The Time Lord of Proxima Centauri went online the week before the New Lords of Time story, Life and Loves of Kit Nova, which also has a gay relationship as its central theme, which slightly worried me at first, then I decided the only people who had a problem with that are not the kind of people I want reading my work, anyway.
Of course, Ruben’s human spouse didn’t have to be a man. He could have married a young woman just like Chrístõ’s father did, and Chrístõ himself fully intends to do. But I decided he should be married to a man. If nothing else, it allowed that extended piece of banter between Hext and Chrístõ that harks back to their dinner date at the tower.
Ruben, aka Destri, is, of course, known to readers of the Marion and Kristoph stories already. He is a traitor who caused thousands of young Gallifreyan soldiers in the war against the Sarre to be killed or captured. It is his fault that Kristoph was tortured for years and returned to Gallifrey a broken man who took months to recover. How Kristoph came to terms with that is detailed in the Marion and Kristoph stories.
Proxima Centauri is the nearest star to Earth’s solar system. It is where humans will be heading first when they break out into space. There is strong speculation that it has a planet orbiting it. The current thinking is, however, that the planet would be tidal locked with a permanent night and day side. It really wouldn’t be a paradise for Human beings. That is why I have portrayed it as a failed experiment of the future.
The volcano! Well, guess when this story was being written! Right in the middle of the chaos over the Icelandic volcano and its ash cloud that spread over northern Europe, halting air traffic and threatening everything from the European Football Championships to the Spanish Grand Prix as well as ruining holidays.
The
problem of moving a bunch of sick children away from the danger of the
volcano is loosely based on a film I saw a VERY long time ago called The
Devil at Four o’Clock, in which a priest and a bunch of convicts
had the task of moving leper children from a colony on an island about
to be obliterated by a volcano. It must be thirty-five years since I saw
it and that’s a disquieting thought as it is, but Destri as a wanted
man and Hext intending to take him in owes something to that film.
There’s also an element of The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, which I haven’t seen for about twenty years, and a touch of Ice Cold in Alex in the bit where they push the bus uphill. Throw in a bit of Dante’s Peak and the story takes a bit from some classic films through the ages. You could even have the Gemini Man in the serum Destri makes up from his own blood. There are no new ideas in fiction. Just new ways of telling old stories. This is one of them.
Of course, Hext would never abandon the children just to take his man back to Gallifrey. He might have done, once, but now he’s developed compassion, with a little help from Chrístõ.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0054805/
