Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers by Grant Naylor: A Review of Red Dwarf Book 1

There is a very specific kind of genius at work in British sci-fi comedy, the kind that takes the absolute worst-case scenario for a human being and somehow makes it funny. Douglas Adams did it with Arthur Dent, yanked from his home as Earth got demolished to make way for a hyperspace bypass. Grant Naylor, the pen name of Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, do it with Dave Lister, who goes into stasis on a mining spacecraft and wakes up three million years later to discover he is the last human being alive. His only companions are a hologram of the most obnoxious man he ever knew, a creature descended from his cat after millions of years of evolution, and a ship’s computer with the IQ of a small thermos flask. If that premise makes you laugh even a little, this book was written for you.

The Last Human in Deep Space

Before we get to the spaceship, the novel spends a surprisingly generous chunk of time on Earth, tracing how Dave Lister, a man of spectacularly low ambition and endearing uselessness, ends up signed onto the Jupiter Mining Corporation vessel Red Dwarf. The route involves a birthday pub crawl around London pubs named after Monopoly board stations, which ends with Lister coming to consciousness on Mimas, one of Saturn’s moons, wearing a pink crimplene hat, yellow fishing waders, carrying a passport in the name of Emily Berkenstein, and with absolutely no money. Joining the Space Corps suddenly seems like the sensible option.

It is a brilliant opening, setting the tone for everything that follows. Lister is not a hero; he is barely functional. His bunkmate Arnold Rimmer is a failed technician who has sat the astronavigation exam nine times and failed every single one, a man of crushing pomposity and almost total incompetence, who gets on with Lister the way a lit match gets on with dry paper. When a radiation leak kills the entire crew, Holly, the ship’s computer with a face like a melancholy potato, seals Lister in stasis for his own protection. He wakes up three million years later, the last human alive. Rimmer is resurrected as a hologram to keep him sane, which works about as well as you’d expect.

The novel follows the TV show’s early arc fairly closely, and fans of the original series will recognise whole scenes translated from screen to page. That’s both a strength and a slight limitation. The characterisation is superb; Lister’s cheerful nihilism, Rimmer’s desperate social climbing, Holly’s profound indifference, the Cat’s magnificent obsession with himself. The writing crackles with wit. But if you’ve seen the show, certain sections feel more like novelisation than original storytelling, and the pacing reflects that unevenness; some chapters fizz with invention while others coast.

Where the book genuinely transcends the TV version is in the space it has to build the world. Grant Naylor lean into the cosmic loneliness in a way the small-screen budget never quite could. Three million years is an incomprehensible number, and the novel earns a few genuinely melancholy moments amid the jokes, particularly around what it means to be the last of your kind, hurtling through space with no destination and no purpose beyond keeping going.

Does It Hold Up, Having Read the Rest?

Having read Better than Life and Backwards, which are both richer and more ambitious books in their own ways, this first instalment reads clearly as the foundation it is. The characters are established, the universe is opened up, and the comic voice is locked in. Better than Life, which takes everything set up here and runs further and harder with it, is a five-star book. This one earns a confident four; it does everything it sets out to do, it makes you laugh repeatedly, and it makes you care about this unlikely crew of misfits floating through the cosmos with nowhere to be.

If you have never read Red Dwarf and you loved The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or you are the kind of person who finds workplace dysfunction funny when it is set three million years into deep space, this is essential reading. It is warm, it is properly funny, and it is surprisingly good at the science fiction bits too.

Audiobook Note

The audiobook edition is narrated by Chris Barrie, the actor who played Rimmer in the TV series. That alone makes it worth your time; hearing Rimmer’s voice reading Rimmer’s most pompous moments is an experience you do not forget quickly. Running at around 8 hours and 15 minutes, it is a very good commute companion.

⭐ Rating: 4/5

A funny, warm, inventive sci-fi comedy that lays the foundations for one of the great British comic universes. Not quite the series at its very best, but a genuinely excellent start that gets better the more you love what follows.

The Audible UK edition is narrated by Chris Barrie and runs to 8 hours and 15 minutes.

Pick up the paperback from Amazon UK.