Every few years, when the contemporary TV shows that consume me offer a brief respite, I dust off my collection of DVDs that follow the crew of the small rouge one on their desolate voyage through a hostile universe now almost entirely devoid of human life. The last time that I did so, I got so into Red Dwarf again that I had to take things a step beyond the small screen, also re-reading my old Penguin paperbacks that tell of the Dwarfers’ alternate adventures following Grant Naylor’s slight tweaking of Lister and Kochanski’s mutual history just prior to the writing of Red Dwarf V.
The result of the writers’ on-the-job refinements, the Red Dwarf novels were initially much more consistent than the TV series had been where continuity and character development are concerned. The first book, Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, even started about six months before “The End” did on television, allowing the authors to set up both Dave Lister’s back story and the 22nd-century world in which he inhabits much more carefully, comprehensively and consistently than they could on the telly. But following the end of the second Dwarf novel, Better Than Life, something odd happened. Odder than usual, in fact; even for this lot. The alternate universe that the novels occupy forked off into two irreconcilable sequels to Better Than Life: Backwards by Grant and Last Human by Naylor. With Craig Charles (wrongly) banged up and the future of the television series uncertain, the former long-time writing partners put their respective names to their own personal interpretation of Red Dwarf. The end result is quite telling, if not particularly pleasing.
Doug Naylor’s Last Human would see print first in 1995, and would totally shake up the crew dynamic by instantly introducing Lister’s now-paramour, Kristine Kochanski, as a Starbug mainstay (exactly like on TV, they’d lost the Dwarf in the hazy gap between stories). This makes what I can only assume is a deliberate mockery of the book’s title, as before long the narrative is teeming with an assortment of humans: besides Kochanski, another Lister, and Rimmer’s long-lost son each have hefty parts to play. The novel thus reflects the tone of the engorged Red Dwarf that would follow on TV under Naylor’s sole stewardship: it’s a little more grown-up, a little more dramatic - and a lot less spiky.
For instance, Last Human sees Rimmer almost become respectable, if not likeable, a little like he would in “Stoke Me a Clipper”, “Only the Good…” and “The Beginning” on TV, only much more explicitly and with a much more plausible motive here. Lister, likewise, borders on mature in places, the decades spent living his life backwards as a husband and father having taken their toll on the erstwhile toenail-clippings muncher. Some readers might find such progressive characterisation off-putting, as it goes against exactly what made the early seasons of the TV show such a riot, but in print it works well as it’s a natural – perhaps even inevitable – progression of the series’ central relationship. Indeed, Last Human feels like an organic culmination of the Red Dwarf adventure; the emotionally satisfying end that we’ll never get on the telly as, even after Red Dwarf XII has aired in 2017, we’re just gonna keep on asking Dave for more until somebody drops.
Yet Last Human’s plot hangs together only very loosely. Like its two preceding novels, it feels very segmented, which is to be expected when huge swathes of dialogue and even storyline are lifted from at least eight different episodes from Red Dwarfs V and VI. Even some of the book’s original elements retrospectively feel old as they would later be repackaged on TV in the better-known episode “Ouroboros”. The new material doesn’t sit all that well with the recycled either as it’s abnormally dark and edgy, and ultimately not all that funny – the one-liners and laughs plundered from existing scripts feel at odds with the action-movie death and destruction that glues them together.
Rather aptly, 1996’s Backwards is the opposite. A meaningful end to the Red Dwarf saga it could not be further from, and the dawning of a new direction it most certainly is not. It is Red Dwarf as it was in heyday, and with all the laughs thereto, only written down rather than acted out. The downside to it is that, again, much of it is familiar as Grant would draw inspiration from “Dimension Jump” and – obviously - “Backwards”, before tacking on a near-complete rendering of the popular episode “Gunmen of the Apocalypse” almost as an afterthought.
However, about two-thirds of Backwards – most of what goes on on htraE and much of the search for Red Dwarf – is new, original and absolutely hilarious. One of the Dwarfers becomes an unwitting murderer and another one of them does time for it - before the crime happens, naturally. Lister and the Cat go through puberty again, backwards, driving the Lister / Rimmer relationship to depths plumbed never before as the hologrammatic smeghead now has to share close quarters with a Lister that’s even less mature and even more volatile than the one that we’re used to. The others aren’t neglected either, with Cat even gaining his virginity in one especially amusing and literally barbed side-step.
Even more gratifyingly, precious little of the episode “Backwards” is transcribed here - the novel feels like an expansion of the conceit; what might have been on TV had Grant and Naylor had ninety minutes to play with instead of just thirty. The same applies to the novel’s “Dimension Jump”-inspired elements - with no limit on time or budget, Grant delights in drilling down into the finer points of Ace Rimmer’s native universe and its colourful characters that we were only ever briefly teased with on screen.
Where Backwards flops though is in its maddening “finale”, which is little more than a needless novelisation of “Gunmen of the Apocalypse” tacked on there just to round out the word count. Indeed, it speaks volumes that these elements were excised almost completely from the audiobook reading of the story. And whilst the story’s post-Apocalyptic final segment does at least offer us something innovative, regrettably, much like Grant’s tenure on the television series, it leaves us on a cliffhanger – one that’s never likely to be resolved.
And so, while offering us promising and nostalgic glimpses of Red Dwarf’s future and past, respectively, one thing seems tremendously clear from Last Human and Better Than Life: two heads are better than one. Whilst I’ve nothing but admiration for what Doug Naylor has done with the television series since his less-than-amicable split from Rob Grant (except for, perhaps, the middle of the glammed-up, Rimmer-lite Red Dwarf VII), “Grant Naylor” was a force more powerful than the sum of its parts, and I get the distinct impression that Back Human or Lastwards, had it happened, would also have been something far greater than either of these wanting novels.
