Geniuses and polymaths like Leonardo da Vinci and Charles Babbage have sometimes dreamed of fabulous inventions that would theoretically work but could not actually be built by the technology of their own era. In his novel The Chronocar, Steve Bellinger imagines a similar story involving a time machine. Simmie Johnson, a brilliant and gifted young man who happened to be the son of slaves, escapes the lynch mobs and segregation of Mississippi in 1888 to study at the Tuskegee Negro school. Inspired by Newton’s Principia, Dr. Johnson goes on to write a paper about how a time machine known as a “Chronocar” might be built.

Fast forward to 2015. Tony Carpenter, an inventive young student at the Illinois Instittue of Technology in Chicago, stumbles across the paper in the Negro Journal of Science. Tony realizes that the one aspect of the Chronocar that prevented Johnson from building it, a “mechanical brain controller”, was sitting right in front of him in the form of a laptop. So he constructs a Chronocar in the basement of an abandoned house. First stop: 1919, to pay Simmie Johnson a visit and show him that his invention had actually been built.

Many time travel stories leave out the actual details of their device – there’s a few words about time warps or photons, a black box or the wave of a wand, and viola, we’re in the past. Bellinger on the contrary delights in explaining the details of his Chronocar, which seems more of a spaceship than an automobile. It’s spherical and moves through both space and time using high-energy Telsa electric fields:

“That’s why the Chronocar is airtight and has oxygen and air scrubbers,” Tony said. “While moving through time, the Chronocar will also be traveling through space.”

The novel also has a historical element, with an opening segment in 1888 and most of the action taking place in Chicago in the summer of 1919 – just when the Chicago race riots are erupting. Although Bellinger paints the era as one of some charm and nostalgia – horse-drawn carriages mixing with cars, malt shops, tailors and tintypes – and racial inequalities are less bleak than in the previous century, the  prejudice against blacks take our time traveler by surprise:

He still did not understand it since he had never experienced any of it himself. He attended IIT, a school with a student body made up of young people of all races and creeds from all over the world, and there had never been a problem that he was aware of. So all of this irrational hatred was still alien to him.

When Dr. Johnson’s beautiful young daughter, Ollie, takes Tony on a sort of tour about the town, the two ride the Ferris Wheel at an amusement park called White City:

For the most part, though, the white kids on the Ferris Wheel were just there to have a good time, just like Ollie and Tony. Or so it seemed. When their turn came, none of the whites wanted to ride with them, so Tony and Ollie had a car to themselves.

That beautifully sad detail captures the long shadow cast by race hatred in the United States, without beating readers over the head with it. Indeed, The Chronocar has a buoyant, gee-whiz spirit fueled by the wide-eyed wonder of time travel. At least in the beginning. As Tony’s visit to 1919 unravels and he attempts traveling back even further to fix things, a darker tone emerges. The destructive natural forces unleashed by time travel begin to dwarf the racially-motivated violence that Tony and Ollie witness, and it becomes evident that Bellinger is letting his plot follow the dictates of science rather than sentiment.

Bellinger’s easy, readable style is deft at explaining technology or painting a scene. Still, there is a sparseness to the narrative that feels in places unfinished. In one chapter a house collapses in the vacuum left by the Chronocar, causing a fire; this is a scene that Stephen King or Ken Follett would spend half a chapter on – yet Bellinger glosses over it in a single paragraph. Overall, however, I found this is an interesting and engaging book. Although there are elements of wish fulfillment,  history, romance (between Tony and Ollie) and race running throughout the book, The Chronocar is a sci-fi adventure at heart. It’s not so much the architecture of the novel that struck me, but the architecture of the time machine itself. In The Chronocar, Steve Bellinger has  given us an imaginative new vehicle for time travel – and a grim warning about tinkering with time. To use a phrase Dr. Johnson is fond of: Tempus neminem manet. Time waits for no one.