Red Dwarf
Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers
by Grant Naylor · first published 1989
57% recommend43% neutral
When Lister got drunk, he really got drunk. After celebrating his birthday with a Monopoly-board pub crawl around London, he came to in a burger bar on one of Saturn's moons, wearing a lady's pink crimplene hat and a pair of yellow fishing waders, with no money and a passport in the name of 'Emily Berkenstein'. Joining the Space Corps seemed a good idea. Red Dwarf, a clapped-out spaceship, was bound for Earth. It never made it, leaving Lister as the last remaining member of the human race, three million years from Earth, with only a dead man, a senile computer and a highly evolved cat
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There is a book called Incompetence, by Rob Grant of Red Dwarf fame, set slightly in the future where it is now illegal to discriminate on race, age, gender... or competence. Highly recommended reading, both as entertainment and as preparation for the inevitable.
on “Ask HN: How to identify potential of a person?” ↗When I was a teenager, I was a big fan of the show (and books), Red Dwarf. One part of the story describes one of the characters, Rimmer, preparing for an exam. He spends so much time preparing his revision timetable and improving it iteratively, over and over again, that he…
on “The Productivity Mirage” ↗Yeah the first two novels were credited to their "Grant Naylor" partnership, and they're both excellent. After that, they each wrote an additional Red Dwarf novel individually / separately. Personally I've never come across those last two novels, although I always check for them whenever visiting a used book store. Maybe they were only released in the UK.…
on “Rob Grant, creator of Red Dwarf, has died” ↗…depth was lost. Like how the transition from series 2 to series 3 got a lot more action-y, 6 to 7 started to lean more on established tropes etc (IMO). Also of note: Grant and Naylor wrote a series of Red Dwarf novels that were surprisingly good. They really fleshed out a lot of the character behind Lister and Rimmer. One novel goes deep on the concept of Better than Life, a one episode throwaway in the show…
on “Rob Grant, creator of Red Dwarf, has died” ↗> In the Red Dwarf (1988-current) spinoff novel Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (1989) by Grant Naylor, stars are deliberately detonated to create a pattern of supernovae spelling out a Coke ad in Earth's sky.…
on “Russian crowdfunded reflector satellite aims to be “brightest star in the sky”” ↗This reminds me of a passage about the brutal Cola Wars from Rob Grant and Doug Naylor's "Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers"… For anyone living on Earth the result would be mindfizzlingly spectacular. One hundred and twenty-eight stars would appear to go supernova simultaneously, burning…
on “Astronomers seek global ban on space advertising” ↗…book. Before continuing wanted to check out a couple of other books. Read Shadow Divers which was really good. Saw it suggested a lot and it did not disappoint. Now reading The Pearl by Steinbeck and Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers by Grant Naylor.
on “Ask HN: Which book are you reading these days?” ↗