Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers by Grant Naylor

Denver Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Club

RED DWARF: INFINITY WELCOMES CAREFUL DRIVERS
by
GRANT NAYLOR

Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (1989)
media tie-in novel

ROC books paperback
298 pages

From the back cover of the paperback:
       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, he was living in a locker on one of Saturn's moons, 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 actually hire him, he joined the Space Corps - and found himself aboard Red Dwarf, a spaceship as big as a small city that, six or seven years from now, would get him back to Earth. What Lister couldn't foresee was that he'd inadvertently signed up for a one-way jaunt three million years into the future - a future which would see him the last living member of the human race, with only a hologram crew mate and a highly evolved Cat for company. Of course, that was before the ship broke the light barrier and things began to get really weird...

From the first inside page of the paperback edition:
       EVERYBODY WAS DEAD
       Everybody.
       Lister had been in stasis three million years.
       Three million years.
       Since one drunken night outside the Marie Lloyd off Regent Street, London, every step he'd taken had led him farther and farther from home. And now he was three million years away. Three million years out into Deep Space. And he was totally alone.
       The enormity of all this was slowly beginning to sink in when Holly, the ship's computer, dropped his final bombshell. The one about the human race being extinct.
       "What d'you mean 'extinct'?"
       Well, three million years is a very good age for a species. I mean, your average genus only survives a couple of hundred thousand years, max. And that's with a clean-living species, like dinosaurs. So chances of the human race making it to the big three-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh are practically nonexistent."
       Much to his surprise, Lister let out a sob.
       "Were you very close?" Holly asked sympathetically.

Read for group discussion on July 27, 2005

RATINGS:
How we each rated these books

Dan	-	Amy	6	10 Wow! Don't miss it 8-9 Highly recommended 7 Recommended 5-6 Mild recommendation 3-4 Take your chances 1-2 Below average; skip it 0 Get out the flamethrower! U Unfinishable or unreadable - Skipped or no rating given
Cheri	-	Barb	-
Aaron	-	Cynthia	-
Jackie	-	Ron	7
Christine	4	Deb	6
Mike	7	Stephanie	6
Gary	6	Patty	6.5

Bibliography:
"Grant Naylor" is the pseudonym of UK writers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor. Together they created the British science fiction comedy television series Red Dwarf. They also worked in the 1980s on satirical puppet show Spitting Image.

Red Dwarf is set in the distant future. There are eight series of episodes which aired originally between 1988 to 1999. Rob Grant and Doug Naylor wrote the first six series together. Grant quit, and Naylor wrote the next two series of Red Dwarf alone or with new co-writers such as Paul Alexander.

There is a Red Dwarf movie in the works, directed by Doug Naylor.

Red Dwarf books published under the name "Grant Naylor"
-- Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (1989)
-- Better Than Life (1990)
-- The Official Red Dwarf Companion (1992, with Bruce Dessau)
-- Primordial Soup: The Red Dwarf Scripts (1993), nonfiction
-- The Making of Red Dwarf (1994), nonfiction

Red Dwarf books published by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor (same guys!)
-- Son of Soup (1996), scripts
-- Scenes from the Dwarf (1996), nonfiction

Books by Rob Grant
-- Backwards (1996), Red Dwarf sequel to Better Than Life
-- Colony (2000), novel
-- Incompetence (2003), near future detective story

Red Dwarf books by Doug Naylor
-- Last Human (1995), sequel to Better Than Life
-- Red Dwarf Log No. 1997 (1996) (with Paul Alexander), nonfiction
-- The Red Dwarf Survival Guide (1996) (with Paul Alexander), nonfiction
-- Red Dwarf VIII : The Official Book (1999), nonfiction

(Please note: Questioning me, the webmaster, about Red Dwarf is an utter waste of time. I'm clueless when it comes to Red Dwarf. I've never seen a single episode of the TV show.)

Links:
The official website of Red Dwarf, the cult science-fiction comedy show
BBC Red Dwarf website
Red Dwarf - Wikipedia
Silicon Hell - Red Dwarf

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This page was last updated August 26, 2005