Rob Grant and Doug Naylor

British comedy writing duo who created the Red Dwarf television series and co-wrote its novelizations, beginning with Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers.

Rob Grant and Doug Naylor are the British comedy writing partnership who created Red Dwarf, one of the most beloved science fiction comedies in television history. Beginning its run on the BBC in 1988, Red Dwarf follows Dave Lister, the last known human alive, stranded three million years in deep space aboard the mining ship Red Dwarf with only the hologram of his dead bunkmate Arnold Rimmer, a creature who evolved from his pet cat, and later a mechanoid named Kryten for company.

Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, published in 1992, is the first of two novelizations Grant and Naylor wrote together, expanding the world and backstory of the television series with characteristic wit and invention. The novel provides the definitive account of how Lister came to be marooned in space, developing the characters and universe with a depth that the television format’s constraints didn’t always allow. It is simultaneously accessible to readers unfamiliar with the series and rewarding for fans.

Grant and Naylor’s partnership eventually split — Doug Naylor continued developing the television series while Rob Grant pursued his own fiction — but their collaborative work represents a genuine contribution to British comic science fiction that deserves to be set alongside Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide books as essential reading in the genre. The humor is distinctively British in its class consciousness and absurdist logic, the science fiction genuine enough to satisfy fans of the genre, and the characters — especially the magnificently awful Rimmer — among the most memorable comic creations of their era.