General questions about Last human.

1. Ace isn’t in Last Human. The confusion may stem from the fact that the novel contains an alternate universes plot and “Smoke me a Kipper” is used in the final chapter but a successful Rimmer (aside from Arnold’s son) does not appear.

And Ace’s ship in Dimension Jump was unnamed.

I’m wondering if the confusion stems from the mistaken belief that Last Human follows on from Backwards. It doesn’t. Both it and Backwards follow on from Better Than Life; separate sequels.

Rob Grant and Doug Naylor ended their partnership during the writing of [The] Last Human. Doug ended up writing Last Human, Rob offered his own sequel with Backwards.

2. The first part of the book probably doesn’t help if you had trouble getting into it as it’s all rather confusing what the hell is going on until you read a bit further. I think it’s the weakest of the books and the most un-Dwarfian but a lot of people here seem to disagree. The final chapters and the inclusion of Michael McGruder I find, to be frank, embarrassing.

I would agree that scenes such as “Red Alert” jar a little with the general tone of the novel and slow down the action.

>I haven?t read far enough in to find out if I like This Kochanski yet, in my head she a weird mix of C.P. and Chlo?.

Novel Kochanski is a bit odd. She doesn’t seem to resemble either version but, that said, this one is in love with Lister rather than an alternate version of him.

I know but cannot say. :-(

>I know but cannot say. :-(

It’s true…you could be fired!

> I know that they are both meant to be sequels to BTL, Backwards just flows better from it, what with the whole, actually starting in the reverse-verse.

I agree… mostly. I still don’t like it how Kochanski was written out of Backwards. “Oh, yeah, she couldn’t perceive time going forwards: she only remembered the future, like everyone else. Why was she like that and Lister wasn’t, when both were taken and transplanted onto Backwards Earth in exactly the same way? Because SHUT UP, that’s why.”

On the whole, I’m not entirely happy about either book but I think I prefer “Last Human” to “Backwards”. “Backwards” is just too… sadistic. (And one minor point: if in the Red Dwarf TV show Lister and Cat were both de-aged to 15 years old, AND STAYED THAT WAY, how would you react?)

they seem to have no problem with Lister being discovered on Earth, an old and tired man, and later dying of a heart attack. Seems a little ohIdontknowsortofmaybe hypocritical, perhaps.

Not really, since the end of “Better Than Life” says that he is going to spend 36 years on Backwards Earth, so that by the end of that – and in time for the beginning of the next book, presumably – he will be back at the physical age of 25. So he DOESN’T stay that way. That’s the difference.

(And at any rate, there’s a difference between aging someone and de-aging someone. Aging a character gives the reader an image in their mind’s eye of the same character, physically older but still the same – so in Lister’s case, you’d imagine Craig Charles in old-age makeup. On the other hand, de-aging the character to a teenager is altogether a much bigger change, and also carries with it all the baggage of “Younger and Edgier Recasting!”)

Although I do recall being majorly bored during the section based on Gunmen, and skipping some of it – whether that?s because I didn?t have the attention span back then, or whether it really DOESN?T work, I don?t know.

Did you that section at all? It’s a lot gorier than the other version.

As for choice, I used to think I’d go with Last Human… but I’m not sure. I liked return to the Backwards reality which the other skipped over, (although I agree concerning what happened with Kochanski, albeit I didn’t think of the contradiction – her not remembering in a forwards way.) I also liked the agonoid characters. I even go by the name of one on the main site. (Sort of.) Not sure why Rob Grant felt the need to rename ‘simulant’ to ‘agonoid’ though, they’re essentially the same as far as I can tell.

Thing is, that section is stuff you’ve seen already. (Mostly anyway.) You kinda know whats going to happen.

Lots of other original stuff though so it all balances out.

I think I promised I’d transcribe this about three years ago, but here’s an interview with Grant Naylor from Steve Lyons and Chris Howarth. This is from Volume 2, No. 6 of the Smegazine (dated October 1993) and is a minor part of a large feature on the then-upcoming series VI…

————————–

With the release date for the third Red Dwarf book, The Last Human, fast approaching, Steve Lyons and Chris Howarth also took their opportunity to ask writers Rob Grant and Doug Naylor how things were going.

“Actually,” Rob confesses “It’s hard to say because of, all the genres, a novel is the one you really have to plan and you really have to know where you’re going. It’s hard keeping a thirty-minute episode in your head, never mind a whole novel…well, I find it hard! So it’s the planning stage which is the hardest; you feel like you’re doing no work at all when you’re planning, but it is the hardest part”.

Although most of that planning has obviously been done now, the guys don’t want to give away much of the plotline of their latest epic just yet. “We might tell you we’re going to put something in and then we cut it”, explains Doug. “A week before we handed in the proofs for the first novel, Thanks for the Memory was in it” Rob adds, “and it all got cut”.

One of the first jobs for the writers is to pick up the plot threads left hanging at the end of the second novel, Better Than Life. As Rob explains, however, “Our aim is that people can pick up the third book and still enjoy it without really missing anything. Obviously, there are always going to be people who’ve read them all, but the idea is to try and make it as self-contained as possible”.

Those people who have read the story so far will recall that an aged Dave Lister has been left living a bizarre reverse life on an other dimensional, backwards-running Earth, where he is shortly to be partnered by the newly resurrected Kristine Kochanski. The third book, according to Doug, “does actually start the day after”. So, would it be too much, we wonder, if we asked for a hint as to whether Kochanski would be sticking around for any length of time. Actually: “It would, yes!” confirms Doug, with a laugh.

As the continuity of the novels drifts further and further away from that of the TV show, it seems less and less likely that Rob and Doug would be able to use any ideas from the show at all. “It’s about a 60-40 mix of new stuff to old”, says Doug – in fact, roughly the same sort of ratio that was apparent both in Better Than Life and in Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers. “When we first started out, ” Rob explains “we wondered if people would get really angry that they weren’t just getting transcripts of the TV shows in sequence. But we thought, well, that’s not what we’re interested in doing anyway.” Obviously, they made the right choice, as evidenced by the international best-selling status of the first two novels.

So how do they decide which episodes to adapt?

“There are always ideas that, though we really try to cram into half an hour, they’re really worth a lot more,” says Rob. “Better Than Life particularly, and that kind of thing – so when we’re thinking of TV ideas now, naturally novel ideas come up as well, and in the novel we’ll do one thing, but for the TV show we’ll do a more straightforward, cheaper version”.

The new book should be hitting the shelves at the end of October [!]; Penguin are obviously rushing it straight into the shops to tie in with the Television screening of Series 6. Perhaps the best news for many people is that we poorer fans will not be left hanging on for a paperback for a year, as with Better Than Life. Although Penguin do plan again to publish both hardback and paperback versions of The Last Human, these will be released simultaneously.

———————–

So, how much did Rob Grant and Doug Naylor write? Rather a lot, it seems.

First:
>Volume 2, No. 6 of the Smegazine (dated October 1993)

And then:
>The new book should be hitting the shelves at the end of October [!];

Forgive me if I’m being thicker than a hilarious comparison, but does this mean that the book was scheduled to come out that very month, or are they referring to next October?

If it was that very month then the thing…well…it should have been finished, barring corrections/minor rewrites.

If it was to be the following October, though, God knows…

They MUST have had an outline at least, surely. God, I’d love to read it. If it still exists!

I don’t know, give us Bodysnatcher and it spoils us…