Life and Love of Kit Nova is one of two stories inspired by the Star Trek episode, Next Generation episode, The Inner Light. The gist of the plot is that a character is rendered unconscious for a short time, but during that time ‘lives’ a completely different life in full, vivid detail as if it really happened. In Smithtown, the Tenth Doctor experiences that alternative life after being affected by strange energy that invades the TARDIS.
I started Smithtown and was part way through it when I had a vivid dream of my own, and woke up knowing I could make a story out of it. I left Smithtown aside and wrote The Life and Love of Kit Nova in a single day. It was one of those stories that really was easy to write.
Like Smithtown, hydraulics and fluid mechanics are an important feature of this story. But where the Tenth Doctor had to find water to save a group of people from dying in the desert, Davie, AKA Kit Nova, just wants to build a fountain in the park. With no memory of his real life he finds satisfaction building that park, using the knowledge locked in his head to make things special for the people of the town he has come to live in.
The town has something of a frontier feel to it, with most things hand made, reliance on horse drawn vehicles, little technology, outside of the doctor’s surgery. I have a bit of a thing about advanced societies that renounce technology. Halle Township is a nice enough place to live without it.
Kit’s relationship with Aaron, the man who finds him and takes him in when he finds himself lost and alone, was nicely controversial. It was complete coincidence that this story immediately followed the Theta Sigma story with Destri, the Renegade Time Lord with his husband on Proxima Centauri. The two stories were not written at the same time. Kit Nova was written months before, but waited for a slot in the NLOT schedule. I make no apology for either story. I don’t really have a political agenda in my writing, as such. But NLOT has, I hope, gone some way in making gay relationships a part of the ‘norm’. Davie’s platonic love for Spenser and Spenser’s unrequited love for Davie, Spenser and Stuart’s marriage, should be no more remarkable than Davie and Brenda, Chris and Carya, Sukie and Earl, Tristie and Trudi, Vicki and Jimmy, the heterosexual pairings of the New Lords of Time. that’s how it ought to be by the twenty-fourth century, if it can’t be achieved in the twenty-first. Anyone who has problems with that is reading the wrong website. Just go away and don’t bother us.
Kit and Aaron are a love story. A gentle love story that starts slow and quiet and burns with a low, slow flame through a lifetime of contentment. And that’s the only thing that matters.
Whether it was a dream, or a reality somehow packed into contracted time, or some other explanation, I leave entirely up to the reader to decide. But either way, one thing comes out of this story for Davie’s character. After being deliberately non-physical in his love affair with Spenser, he has now fully experienced that physical side of homosexual love. I would like to think I created a character who was a little more than just bi-curious, and it isn’t exactly right to say he has now ‘got it out of his system’. But, basically, he HAS done exactly that. Without being unfaithful to Brenda or his Time Lord honour, he was able to live the sort of life he might have had if he had been free to reciprocate when Spenser made his feelings known to him.
All that stuff about Artesian wells and Archimedes Screw, by the way, took a bit of research, so give me credit for that. The fact that a park isn’t complete without a fountain and a Japanese water feature is, of course, down to my usual favourite park where I often go to compose stories.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Inner_Light_%28Star_Trek:_The_Next_Generation%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artesian_aquifer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_screw
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avenham_Park
