Where to Start with Rob Grant and Doug Naylor: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Rob Grant and Doug Naylor — how to approach Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, their funny and quietly devastating expansion of the beloved sitcom about the last human alive, three million years into a future without anyone else. A complete reading guide.
Rob Grant and Doug Naylor are British comedy writers who created the science fiction sitcom Red Dwarf, which premiered on BBC Two in 1988 and became one of British television’s most beloved and long-running comedies. Writing together as “Grant Naylor,” they produced two novels based on the series: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (1989) and Better Than Life (1990). The collaborative pseudonym has a specific history — Grant and Naylor wrote the first two novels together before their partnership ended, after which each wrote solo work. Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers remains the definitive version of the Red Dwarf story in prose.
Where to Start: Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (1989)
The essential Rob Grant and Doug Naylor — and one of the most unexpectedly moving science fiction comedies available in any format. Red Dwarf begins not with Dave Lister aboard the Red Dwarf but with Dave Lister on Mimas, one of Saturn’s moons, broke, directionless, and stranded after a disastrous trip he can no longer remember the beginning of. This extended pre-ship backstory — absent from the TV series — is the novel’s most important departure from the screen version, and it makes everything that follows considerably more affecting.
The Lister who eventually ends up aboard the Jupiter Mining Corporation’s Red Dwarf as a third-technician is not an abstraction. He is a specific young man from Liverpool who has been making a specific series of bad decisions for specific reasons, and whose life trajectory has brought him to the most incongruous place imaginable: an enormous mining spaceship heading to deep space, sharing a bunk room with Arnold Judas Rimmer. The backstory gives Lister something to lose. The premise gives him everything.
The premise, for readers encountering it for the first time: after a radiation leak kills the entire crew, the ship’s AI Holly keeps Lister in suspended animation for three million years until the radiation dissipates. He wakes up as the last human being alive, in deep space, with Holly (a computer with the intelligence of a twelve-year-old), Arnold Rimmer (his dead bunkmate, resurrected as a hologram because the regulations require one living — technically — crew member for company), and Cat (a humanoid creature who evolved from the cat Lister smuggled aboard over three million years of isolated evolution). This is his universe now.
Arnold Rimmer is the novel’s richest character, and the expansion of his backstory is the most significant thing the book adds to the screen material. The TV Rimmer is a magnificent comic creation — vain, cowardly, rule-obsessed, perpetually failing — but the novel’s Rimmer has a psychological history that makes the comedy slightly unbearable in the way great comedy often is. His family, his repeated exam failures, his desperate performance of competence over an abyss of inadequacy — all of it is here, rendered with a sympathy that somehow coexists with the contempt his behaviour reliably provokes. He is awful, and you understand exactly why he is awful, and understanding why doesn’t make him less awful.
The British class comedy — Lister working-class slacker, Rimmer aspirational middle-class failure, their status rivalry absurd at three million light years — provides the engine for much of the book’s humour and a genuine satirical portrait of British social anxiety that should not survive its context but does. The jokes work because they are accurate about something real.
What Grant and Naylor understood, and what puts this book in the company of Adams and Pratchett rather than beneath them, is that comedy about cosmic loneliness and human insignificance is not a contradiction. The last human’s situation is genuinely terrible. The fact that he mostly responds by trying to annoy Rimmer and thinking about curry is not avoidance; it is a portrait of resilience that is more moving for being funny.
Reading Rob Grant and Doug Naylor
Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers is the essential and most widely read book. Readers who want to continue should move to Better Than Life (1990), which continues directly from the events of the first novel.
For the full Rob Grant and Doug Naylor bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Rob Grant and Doug Naylor author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Rob Grant and Doug Naylor?
Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (1989) is their essential book — an expansion of the beloved British television series that uses the novel form to go deeper into the premise than the TV show's format allowed. Dave Lister, the laziest man in the universe, wakes up three million years into the future aboard the mining ship Red Dwarf as the last surviving human, with only the hologram of his dead bunkmate Arnold Rimmer and a creature called Cat — who evolved from his smuggled pet — for company. The novel substantially develops both characters' backstories and treats the premise's genuine existential horror with more sustained attention than the TV series could manage.
Do I need to know the Red Dwarf TV series to enjoy the book?
No — the novel works entirely as a standalone. Grant and Naylor use the extra space to develop the characters and world beyond what the TV series established, including extended backstory for both Lister and Rimmer that was never fully explored on screen. Readers coming to the book without knowledge of the series will encounter a complete introduction to the characters and situation. Readers who know the TV series will find a significantly deeper version of the story they already love — particularly the development of Rimmer's psychological damage and Lister's pre-ship life in Liverpool.
What makes the Red Dwarf novel different from the TV series?
The novel is more sustained in its treatment of the loneliness at the premise's core. Television comedy works in twenty-five-minute episodes and manages existential darkness through pacing and the physical presence of actors; the novel has room to let the horror of Lister's situation breathe. He is three million years from anyone he ever knew, in a universe that has moved entirely on without him. The novel treats this with genuine pathos rather than simply as a setup for jokes, while maintaining the series' comic voice throughout. The result is a book that is genuinely funnier and genuinely more moving than a TV tie-in novel has any right to be.
What should I read after Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers?
After Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, the sequel Better Than Life (1990) continues the story with comparable ambition. For British science fiction comedy with similar sensibility, Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is the obvious companion — the same tradition of finding human absurdity both hilarious and genuinely tragic. Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman's Good Omens covers similar tonal ground (cosmic stakes, very funny, quietly devastating) in a fantasy rather than science fiction frame.
