial tensions to add drama to the story, he balanced the dangers of being a minority through history with the fact that not all whites were bigots any more than all blacks were ignorant. He is a master storyteller who takes the time to set the scene with both historical facts and memorable characters. I especially enjoyed how he chose times in history that were unexpected, such as starting Semmie Johnson’s story after the Civil War and choosing a quiet time in history for Tony to make his trip back to Chicago, just prior to the Chicago race riots of 1919. By choosing relatively quiet times in history, the reader gets a better feel for what the everyday man experienced.