Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers

The Last Human

Red Dwarf began as a British television sitcom in 1988, and the novel Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers arrived a year later — not quite a novelisation in the conventional sense but an expansion, a deepening, a version of the story that could do things television budgets and formats could not. Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, the show’s co-creators writing under their combined pseudonym “Grant Naylor,” used the extra space to ask what their premise actually meant if you took it seriously.

The premise is this: Dave Lister, a slovenly third-technician aboard the mining ship Red Dwarf, is placed in suspended animation as punishment for smuggling a cat aboard. During his stasis a radiation leak kills the entire crew. The ship’s AI, Holly, keeps Lister in suspension for three million years until the radiation clears. He wakes up as the last human being alive, in deep space, with only Arnold Rimmer — his dead, neurotic, deeply unpleasant bunkmate, resurrected as a hologram — and a creature called Cat, who evolved from Lister’s smuggled cat over the three million years, for company.

Expanding the Backstory

The novel’s most significant addition to the TV material is its extended portrayal of Lister’s life before Red Dwarf. We see him as a young man in Liverpool, directionless and broke, making a series of bad decisions that eventually lead him to take a job on a mining ship as a way of getting back from a disastrous trip to Mimas. This backstory does something the TV show couldn’t easily do: it makes Lister’s losses concrete. He is not an abstract “last human” — he is a specific person who had specific things and lost them all, including a future he had barely begun to imagine.

Rimmer receives similar treatment. The novel’s portrait of his psychological damage — the overbearing family, the repeated exam failures, the desperate competence-performance concealing near-total inadequacy — is more sustained and more sympathetic than the TV version managed. He is still awful. But he is awful in a way that is legible and even pitiable.

Comedy at the End of Everything

What Grant and Naylor understood — and what puts Red Dwarf in the company of the Hitchhiker’s Guide books rather than beneath them — is that comedy about cosmic insignificance and human loneliness is not a contradiction in terms. The jokes work because the loneliness is real. Lister’s situation is genuinely terrible: he is three million years from anyone he ever knew, in a universe that has moved on entirely without him. The fact that he mostly responds to this by worrying about curry and trying to annoy Rimmer is not avoidance — it is a portrait of human resilience that is more moving for being funny.

The class dynamics between Lister (working-class slacker) and Rimmer (aspirational middle-class failure) provide the engine of the comedy and a satirical portrait of British social anxiety that travels surprisingly well across the three million light years involved.

From Sitcom to Page

Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers occupies an unusual place in the comic-science-fiction shelf: it is a prose novel written by the same two people who created the television series, rather than a hired hand’s cash-in adaptation. Rob Grant and Doug Naylor had already written the early television scripts together, and turning to the novel let them reclaim material that the studio format had compressed. Episodes that on screen had to fit a half-hour slot and a small set of sets are here unspooled, recombined, and given backstory that television could only gesture at. The result reads as a genuine novel rather than a transcribed script, even if a practised viewer will recognise the bones of certain favourite scenes underneath the expanded prose.

The pairing of Grant and Naylor was a true collaboration — they wrote as a single unit under the “Grant Naylor” byline — and the partnership produced a sequel novel, Better Than Life, before the two writers eventually went their separate ways and continued the franchise individually. For readers who finish Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers and want more, Better Than Life (which takes its title from the addictive total-immersion video game that traps the crew inside their own fantasies) is the direct continuation and arguably the funnier of the two books.

In the Lineage of British Comic SF

The novel belongs unmistakably to the tradition Douglas Adams established with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: science fiction whose real subject is human (or post-human) absurdity, where the cosmic scale exists chiefly to throw small, petty, recognisable behaviour into relief. Where Adams sent an ordinary Englishman tumbling through a baroque, joke-dense universe, Grant and Naylor keep their focus tighter and bleaker — a single derelict ship, a tiny cast, three million years of nothing — and mine the claustrophobia for both comedy and a surprising undertow of melancholy. The Cat, a vain creature who has evolved an entire religion around the long-dead Lister and his plans to open a hot-dog and doughnut stand on Fuchal, is the book’s purest comic invention and its sharpest satire of how belief systems calcify around misremembered origins.

Who Should Read It

You do not need to have seen a single episode of the television series to enjoy the book, which works completely as a standalone comic novel — and devotees of the show will find it deepens characters they thought they already knew, particularly Rimmer, whose sad, thwarted history is given far more room than the screen ever allowed. It is an ideal entry point for readers who love Adams or Terry Pratchett and want another voice working the same vein of intelligent, character-driven British humour. Approach it as a comic novel with unexpected emotional weather rather than as a straight sitcom tie-in, and it rewards the shift in expectation. The episodic seams are real, but the warmth and the jokes carry easily over them.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — A genuinely funny and quietly moving expansion of a great premise, with more heart than most comedy science fiction dares to carry.