#3: Velykyy Scott: On Meeting Dr. Emmett Brown in Chornobyl
Also: “Chornobyl” versus “Chernobyl”
I once spent a week in a recording studio in Somerset, working on a heavy metal EP with my band at that time, and the studio engineer gave us a piece of advice that I have often thought about since:
A song is only as good as the best riff you don’t use.
That is to say, restraint makes for a better finished product than does simply throwing in every good idea you can think of. In a similar vein, my original draft for Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide was significantly longer than the version that got published… it was not just more wordy, it had more ideas in it too.
But Khans & Cosmonauts seems like the perfect place for sharing some of those ideas that didn’t quite make the final cut.
One of my favourite offcuts was a little story about meeting Christopher Lloyd in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone. I actually laid the foundation for that anecdote with this paragraph in Chapter 2:
“I was born a couple of years before the disaster at Chernobyl, and I grew up on a diet of atomic science fiction – I adored Isaac Asimov and Philip K. Dick, and read comics whose characters possessed radiation-enhanced powers. My favourite film, for a very long time, was Back to the Future. I didn’t identify with the young hero Marty McFly, though: I wanted to be Christopher Lloyd’s mad-scientist character, Dr. Emmett Brown, stealing plutonium from terrorists to fuel a fission-powered time machine.”
Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide – p.36
That all works by itself, but originally this was conceived as the set-up to a story I would tell in a later chapter.
In September 2021, I was back in Ukraine, leading my first post-Covid tour. It was my first trip anywhere post-Covid, in fact – I hadn’t crossed a border since 2019. We had a fun group of guests, and our last few days together would be spent in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone.
So there we were, stood at Dytyatky checkpoint: where the guards check your papers, and buses from Kyiv filter into the Zone between the tacky coffee-and-souvenir vans positioned on either side of the road. It was an unusually quiet day – tourism hadn’t yet bounced back from the pandemic, and this place was missing the hectic queue of coaches that had become normal by 2019. Aside from ourselves there was one other minibus, some bored guards, and the staff of the souvenir vans. As we stood to one side and waited for approval to pass, a lone car pulled up and three people got out to make their way to the guard office.
Nate, my tour collaborator, nudged me and nodded towards them –
Flanked by a young woman, and a muscular Ukrainian man (a tour guide and minder, I guessed), walked an older man in a dark coat, with swept-back white hair, glasses, and a very familiar face. He had a gentle yet magnetic energy about him.
For the first split-second I thought it was Larry David. As they crossed the road towards us though, I recognised those eyes – and realised this was none other than Dr. Emmett Brown himself, my childhood hero, heading into the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone for a private tour.
It wasn’t entirely random. On 21-22 September, Kyiv was hosting a Comic Con event that featured a number of celebrity guests. We had seen the posters around town, so we knew that people like Danny Trejo and Christopher Lloyd were currently in Kyiv. We had even joked about maybe bumping into Machete in a Ukrainian dive bar.
As Christopher Lloyd bought a coffee at the Dytyatky souvenir van, Nate and I shuffled sheepishly over to him.
There is a profound sense of imbalance on meeting a celebrity. For a phase in my youth I watched Back to the Future religiously, every single weekend. I had spent probably hundreds of hours in the company of this man – he felt like family to me. But how do you tell a stranger that without sounding like a complete nutcase?
So we simply, civilly, told him we were huge fans of his work.
He replied with a quiet, almost whispered Thank you – and a smile that felt genuine and humble. Nate asked if we could all take a photo together, to which Christopher Lloyd smiled again, and his eyes did that thing they do, but then he shook his head and politely said: “I don’t think so.”
I guess he wanted to keep a low profile here. In fairness, it was a somewhat different proposal to posing for photos at Comic Con.
And that was that. The surreal encounter was over in seconds, and we didn’t cross paths again inside the Zone.
It was a significant personal moment for me, and in the context of my book, it rhymed – that the same man who first got me asking my parents what plutonium was, would appear in the flesh, while I was in the middle of briefing tour guests on plutonium safety.
I included the anecdote in my first draft of CASG, though ultimately my publishers, FUEL, felt the narrative was stronger without it. They were correct, of course – by that point in the book I was talking about high-stakes infiltration missions, thousand-dollar bribes, illegal border crossings, and all the rest. A whimsical side-story about a ten-second conversation with a celebrity would only have damaged the momentum.
While I may not have a photo of the encounter, thanks to the wonders of AI we can at least steal a glimpse of what a Chornobyl-based Back to the Future Part IV might look like. The second image below is quite uncanny in fact: just picture his overcoat darker, and a sign on the van at the back, advertising coffees and ice creams beneath an atom symbol.
While We’re Here… “Chornobyl” versus “Chernobyl”
Eagle-eyed readers have perhaps already noticed that in most of my recent writing and online shares, the spelling “Chernobyl” is generally being replaced with “Chornobyl.”
I think this is largely self-explanatory, yes?
But to further elucidate –
This change has been gradual from my side. In my 2020 book (which I actually wrote in 2019), I featured this passage about the spelling for the town of Chornobyl:
“‘Chornobyl’ is the Ukrainian spelling of this place-name. While the Russian form, ‘Chernobyl,’ was officially used for the plant and has become synonymous with the disaster, throughout this book the Ukrainian spelling of ‘Chornobyl’ will be used to specify the town, as it remains an active settlement and this spelling is typically preferred by those who live there.”
Chernobyl: A Stalkers’ Guide – p.42
My logic was this: in places where time had seemingly been frozen, or where seismic events had etched a single moment into an immutable historic fact, then I would use the spelling which had been correct at that moment. The disaster happened at “Chernobyl,” because that’s what the nuclear power plant was officially called in 1986.
As a parallel, the 1993 Bombay Bombings are still referred to that way, even though the city has since been renamed “Mumbai” in a move to throw off the legacy of British colonialism. Historians still talk about the Siege of Plevna, as the city was called in 1877, even though “Plevna” was afterwards changed from its Turkish form, to the Bulgarian, “Pleven.” And of course there are many more examples of this: fixed points in history.
However, I have always cared most about history as told from the bottom-up. And while the disaster might have been a fixed historic event, on my visits to the local town, Chornobyl, I would hear people speaking in Ukrainian, I would see Ukrainian flags being flown from the windows of shops and residential buildings, and it just didn’t seem appropriate to use the old Russian name for this living, breathing, Ukrainian settlement. Hence my naming choices in the book.
But of course, a lot more history has happened in the region since then.
When I first started visiting the Zone over a decade ago, its official treatment by the Ukrainian authorities (then under President Yanukovych) felt something akin to a dirty secret. A taboo Soviet leftover. Sure, it brought in tourism revenue, but it wasn’t exactly talked about or promoted as a tourism destination. It was what Zelenskyy called in one of his early speeches as president, “a symbol of corruption,” until in 2019 he signed a decree for the official recognition and development of the Zone as a tourism destination, saying: “We must give this territory of Ukraine a new life … Until now, Chernobyl was a negative part of Ukraine’s brand. It’s time to change it.”
This was the first formal attempt by any Ukrainian leader to officially rehabilitate and reintegrate the Chornobyl Zone as a Ukrainian place.
More recently, the Zone has seen fresh conflict. Early in the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Russian forces took control of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant and held its engineers as hostages for several weeks. Ukrainian blood was spilled defending this place from foreign invaders. Some day, new memorials will be raised to the Ukrainian heroes who fought here. It may have felt like a Soviet leftover before, but today it is a resolutely Ukrainian place.
One commenter on Facebook called me “woke” for switching to the Ukrainian spelling. (Though I’ve now been called just about every political pejorative ranging from the far right to the far left, which I take as an indication that I’m probably quite well-balanced.) More important for me, is what my Ukrainian friends think.
Back in 2019, most Ukrainians didn’t really care if you called it “Chernobyl” or “Chornobyl.” The Ukrainians I know typically speak a mixture of both Russian and Ukrainian with their friends and family – one friend I asked about it, while I was writing my book, advised me to use whichever spelling would be best for my SEO. It simply wasn’t an ideological issue for him.
Post-invasion though, the mood is changing. Those same Ukrainians who expressed indifference before, are now generally voicing a preference for the Ukrainian spelling. After the president vowed to “give this territory of Ukraine a new life,” and subsequently, heavy Ukrainian sacrifices were made to defend the territory, it just seems inappropriate to call it by a Russian name.
Of course, sometimes I'll get it wrong. Autocorrect is constantly trying to switch it back to Russian… and inevitably, some editors I work with will too.
As discussed above, I do also think there’s still a very good argument for treating the “Chernobyl Disaster” as a fixed point – and spelling – in time. And I am certainly not about to start policing other people’s language.
But for myself, it’s time to start calling this place by its local name.
I completely agree that the Ukrainian name should now be used for any territory which is recognized as theirs, the same as most media outlets reverted to using the Ukrainian "Kyiv" instead of the Russian "Kiev" after the invasion.
As for your meeting with Christopher Lloyd, I have trouble imagining you doing anything "sheepishly". ;~}