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Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers

(Red Dwarf #1)

Grant Naylor

4.06 · Rating details · 25,789 ratings · 498 reviews

The first lesson Lister learned about space travel was you should never try it. But Lister didn't have a choice. All he remembered was going on a birthday celebration pub crawl through London. When he came to his senses again, with nothing in his pockets but a passport in the name of Emily Berkenstein.

So he did the only thing he could. Amazed to discover they would actuall

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Mass Market Paperback, 298 pages

Published September 1st 1992 by Roc (first published 1989)

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Jun 04, 2019 Joey Woolfardis rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 2019, egads-bogen, masculine, ce20, champion, sterling, humour, childhood, telly

I listened to this on audiobook, mainly because I've always wanted to try out audiobooks and never really gotten around to it, but also because it is freely accesible on spotify. Huzzah for spotify.

However, I believe what I listened to was the abridged version, which is slightly upsetting but excites me also: more Chris Barrie doing Scouse and Cockney and every-other accent ever? Yes please.

My rating is partly for the book and partly for the audiobook. I thoroughly enjoyed Chris Barrie: he is an ...more

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Mar 05, 2015 Andrew rated it really liked it

Ok this has been a blast of pure nostalgia for me - I loved the series when it first aired, it had for me the right mix or humour and science fiction. I guess for me I have always been suspicious of humour and SF simply because its been too easy to laugh at the genre and its fans rather than try and be clever and laugh with them. I will admit the likes of Douglas Adams has gone a long way to correct that yet still its sometimes all too easy to fall for the easy (and cheap gags).
For me Red Dwarf ...more

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Sep 05, 2012 Jason rated it it was amazing

Shelves: read-in-2016

I was going to write a review for this book that I last read a few years ago, but I thought sod it, it must be time for a re-read.

This is where it all started, one of the greatest SciFi series ever, a brilliant cast of characters and funny as hell story. I've watched the series so many times now that when reading the books the characters voices come so easily to me. During this reading I kept getting glimpses of Douglas Adams writing, never noticed that previously, but the explanations about spa ...more

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Feb 19, 2016 David Sarkies rated it really liked it

Shelves: comedy

Gazpacgo Soup

I can't say exactly when I first encountered Red Dwarf – I was probably sitting at home one night, board out of my brains, and channel surfing, when suddenly I discovered this show that looked very science-fictiony on the ABC and was instantly intrigued. While I can't remember the first episode that I ever watched (though I believe it was the third season), I do remember instantly falling in love with it. In fact, at the time I was still really interested in film making and seeing Gazpacgo Soup

I can't say exactly when I first encountered Red Dwarf – I was probably sitting at home one night, board out of my brains, and channel surfing, when suddenly I discovered this show that looked very science-fictiony on the ABC and was instantly intrigued. While I can't remember the first episode that I ever watched (though I believe it was the third season), I do remember instantly falling in love with it. In fact, at the time I was still really interested in film making and seeing what I could do with little to no funds (and this was the days before mobile phones, so a video camera cost something in the vicinity of $1000.00 – and I didn't have one). I was always particularly interested in low budget science-fiction shows: Blake's 7 and Doctor Who. When I stumbled serendipitously upon Red Dwarf my interest was immediately caught.

Anyway, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers is basically the novelisation of the first two seasons of Red Dwarf, though it is drafted in a way that creates a much more seamless story. Those of us who have watched the early shows will be very familiar with the episodes that make their way into the books, including the one where they first meet Kryten, the one where Rimmer creates a duplicate of himself, and of course the pilot episode. However, unlike the series the authors (who also created the series – which was originally a radio show) did a brilliant job creating what is in effect a seamless story from a collection of disparate episodes. However, while the idea of a science-fiction sitcom in space is always appealing, it is the characters that really attract my attention.

The thing with the characters is that they are all extremes. Mind you, I am actually hesitant to suggest that Lister is an extreme because he just seems to be your everyday working class slob. Sure, they paint him as being somewhat of an extreme slob that lives on a diet of vindaloo and beer, however there is actually something realistic, and appealing, about him. I guess it has something to do with the fact that he really doesn't care. Sure, life as thrown its fair share of punches at him, and wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he seems to just roll with the punches and simply gets on with life. In a way he is carefree and really not worried about what people think of him, or what the next day would bring (and despite the fact that he is a working class slob, he is actually pretty smart, though these smarts would be considered street smarts).

Rimmer couldn't be the more opposite, which is probably why they suggest that Red Dwarf is the Odd Couple in space. Unlike Lister, Rimmer blames everybody else, but himself, for his short comings, and is always trying to impress the wrong sorts of people, which generally lands him up in a lot of trouble. In fact the friendships that he should be cultivating he actually rejects and he pretty obviously brown noses people that really couldn't care less about him. Rimmer is the classic example of the pointlessness of the career minded individual that seeks to elevate himself above others, which in the end earns their disdain. His repeated failure to pass the astronavigation examine (namely because he doesn't actually study for it) is a clear example of how all of his priorities are wrong (and let's not forget him spending his spare time in stasis so that by the end of the seven year tour, he is only six years older).

The Cat, however, is a rather enigmatic creature. In a way he is the opposite of Lister, for where Lister is a slob, he is incredibly stylish. In fact his attention to neatness and style puts him in the same camp as Rimmer, who always appears in an immaculate uniform. However, unlike Rimmer, he lives a carefree life which has no ambition beyond eating, sleeping, and looking for women (as well as making sure he looks incredibly stylish). Ironically it turns out that he relates to Lister much more than he does Rimmer (in fact nobody likes Rimmer, probably because he is just one enormous goit).

Red Dwarf is an incredibly existentialist piece of work. What we have are three (actually four if you count the computer Holly) characters stuck millions of miles from home, millions of years in the future. In fact from their vantage point there is unlikely to be any home left. As such anything, and everything, that gives them character – their home, their friends (if they have any), their goals and their dreams, have all been stripped from them leaving them alone without a world that can define them. As such they are in a situation where they are defined only by how they define themselves (though of course there is an element of creating a definition of each other: yes, Rimmer, you are a goit!). Of course, in this environment, where they are effectively on their own, they don't necessarily need accept what the other makes them out to be, which in a way gives them strength. Even though Rimmer still believes that he is in command, there is no formal command structure, which means that despite what he believes, there are only two things that Rimmer is in command of: Jack and shit, and unfortunately for Rimmer, Jack just left town. However, despite the fact that there are three people on the ship that all agree the Rimmer is a goit (and the reality is that Rimmer is a goit), that doesn't mean that he has to accept that. What Red Dwarf teaches us is that by stripping away all of society, and our peers, all we are left with is that which we have defined for ourselves (though of course, in Rimmer's case, this is completely delusional).

Of course, this all comes down to the scene with regards to the gazpacgo soup. When Rimmer first came on board the ship he was invited to the captains cabin for dinner and he saw this as his one big break, so he went out of his way to impressed them, and to say that it turned out to be a disaster is an understatement. The crux of the whole event was when he was served gazpacgo soup (which is supposed to be served cold – something that I didn't know until I watched the show) and Rimmer calls the waiter over to him and asks him to heat it up. This, allegedly (we are only going by Rimmers account here) the entire cabin burst out laughing and Rimmer was never invited back. A Lister points out, when Rimmer finally spills the beans, the only person that is holding onto that event, and letting it drag him down is him – even if it wasn't the case that everybody in that room has been dead for three million years, in any event, after a few days of chuckling, they would have got on with their lives, while Rimmer is forever kicking himself for that one mistake (or many mind you, but that is the one that haunts him – and it wasn't his fault by the way, they should have taught him in basic training).

Red Dwarf Crew

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Jun 24, 2009 Stonemagpie rated it it was amazing

Shelves: humor, science-fiction

Fan-smegging-tastic! It's the boys from the Dwarf! I loved this book so much, and if you enjoyed the tv show you will too.

Rob Grant and Doug Naylor outdid themselves; this was the first book in years that has made me laugh out loud. It starts off explaining how Lister ended up on Red Dwarf and takes off from there.

Some of the plot is familiar, some is new. But the authors managed to gather together storylines from episodes into a whole that not only makes sense, but fills original episode plot h ...more

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May 29, 2015 Ubiquitousbastard rated it really liked it

Shelves: favorite-character, humor, scifi

Alright, so I'm kind of weird on this book. It sort of sent me in several directions emotionally, and I'm not sure a (semi) novelization of sci-fi comedy is supposed to do that. I mean, I did smile so much my face hurt (which also brought to me the realization that I don't smile very much) and also left me feeling extremely depressed (partly from that realization).

I think that the overall tone was more serious and dark than the show, which never at all left me feeling sad. This book was more in ...more

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May 03, 2018 Angus McKeogh rated it it was amazing

Just absolutely awesome stuff! Such a fun read and funny as hell. Reminiscent of Douglas Adams but certainly not a direct copy. If anything perhaps more brilliant in some areas and a bit inferior in others. The whole bit about Rimmer making a copy of himself was just phenomenal. Want to dive right into the sequel but I’m in the middle of too many other books at the moment. But grand. Highly recommended!

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Jul 11, 2010 Crystal Starr Light rated it liked it

Shelves: science-fiction

After taking a Lit of Sci-Fi class in college, I found about this TV Series. So I checked them out from the library thinking, "Oh, great. They'll probably be boring and stupid."
Was I wrong! The series was great, and my sister and I became mild fans. So, when I discovered that there were books and found them on sale, I snatched them up.

Plot:
David Lister, third technician on Red Dwarf, a 6 mile long space mining ship, is sent to stasis just in time to avoid a radiation leak that wipes out the rest After taking a Lit of Sci-Fi class in college, I found about this TV Series. So I checked them out from the library thinking, "Oh, great. They'll probably be boring and stupid."
Was I wrong! The series was great, and my sister and I became mild fans. So, when I discovered that there were books and found them on sale, I snatched them up.

Plot:
David Lister, third technician on Red Dwarf, a 6 mile long space mining ship, is sent to stasis just in time to avoid a radiation leak that wipes out the rest of the population on Red Dwarf. He exits three million years later to a senile computer named Holly, an annoying failure named Arnold J. Rimmer, and a highly evolved cat named Cat. Throughout the book, they encounter future echoes from traveling at faster than light speed, "alien" encounters, and discovering wrecks of other space ships.

Good:
The biggest draw to Red Dwarf is one thing: the sarcastic humor. The humor in Red Dwarf is gut-wrenchingly funny, just as in the TV series (in fact, there is no much difference between the two mediums, but see below). Lister is a complete slob; Rimmer is his "Odd Couple" counterpart, a man who has failed the astronavigation exam 13 times in pursuit of being an officer. Nearly everything anyone says is meant to be sarcastic, though some of the jokes don't make sense to Americans (or at least this American).
While this is likely to disturb those who are obsessed with continuity (I would normally be in that category), this book does have some distinct deviations from the TV series, which makes the relation of the episodes (more later) more cohesive. They become one story instead of a weekly engagement.
Lastly, the third part was odd, but really interesting. I liked the stark divergence from the TV series on this and seeing what Lister, Rimmer, and Cat would imagine in their fantasies (minus the gratuitous sexual references, of course).

Bad:
While the book makes some pretty interesting deviations from the TV series (namely how Rimmer and Lister first met--and this is a little raunchy, in my opinion--and in the final section of the book), overall, there really is not much difference between them. At times, I feel like I am reading one of the episode's screenplay. This is a little disappointing as I was expecting to read more about the lives of Lister and Rimmer beyond the TV series and not just a rehash of the same jokes and situations. The jokes were funny in the TV series; hearing them repeated without Chris Barrie, Craig Charles, or Norman Lovett's wonderful intonations is just eating the cake and scraping off the icing.
Also, "Grant Naylor" rush past descriptions to get to the dialogue. They fail to note what the room looks like, what a person is doing, and what is happening in the background until after a person brings it up in dialogue. This makes the book difficult to understand and follow at times.
Lastly, much of the humor in this book (as in the TV series) is merely reproductive humor. I will not blame the book for this "flaw" as the TV series was filled with it as well. I get tired of hearing jokes about the size of organs, sleeping around, and the like. Humor is more than just body functions and it takes true talent to be able to make something funny without stooping to this juvenile level.

Dialogue/Sexual Situations/Violence:
Sh**, bas****, and a few other fairly mild profanities. Sexual situations crop up in jokes and surroundings (the beginning details a trek to an android brothel, Lister own a pair of underwear he considers very "lucky", Cat is sex obsessed, etc.) Violence includes a man committing suicide, descriptions of a man being blown up, and several deaths.

Overall:
This was not bad, but if you are a Red Dwarf fan (like myself), you might be a little disappointed. The descriptions are lacking, there is little character development beyond what is seen in the TV series, and most of the humor is dependent on certain reproductive organs. Also, the book has a tendency to contradict the TV series (not bad, but worth noting). This book was not a bad way to spend my time, but not five star quality and not as funny as it implied it was (it was rather lame that most of the jokes were just carbon-copies of the ones delivered in the TV series). ...more

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Sep 20, 2011 Sandi (Zorena) rated it it was amazing

Shelves: humor, science-fiction

This is a lot like the television show episodes in book format so of course I love it! I've been a fan of the show since it started and was gleeful when I found there were actually novels! It tells the tale of the Red Dwarf crew from the start. It includes a lot of what was in the first two series as well as a ton of details that you wouldn't know if that was your only source. Then it throws in whole new story lines and tangents. Lister's back story of how he ended up on Red Dwarf was something ...more

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Apr 13, 2017 Tony rated it it was amazing

Second outing, this time via the audiobook. What can I say, the word, the video and now the audio... all perfect.

Chris Barrie, you are exceptional at relating an exceptional concept.

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May 03, 2020 Karin rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: 1980s, kapk, science-fiction, play-book-tag, scifi, scifi2020, book-1, humorous, first-in-series, pick-a-shelf

When Lister got drunk, he got DRUNK and the last time he got drunk he somehow ended up on board a space ship, and so when the book opens up he has been stuck on one of Saturn's moons for six months with a woman's passport and has been sleeping in a storage locker. He manages to sign onto the Red Dwarf as a vending machine maintenance worker only to find that it was heading farther out before it returned to earth and it was going to take 4.5 years to get back. Finally, and this is in the blurb so ...more

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Mar 20, 2018 Nicki Markus rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: read-audio-books

As a huge Red Dwarf fan, I naturally love the four books based on the series too. Chris Barrie is the perfect narrator for this story. Obviously, he *is* Rimmer, but as a former impressionist, he also does wonderful imitations of the other cast members' voices. Great fun for fans of the show, but this could also be enjoyed by those coming to the characters and story for the first time.

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May 13, 2017 Adam Whitehead rated it it was amazing

Mimas, 2180. After an epic all-night bender in London to celebrate his 25th birthday, Liverpudlian slob Dave Lister wakes up a billion kilometres away on one of Saturn's moons with the mother of all hangovers. Desperate to get home, Lister hits on the plan of enrolling in the Space Corps, getting a job on an Earth-bound ship and then going AWOL the second he gets home. Unfortunately, the only vessel that will have him is the city-sized Jupiter Mining Corporation ore-hauler Red Dwarf. And before Mimas, 2180. After an epic all-night bender in London to celebrate his 25th birthday, Liverpudlian slob Dave Lister wakes up a billion kilometres away on one of Saturn's moons with the mother of all hangovers. Desperate to get home, Lister hits on the plan of enrolling in the Space Corps, getting a job on an Earth-bound ship and then going AWOL the second he gets home. Unfortunately, the only vessel that will have him is the city-sized Jupiter Mining Corporation ore-hauler Red Dwarf. And before it gets back to Earth, it's going all the way to Triton on a job. So it will take Lister four and a half years to get home.

Driven to distraction by his mind-bogglingly anally-retentive bunk-mate Arnold Rimmer and heartbroken by a doomed romance with navigation officer Kristine Kochanski, Lister hits on a plan: by smuggling an unquarantined cat on board and getting caught, he gets condemned to spend the rest of the trip in temporal stasis and forfeit four years pay. Unfortunately, whilst he's in stasis, the Dwarf's fusion reactor unleashes a deadly radiation pulse which kills everyone. The ship's AI, Holly, takes the Dwarf into deep space and waits for the radiation to die off before reviving Lister...which takes three million years. Lister awakens to find his only companions are a holographic simulation of Rimmer, a senile AI and a creature which evolved from his pet cat. Their mission: to get back to Earth. Somehow.

As the above precis indicates, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (originally published in 1989) is a spin-off of the British TV series Red Dwarf, published just after the airing of the show's third season. It is not a novelization of the episodes, but can be regarded as sort-of reboot of the format. Creator-producers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor were unhappy with both the small budget given to the show and how that money was spent for the first two seasons; notably, when they took over as showrunners in the third season it took a quantum leap forward in its visual style and quality. When asked by Penguin Books to write a novel based on the series, they leapt at the chance and used the opportunity to write the big-budget SF epic that the BBC's lack of money had denied to them.

The result is something far more interesting than a bog-standard TV novelization. Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers stands alone very nicely as a solo SF novel, with no foreknowledge of the TV series required. The storylines of several episodes have been reworked into one large over-arcing narrative and the start of the story is very different, with a lot more time spent on the pre-accident Red Dwarf. This allows the writers to flesh out a number of other characters (some new, some recast versions of TV characters) before the accident takes place and they zero in on the characters of Rimmer and Lister.

These two characters are well-established in the TV show, but the authors take advantage of the novel format to really delve into their psyches and get into their internal drives and motivations. Lister benefits from this the most, since as the TV show continued Lister was sometimes sidelined in favour of the more inherently funner character of Rimmer. The Cat also benefits from added material, turning him from a rather one-note character in the first two seasons to a more rounded figure whose alien, non-human characteristics are emphasised. Holly also gets more development, with the reasons for his computer senility made clear (though current editions of the novel drop his ongoing inexplicable hatred of 1970s British footballer Kevin Keegan for legal reasons, sadly).

The novel is cleverly written, using ingredients and events from several episodes to build up a larger storyline. Some jokes are re-used a little too freely from the TV series and there's a couple of spots where the episodic building blocks betray themselves (Lister's determination to go back into stasis until they get back to Earth is handwaved away a little too easily in both the TV series and novel, but in the novel is more jarring given we move into the Nova 5 storyline almost immediately), but overall this works well.

As the novel continues, the more amusing and comic moments start giving way to moments of pathos, even tragedy, which gives the novel more depth than it first appears. It's a very funny book, but it's also one that focuses on character-building and using the humour to illuminate the story and themes. A more disappointing element is that the actual science in the novel is occasionally woeful (the writers' understanding of relativity, breaking the speed of light and, in particular, how long it takes to travel between different star systems at below lightspeed is rather lacking). Given that the TV series, particularly in later series, prided itself in the use of real science to back up the story, the somewhat shoddy application of it here is unfortunate.

Overall, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (****) is a splendid comic SF novel, funny but with real depth of character. The book builds along nicely to a big climax (that riffs heavily on the movie It's a Wonderful Life) and a huge cliffhanger. The novel is available now in an omnibus edition with its sequel, Better Than Life, in the UK and USA. ...more

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Sep 30, 2018 Michelle (Sherbet Lemon) rated it liked it

Shelves: male-protag, 2018-read-in, sci-fi, m-f, aliens, adventure, comedy

Well I certainly enjoyed it and do hope to see the show sometime, but it just seemed like a comedic boys party primarily. Still I loved some of the interactions and ideas behind this. I wonder if I'd enjoy the sitcom.

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Sep 20, 2020 Dave Taylor rated it it was amazing

Bloody marvelous. Who knew that an audio book -- yes, I listened to this and Naylor's terrific and spot-on voices for the various TV series characters -- could be so extraordinarily amusing. It is. In fact, I'm sure that the people who saw me driving while listening to this must have thought I was completely bonkers as I continually laughed out loud and even sniggered at the antics of Lister, Rimmer, Crichton, Holly and Cat. Highly recommended and happy to get suggestions for other books with a ...more

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Apr 11, 2015 Spinster rated it really liked it

Shelves: scifi

I'd heard of the TV show but never seen it, so my viewpoint might be a bit different than many of the ones who have read the book. I have no idea how similar or different they are, what more (or less) there is than in the TV series or even how the characters are supposed to look.

The first thing I noticed was the douglasadamsness. I'm not sure if it's even possible to write a humorous space adventure without sounding a bit douglasadamsey, and I like Adams, so I didn't dwell on it. The Grant/Naylo ...more

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Aug 31, 2017 Marty Fried rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: sci-fi, humor

This book had some really laugh-out-loud funny bits along with a lot of somewhat boring story and fairly immature humor. It was along the lines of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe, but not as good, in my opinion. I think you have to like British humor to like either one.

There's a lot of joking around about time travel, death, etc. One of the main characters actually died near the beginning, but he lived on as a hologram simulation. At one point, he made a copy of himself because nobody liked h ...more

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Jul 18, 2012 Jess rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobooks, read-2012

I wanted to give this five stars, in honour of both my 11 year old self's love for this series (and all of the tie-in materials) and Chris Barrie's immense voice acting talent, but I'm resisting. Mostly because my version of the audiobook played a musak version of the theme song, in its entirety, every half hour - but also because, as I remember, the later Red Dwarf novels are a lot more engaging (and so giving a four-star rating encourages me to re-read them!)

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Mar 17, 2017 Gabriella rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 2017, science-fiction

I was hooked from start to finish. If you loved the show then you will enjoy this book. Meet all your characters anew and see them in a different light while at the same time seeing them from the first season of the show in places. An enlightening look into how Lister came into the job of tech on the Red Dwarf, you will not help but hear the characters speaking to you as you read it, seeing the world anew.

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Oct 25, 2017 Faith Jones rated it really liked it

The origin of Red Dwarf is the 1944 play “No Exit” (“Huis Clos” in French), by Jean-Paul Sartre. This remains little known amongst its sci-fi comedy devotees, even though they do occasionally recognise it as existentialist thought.

The influence of this school of philosophy on British and Irish writers has snuck through on rare occasions, e.g. the television series “The Prisoner” and from, less surprisingly, Samuel Beckett, who was living in Paris and surrounded there by bubbling existential idea The origin of Red Dwarf is the 1944 play “No Exit” (“Huis Clos” in French), by Jean-Paul Sartre. This remains little known amongst its sci-fi comedy devotees, even though they do occasionally recognise it as existentialist thought.

The influence of this school of philosophy on British and Irish writers has snuck through on rare occasions, e.g. the television series “The Prisoner” and from, less surprisingly, Samuel Beckett, who was living in Paris and surrounded there by bubbling existential ideas. Red Dwarf isn’t just existential in the form of asking “what are the components of an individual?” or addressing questions of free will, decisions are not free choices etc., but it also takes its core theme from No Exit, Sartre’s play: Hell is being locked forever in a room with your friends. "L'enfer, c'est les autres" is the more quoted and detached angle, i.e. how your persona appears externally to other minds. Who goes mad first? As reflected in “The Prisoner”, individuality depends on challenge, defence, questioning and refusal to conform.

Although Dark Star also gave the writers a nudge, the prototype of Red Dwarf was the sketch "Dave Hollins: Space Cadet" in the Radio 4 show "Son of Cliche", by the same authors. Alone, the crew all dead, lost in space, only the computer to talk to and going crazy.

Just as in Sartre’s play, Red Dwarf begins with three characters who can’t escape each other’s company. There’s been a radioactive accident on a deep-space mining vessel, a several million year pause to let the half-life of that quarter, eighth and sixteenth-out to safe background levels, then three characters emerge as the last representatives of life from our planet (which is now a huge bundle of consumer garbage).

Character 1 is Dave Lister, a Liverpudlian slob who had no idea what to do with his life and spends most of it eating super-hot curry and drinking lager. He has depth of romantic soul, sarcastic wit and a few other attractive qualities like a warm smile and dreadlocks but his main attribute is a complete lack of respect for authority. Character 2 is Arnold Rimmer, who died and returned as a hologram. Psychiatrists and psychologists could unite their disciplines with this missing link of a mind. Aside from the projection aspect, he’s hardly corporeal at all because he’s built out of pre-silicon chips on his shoulders, prejudices, petty squabbles, false ego, an insane devotion to the chain of command (they’re all dead), obsessive compulsive disorder, need for control and some very immature hang-ups. Character 3 is Holly, the ship’s computer, who has brought Rimmer back as Dave’s companion (many other hologramatic crewmates were available) for a reason that makes perfect sense in existential logic: They are complete opposites, have nothing in common, will detest each other, focus each other’s attention as a rival or opponent and, therefore, this is a strategy to keep Dave Lister sane. Rimmer is already quite mad but Dave can be saved. Holly also pretends to be senile, so Dave has something else to adapt to and deal with. Grow up Dave, we’re all rooting for you.

After some time, Character 4 shows up – an irritatingly subservient mechanoid called Kryten, soon followed by a humanoid descended from the ship’s cat. Dave tries to teach Kryten to challenge authority (Rimmer) and refuse to conform, using existentialism to turn a paper or plastic man into a genuine individual, making him more human. The cat is a superficial being, preening, a contrast to any deep trends in these characters’ thinking. It plays out the characteristics of being a cat (disloyal, selfish, vain). It’s as if the writers wrote thirty character flaws and two assets on playing cards and divided them up amongst the characters. Rimmer got the epic tragic complexity, Lister is despondent that he won’t get any hearts and Holly pretends to forget the rules but is actually a secret Svengali who sees all, sits tight and knows everyone’s game.

T.S. Elliott, a fan of cats and hopelessness (Old Possum/Thomas Becket), produced the famous quote: “This is how the world ends; not with a bang, but with a whimper.” Other visions of the final scenes exist. In “Beyond the Thunderdome”, the world ended with no consumer products at all except, strangely, an awful lot of hair mousse. Red Dwarf (infinity welcomes careful drivers) is deliberately, shocklingly, devoid of all hope in this matter. Not only are the crew without a chance because they’re on a space ship approaching light-speed so far from Earth that they can’t even turn around but they are also all exclusively men, so that’s loneliness… to be followed unavoidably by the end of the species. I wonder, would they trade what’s left of our planet and species for a sympathetic hand job? Some questions should be left unanswered. In a black hole, even physics breaks down.

Sexual tension appears a lot in Red Dwarf, sometimes as the butt of the humour but usually it manifests as Dave’s yearning for the sassy girl he cannot be with, Christine Kochanski (Claire Grogan in the TV series, who is responsible for a version of “Happy Birthday” which will also outlive us). Dave would much prefer to talk to her than he would to Rimmer, but Holly, mortality, different ranks and about seven million years have intervened to keep them apart. This is a very unlikely love story across time and space, like falling in love with a dead person’s image. However, the inviable need for Kochanski is forged into how Dave defines himself as an individual and sum of his experiences (vindaloo, lager, making a rude crevice in a golf bunker, cartoons and the London Jets zero-g sports team). As Claire is kind of my doppelganger, it’s probably a good thing this is no longer on television.

Red Dwarf is designed to be a boys only club, which is necessary to twist the tension to have them bouncing off the walls with no way to release their pent up frustration, although when Norman Lovett (Holly) quit the TV series to go and live in Scotland he was replaced by an actress who tilted the gender balance whilst still being unavailable to Dave because, you’ve guessed it, Holly is short for hologram.

This book is really an amalgam of the first two television series. The first was the best of all, philosophically, then the second had a bigger budget, some outside locations and occasional pretty CGI. When converting it into a book though, the story was laid out in series one and the mind games come from there. There were also only two writers behind this. “Only two” seems odd for a book but ten TV series and one radio series came from just two minds, whereas Star Trek and The Simpsons are both written from a pool of up to three hundred contributors. That’s a feat of imaginative endurance, right there.

This is supposed to be fun but, structurally, the setting is a depressing image, so how does that work? It’s what the British call “black humour”, the wit and absurdity that exists on the brink of oblivion, skating around the plug hole of death. It brings out the best in us – not a clue why. Death concentrates existential ideas beautifully because there’s no more personal or individual thing than death, especially dying alone when the struggle is useless. Making jokes on the steps of the guillotine (the service around here is terrible) is not a very French thing to do, it’s a British thing, so that is the north’s contribution to this cross-channel spectacle.

The TV series might be sweet and sour, the book sad, entropy inevitable and the crew we’ve got to know fated to die but the fun they’ve made to keep them going in this vision of hell is the stuff eternal. That’s it, I’ve sussed it, this book is a failed vision of hell. It would work every time on left-bank intellectuals (now a reflection of their thoughtful forebears and sadly more often concerned with self-aggrandisement). The design flaw in this infernal design was incarcerating comedians because that’s the one unique sub-set of our species who would thrive and make the most of it. Red Dwarf is unmissable stuff. I would give it five stars if the mood at the end hadn’t been dragged down quite to my ankles. ...more

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Jan 18, 2019 Paul rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I used to love Red Dwarf. I mean LOVE. The turning point for me was season 11 which brought me to the conclusion that it's gone on too long and it should be put to rest. However I still have a fondness for everything that came before. So to read novels of one of my favourite Sci fi sitcom was a welcomed experience.

Anyone who's been a fan of the show will recognise many classic moments. As this is written by the show's creators / writers there is a lot of dialogue and scenes taken directly from ...more

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Mar 05, 2018 Christopher rated it liked it

Shelves: audiobook-generic

Probably more of a three-point-five than a three but not quite a four at all. Some bits were really funny and some bits I just thought, "would this be better if I had watched even one episode of the show? Which I'm going to do, eventually, it's just that I happened to have the time for audio books and not a TV show at the moment.

Which, let me say, I think I would have enjoyed the book less if I had tried reading it. It's just that the accents and intonations fit so well that I couldn't have repl ...more

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Jan 16, 2020 Sammy rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: mad-hatter-challenge, sci-fi, 2020, humour, re-reads

A must for any Red Dwarf fan. And do yourselves a favour and get the audio version read by Chris Barrie. I have both paper and audio, and Barrie elevates it from being merely hilarious to absolutely hysterical. I may or may not have been walking to the bank today with my headphones on, grinning like a loon with tears of laughter running down my face. People stared. I am rapidly getting a reputation in my neighbourhood for being somewhat unhinged, I'm sure...

Barrie's impersonations are exceptiona ...more

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May 19, 2017 Bryan rated it really liked it

I'm not a big sci-fi reader… I remember Red Dwarf (the tv show) fondly (but only vaguely) from my high school years, but hadn't watched it since then.

I found the book at a used book sale and expected it to be a bit dated and not very well-written, but in fact it's very funny and charming (although there's a very obvious debt to Douglas Adams) and even more surprisingly, there are very prescient ideas about virtual reality and technology that seem ahead of their time even by science fiction stand ...more

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Jan 25, 2018 BlurryBug rated it it was amazing

Shelves: beat-the-backlist-2018, read-2018, library-book

Silly and nostalgic automatic 5 star from me.

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Jul 28, 2019 Barnaby Haszard rated it liked it

Hard not to think of these events as they played out in the early episodes of this, one of my cultural touchstones growing up. This is Red Dwarf with an unlimited budget, though, which would suggest a greater focus on set pieces and compromised characterisation and ideas. Fortunately, Grant and Naylor keep Lister and Rimmer at the forefront of their considerable shared imagination; if anything, Lister is an even more fascinating character here than he was in the show. The passive-aggressively wi ...more

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Dec 20, 2018 Dean Burnett rated it it was amazing

I imagine people who come to this book without knowing Red Dwarf the sitcom would find it very weird, oddly paced and often confusing. But if you do know the show (as I do, in depth) then it's a very fun elaboration and fleshing-out of many of the classic plots and ideas, unrestrained by budget and practicality.

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Oct 24, 2017 Mo Coghlan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

A very fun, Hitchhiker's Guide-esque adventure story with vivid characters and biting wit!

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Apr 22, 2020 Shannon rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

I will forever love Red Dwarf they are all going to get 5 stars before I've picked it up. It's my jam it's a guilty pleasure but I ain't guilty.

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Apr 02, 2013 Ivan Idris rated it really liked it

“Red Dwarf” is a funny science fiction novel about a drunk called Lister. An epic drunk who contrary to real-life drunks is actually a nice guy. One day Lister and friends start drinking in London and eventually wakes up on a moon near Saturn. Shouldn’t be a problem, right? Except he has no money and doesn’t know anybody on the moon.

Lister joins the Space Corps in the hope of one day returning to Earth. He survives an accident in stasis, that kills the rest of the crew of the ship he is on and f ...more

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About Grant Naylor

Grant Naylor

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Grant Naylor was the collective name used by writers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor for their collaboration, particularly the TV series, Red Dwarf. Grant and Naylor call their pseudonym a gestalt entity, something that is greater than the sum of its parts.

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Quotes from Infinity Welcomes...

“Your explanation for anything slightly odd is aliens,' said Lister. 'You lose your keys, it's aliens. A picture falls off the wall, it's aliens. That time we used up a whole bog roll in a day, you thought that was aliens.” — 23 likes

“Lister patted the towel rail against his left palm. 'I'm going out like I came in - screaming and kicking.'
'You can't whack Death on the head.'
'If he comes near me, I'll rip his tits off.” — 13 likes

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