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.

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.