DwarfCast 113 – Book Club #2: IWCD (Part Two)

66 comments on “DwarfCast 113 – Book Club #2: IWCD (Part Two)”

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• We love Kris Carter.

  You’re in there, Kris.

• This is perfect to sit and listen to in the park while drinking a couple of beers, he said while sat in the park listening to the episode, drinking a couple of beers.

• I really enjoyed this. Cheers lads.

  One thing that struck me when reading this part, was how little I was enjoying the parts that I knew from the TV. A few times I considered skipping over because I knew what was about to happen.

  Maybe that’s because I only re-read all the books last year so the content is quite fresh. But I enjoyed part one, that is more or less entirely new material, a lot more.

  It’s interesting seeing how they change certain aspect and weaving thing from different episodes together, but by a large, a chapter from Kryten or Me2 is close enough to the show to not need to read it.

  One thing that did strike me, was how much of this part is focused on Rimmer, because of the Me2 aspect, Lister really doesn’t do a lot at all. It’s mostly Rimmer coming to terms with death, then coming to terms with living with himself etc. Whereas Lister just has a bit of a breakdown, rebuilds Kryten, then goes mining, and that’s all given so little page space compared to Rimmer’s experiences.

• Remember the other week, when we all started this journey together? And I said of Rob and Doug’s writing,

  that very first, opening, capitalised introduction to chapter One is so striking, it’s actually exciting just to look at.
  […] It all just sounds nice.

  Well, Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers also has one of the finest final sentences of any novel I’ve ever read. It ends with a enigmatic smile and a knowing wink. Just marvellous.

• Listening to this, and hearing Symes refer to The Cat breaking his “tuth” with an ‘uh’, rather than “tooth” with an ‘oo’, is really bothering me.

• Re: Danny’s Passage.
  How do you think Chris in particular (and Craig, Danny and Robert in other assorted literary instances) felt about being so… well, abused, I suppose? Having his physical features – his nostrils, chin, nose, adam’s apple etc – picked on?

• The Brian Kidd thing has reminded me of something I wondered about. In the Omnibus, Rimmer says Lister’s read the same number of books as “Woolfie Sprogg, The Plasticine Dog”. Same in the non-Omnibus version, or Champion the Wonder Horse as per the episode? Part Two Chapter 15.

  I agree the way Lister treats Kryten is a bit off. The Rimmers getting Kryten to eat the glass shows that he really will blindly follow orders. Presumably Lister knows that if he ordered Kryten to help with the mining he’d just get on with it, but instead Lister persuades him to do it. He’s still reluctant of course, and then Lister does whack him on the head with a piece of ore, so it’s really not much of a defence.

  I’ve just read the last chapter again to see what the guys are on about. Ahhh! Never clocked that before. Very clever. Anyway, on to Part Three, but IAWL first. I’m enjoying this :)

• Anyway, on to Part Three, but IAWL first. I’m enjoying this

  Like Ian (and other G&T-ers, I can imagine), I’d never watched It’s A Wonderful Life before it cemented its place in Red Dwarf lore. And it’s now a big part of my Christmas-time, too.

  Mind you, I’d never actually watched BladeRunner before I was made aware of it’s effect on the creation of Back To Earth (despite it already residing on my DVD shelf), and I don’t think I’ve watched that again since.

• Here’s John’s history of the decative joke: https://www.ganymede.tv/2015/06/history-of-a-joke/

  Is Ian not thinking of “no Zargon warships” in ‘Waiting for God’, rather than Zygons?

• You know, I knew I’d missed a shownote somewhere…

• Don’t give me this Star Trek crap, it’s too early in the morning.

• Listening to this, and hearing Symes refer to The Cat breaking his “tuth” with an ‘uh’, rather than “tooth” with an ‘oo’, is really bothering me.

  You should loooook it up in a boooook.

• GOOD LOOK WITH THE BUCK

• And where does Lister say he wants to stop The Cat breaking his tuth?

• I listened to the audiobook (and BTL) as available on Spotify. Never listened before, but they must be heavily abridged versions.

  Having read the books 4 or 5 times over the last 20 years, I started noticing passages, or whole plot lines missing.

  E.g. They meet Kryten, learn about the Duality Drive, get a summary of Listers mining plan, then bam: Bedford Falls. No second Rimmer, no accidental crushing of multiple scutters as a result of petty one-upmanship.

• Ah, west midlanders saying tuth. A strange thing.

  I’d like to heap praise on this wonderful DwarfCast but, despite his wonderfully in-depth analysis of the book in the previous thread, I don’t think Dave deserves to be credited for my point about Lister’s lucky pants being both boxers and y-fronts.

  And yes, I always thought it was Zargon warships, not Zygon.

  Looking forward to reading Earth this week.

• I don’t think Dave deserves to be credited for my point about Lister’s lucky pants being both boxers and y-fronts

  Too late, it’s there for posterity now, I’ve stolen your credit. I’m the Thomas Edison of G&T.

• I listened to the audiobook (and BTL) as available on Spotify. Never listened before, but they must be heavily abridged versions.

  Having read the books 4 or 5 times over the last 20 years, I started noticing passages, or whole plot lines missing.
  E.g. They meet Kryten, learn about the Duality Drive, get a summary of Listers mining plan, then bam: Bedford Falls. No second Rimmer, no accidental crushing of multiple scutters as a result of petty one-upmanship.

  Not sure of the options these days, but the unabridged audio books are out there. The abridged ones were available on 2 cassettes, whereas unabridged was..I want to say 5? I never owned the unabridged ones on physical media and remember it being incredibly difficult to find them in shops in the nineties.

  The abridged ones are a terrible way to experience either of them to be brutal. In Infinity, it cuts so much of the post-accident stuff on board Red Dwarf (the status quo the first third of the book builds up to), that Lister appears to be stuck in deep space for a relatively short period. (Ok, we know the twist but STILL).

  The manner of Lister’s death is also changed at the end of BTL as all the Polymorph stuff is removed. It is such a big decision that it’s really quite surprising they went with that.

• The manner of Lister’s death is also changed at the end of BTL as all the Polymorph stuff is removed.

  SPOILERS MUCH?!

• I’d like to heap praise on this wonderful DwarfCast but, despite his wonderfully in-depth analysis of the book in the previous thread, I don’t think Dave deserves to be credited for my point about Lister’s lucky pants being both boxers and y-fronts.

  Whoops. Looking back at my notes I had everything properly attributed, I was just rushing to get through it so must’ve omitted your name. SORRY.

• The manner of Lister’s death is also changed at the end of BTL as all the Polymorph stuff is removed.

  SPOILERS MUCH?!

  Yeah, I left that out deliberately, another massive omission

• The versions on Audible are definitely unabridged, as that’s how I listened to them. I believe iTunes has the unabridged versions too, as long as you go for the audiobooks and not the “radio show” versions listed as albums.

  The downside is those storefronts require you to pay money, which is a bit unreasonable.

• The abridged is 4 hours long i believe. the unabridged is 8 hours long. so there is a lot cut out of the abridged.

• The abridged is 4 hours long i believe. the unabridged is 8 hours long. so there is a lot cut out of the abridged.

  Yep. I think the unabridged was 4 tapes. Unabridged was 8. I bought the audio book from Audible pre-Amazon buyout so it ended up in a format I couldn’t listen to it in, so I had to convert it to mp3. Which means now I can cut it up into Chapters.

• Whoops. Looking back at my notes I had everything properly attributed, I was just rushing to get through it so must’ve omitted your name. SORRY.

  I’m almost annoyed.

• Finally finished this Dwarfcast, and I just had to go back and reread that final page with the transition into Part Three to see what the secret giveaway was that you were talking about.

  I’d never noticed that before. Very clever.

• Some thoughts on ‘Earth’.

  -One question I’d like to ask everyone is: the first time you read this book, how long did it take you to realise that they were in Better Than Life? I can vividly remember feeling very stupid for not getting it until the U=BTL reveal. In retrospect it makes sense, especially given all the weird and wacky shit in Lister’s new life particularly, but up to that point I thought it was just the book suddenly getting very silly and weird and Hitchhiker’s-esque. I AM AN IDIOT.

  -The arrival on Earth in the Sahara feels incredibly cinematic. Another one of those moments that you can’t help but visualise in the imaginary movie version of this story. It’s also hard to not think of the aborted finale to series VIII and wonder whether it would have shared any resemblance.

  -On the handling of Better Than Life in general, I feel like this is the first time the books take something that didn’t quite work in the series (albeit only due to the budget limitations inevitably making it difficult to fully realise) and decides “right, we can do this better”. It’s so gloriously over-the-top and outrageously large-scale in places, and sells the idea of BTL much better than an overcast day out in Rhyl.

  -Like some of the earlier sections of the book, this version of Better Than Life is again a much darker and more disturbing take on an idea from the series. Doing BTL like this wouldn’t have worked in the show even if they did have the budget, but it’s fantastic drama for the book.

  -Did Rob and Doug know they had a contract for a second book when they wrote the first one? If so, the cliffhanger ending makes more sense, but if not then that’s a ballsy way to end the novel, potentially forever.

  -In our current era, there’s something very weird about Rimmer in BTL essentially becoming a parody of Donald Trump (the buildings named after him are the real giveaway). It feels a bit too harsh even for Rimmer. Has there ever been any indication that he aspires to that kind of corporate success? Or was that just society’s shorthand for success in the era when the book was written?

  -In lots of ways, Rimmer’s ideal existence is, curiously, not unlike the alternate life Lister manages to make for himself in Timeslides. So was that TV-Lister’s dream and Bedford Falls book-Lister’s? Or was a statue of himself urinating champagne and being hitched to Sabrina Mulholland-Jjones just an unintended consequence of TV-Lister’s plan?

  -The Solidgram is an interesting prototype of the hardlight hologram, years before Legion. I actually kind of like the elegance of the name, but maybe they thought it was too jargon-y and unnecessary for the TV series, and “hardlight hologram” is more obviously self-explanatory.

  -The one bit of this section that I didn’t really like was the slightly too on-the-nose explanation of Lister and Rimmer’s fantasies and what each of them wanted out of life. But then it acts as a necessary precursor to that great bit where each is jealous of the other’s fantasy, playing off the difference between conscious and subconscious desires.

  -Which maybe explains the Timeslides thing, come to think of it. That’s what Lister thinks he wants, but Bedford falls is what he actually wants.

• I always thought the paradise the people get trapped in Star Trek Generations was pretty much Better Than Life. Though I suppose false paradise traps were in sci fi before, Alan Moore’s Superman one for example and I’m sure in classic sci fi too.

  As for Rimmer being like Trump I guess that was a pop culture thing, Biff in Back to the Future for example. heck even blade runner.

• One question I’d like to ask everyone is: the first time you read this book, how long did it take you to realise that they were in Better Than Life? I can vividly remember feeling very stupid for not getting it until the U=BTL reveal. In retrospect it makes sense, especially given all the weird and wacky shit in Lister’s new life particularly, but up to that point I thought it was just the book suddenly getting very silly and weird and Hitchhiker’s-esque. I AM AN IDIOT.

  I honestly can’t remember what my experience of this was. It would have been at least 20 years ago and I’d have known the next books title so maybe I sort of assumed going into this section that it wasn’t all real anyway? Who knows.

  It’s good to see it did catch people out though.

  On the handling of Better Than Life in general, I feel like this is the first time the books take something that didn’t quite work in the series (albeit only due to the budget limitations inevitably making it difficult to fully realise) and decides “right, we can do this better”. It’s so gloriously over-the-top and outrageously large-scale in places, and sells the idea of BTL much better than an overcast day out in Rhyl.

  I think, on the whole, the books do better when they stay away from the scripts entirely and do something brand new. The open, pre-accident stuff in Infinity is much more interesting and perhaps even better written than the second section that is a mash up of 3 scripts with a bit of extra detail thrown in. the Me2 is only interesting in so much as that the two Rimmer’s have a reason to be competing with each other (fixing the Nova 5) but otherwise Future Echos and Kryten are bits I sort of wanted to skip over. I’d have liked to have seen more on Lister’s mining expedition, but as I said elsewhere, it’s interesting how this second of the book focuses much more on Rimmer than Lister, despite the book ostensibly being about the last guy alive and how he deals with it.

  Or was that just society’s shorthand for success in the era when the book was written?

  I think that was societies shorthand for success, especially late 80s and the end of the Thatcher/Regan era – boom and bust economics and all that. That was a massive drive for people to become wealthy. Also, Rimmer would never be successful in the Space Corp, but arriving back on earth and making something of himself post death (whatever that may be) was what he wanted.

  -In lots of ways, Rimmer’s ideal existence is, curiously, not unlike the alternate life Lister manages to make for himself in Timeslides. So was that TV-Lister’s dream and Bedford Falls book-Lister’s? Or was a statue of himself urinating champagne and being hitched to Sabrina Mulholland-Jjones just an unintended consequence of TV-Lister’s plan?

  In Timeslides, you can see a stark difference between young Lister who loathe money and possessions (and who likely be happy with a Bedford Falls lifestyle) and the older Lister who just wants to escape Red Dwarf, and making himself a millionaire so he didn’t have to sign up to Red Dwarf was his way of doing that. I’d also suggest (without evidence) that being a multi-millionaire would allow him to fulfil any dream he wanted. He could, had he chosen to, bought his farm on Fiji. But a) money changes people and b) perhaps the younger Lister hadn’t had that plan yet.

• In Timeslides, you can see a stark difference between young Lister who loathe money and possessions (and who likely be happy with a Bedford Falls lifestyle) and the older Lister who just wants to escape Red Dwarf, and making himself a millionaire so he didn’t have to sign up to Red Dwarf was his way of doing that.

  True. And I guess it’s interesting that (despite initially rejecting future-Lister’s offer of the tension sheet) young past-Lister does ultimately take him up on it and pursue that lifestyle. So maybe it was always in him to some extent.

• In Timeslides, you can see a stark difference between young Lister who loathe money and possessions (and who likely be happy with a Bedford Falls lifestyle) and the older Lister who just wants to escape Red Dwarf, and making himself a millionaire so he didn’t have to sign up to Red Dwarf was his way of doing that.

  True. And I guess it’s interesting that (despite initially rejecting future-Lister’s offer of the tension sheet) young past-Lister does ultimately take him up on it and pursue that lifestyle. So maybe it was always in him to some extent.

  One thing that’s never discussed, is exactly when young Lister “invents” the tension sheet. It could be much later when he’s had time to reflect on how his life is going, and not like the day after he meets his future self

  Although presumably it needs to be before Holden invents it. And it’s implied it was always invented when he was at school right?

  So actually, none of these timelines add up as Rimmer is older than Lister so even young Lister should have been too old to invent it.

• I don’t think Holden necessarily got the idea at school in the original timeline. That only happened after Rimmer went back and ‘fixed’ things.

• Rimmer/Thickie are 6 years older than Lister. Thickie is a millionaire at the age of 26, so we can assume that it’s around that time when he invents it (originally).

  Lister’s plan is that he goes back and gives the idea to patent the Tension sheet to himself at age 17. Note; he doesn’t need to publicise it, he just has to wait maybe 3 years for Thickie to try and do that and claim it infringes on his patent.

  When Holly says Rimmer has “put things back the way they were”, it’s just in terms of who the inventor was. Thickie ends up inventing it aged 8, so about 18 years earlier than in the original timeline.

• Rimmer/Thickie are 6 years older than Lister. Thickie is a millionaire at the age of 26, so we can assume that it’s around that time when he invents it (originally).

  Lister’s plan is that he goes back and gives the idea to patent the Tension sheet to himself at age 17. Note; he doesn’t need to publicise it, he just has to wait maybe 3 years for Thickie to try and do that and claim it infringes on his patent.
  When Holly says Rimmer has “put things back the way they were”, it’s just in terms of who the inventor was. Thickie ends up inventing it aged 8, so about 18 years earlier than in the original timeline.

  Ok that makes a lot of sense.

• Whether Thickie Holden actually thought up the Tension Sheet, or it was just an infinite loop of Rimmer telling him about it, has kept me up at night before.

• I always find the stuff about Jim and Bexley creepy, and imagine them looking a bit unlifelike, like unconvincing CGI like you get in adverts where babies sing and dance etc., or with Syncro-vox mouths or something. I do like that bit though, where Lister realises what the messages on his arms mean, and the idea of what’s really going on there as his brain fights against the game.

  Couple of things I was struck by when watching IAWL: the GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS sign in Pottersville, very similar to the one on Mimas in Part 1 of Infinity. And young George mentioning Fiji when he’s telling Mary where coconuts come from, and talking about going exploring one day.

• Earth, then.

  One: I’d forgotten just how early on they throw a curveball that things aren’t right. In my head you’re led to believe that it’s all possibly real for at least a few chapters, but the arm message immediately tells you something’s very wrong here.

  Two: The Solidgram is definitely a precursor to hardlight. It probably wasn’t something they said “we’ll do this on screen at one point” about, but the immortal line feels too familiar for them not to have used it as a model.
  Rimmer wanting to buy Bedford Falls and turn it into a maggot farm is proper nasty series 1 Rimmer at play.
  The phrase ‘salute-shaped pool’ really makes me laugh.
  I love how Rimmer is so unimaginative that his Brazilian wife is called Juanita Chicita. Everything about that marriage is unpleasant, from the fact that she was probably 17 when they met, to the use of the word ‘acquired’.

  Three: The description of Kochanski is kind of the point you give up thinking this is reality. Still surprised it’s so soon. And yes, the babies are really fucking creepy.

  Four: The fact that Rimmer is not only willing, but almost happy to shoot Lister a few million seems at odds with the maggot farm idea, and feels more like series 2 Rimmer: if they’re not quite friends, they’re still very fond of each other.

  Six: Lister and Rimmer both being embarrassed of their fantasies and jealous of the other’s is really interesting. They both know their ideal lives are somewhat cliched and, if they knew they were playing the game, they might want to challenge themselves a bit more.

  Seven: Is Cat’s fish tank meal the only thing that happens in both the TV and book versions of the game?

  Nine: Those last two sentences are so ominous.

  It’s funny, that book felt really long to me when I first read it, but I got through each section so quickly this time. I suppose age and reading experience fed into that.

  On the whole I enjoyed it a lot. As with the general consensus, the weakest bits are those that are copied directly from the scripts. The rest, especially those that expand on things only hinted at on screen, is really superb though.

• What happened to Five and Eight? Did you put two Septembers in the calendar by mistake?

• Four: The fact that Rimmer is not only willing, but almost happy to shoot Lister a few million seems at odds with the maggot farm idea, and feels more like series 2 Rimmer: if they’re not quite friends, they’re still very fond of each other.

  I read that the other way. That’s Rimmer making a gesture that costs him nothing (relatively-speaking, considering his wealth), but simply asserts “how much better” he’s done than Lister.

• It’s funny, that book felt really long to me when I first read it, but I got through each section so quickly this time. I suppose age and reading experience fed into that.

  It is a relatively short book. Especially if you’re used to longer more complicated reads. It’s at the very bottom end of novel length I think, at 300 pages, and it’s written with uncomplicated language so you can blast through it quite easily.

• Thank you for keeping the comments coming – we will be picking up where we left off at some point, we just don’t yet know when. Won’t be too long. We’ll keep you posted and try to give you a bit of notice before we record.

• It’s at the very bottom end of novel length I think, at 300 pages

  Not to “actually…” you, but actually there are a lot of novels shorter than 300 pages, including a huge number of ‘classics’.

  What I am surprised about, having Googled it, is that it turns out to be the shortest Dwarf novel. I could have sworn Better Than Life was even shorter.

• I recall finishing them all in one day on first reads, aside from Backwards…which took a tiny bit longer.

• I recall finishing them all in one day on first reads, aside from Backwards…which took a tiny bit longer.

  From back cover to front.

• It’s at the very bottom end of novel length I think, at 300 pages

  Not to “actually…” you, but actually there are a lot of novels shorter than 300 pages, including a huge number of ‘classics’.
  What I am surprised about, having Googled it, is that it turns out to be the shortest Dwarf novel. I could have sworn Better Than Life was even shorter.

  A novel is anything over 50,000 words, so page count isn’t indicative of length. But for the page and print size of IWCD, 300 pages is around that mark. So you’ll get shorter and longer page counts, but that’s something of an average I think. I could be completely wrong and chatting out of my arse of course.

• You talk a bit about the order of experiencing these. So: my first Red Dwarf was V, then I’m not sure what order I watched the rest and read the books exactly; but certainly I had read this by the time the first series came out on video. As such I was actually a bit disappointed by “The End” when I first saw it – I was expecting to see Mimas, I wanted the Cat civilisation, and I had exactly no conception that those things would have been unachievable, or even that they hadn’t been devised.

• Another excellent edition of the Book Club! When re-reading I thought that there wouldn’t be as much to discuss with so much being direct TV adaptation compared to Part 1, but I needn’t have worried. And I can’t believe I waited over a year to find out my comment was read out. Cool.

  – Didn’t mention it last time because it technically becomes relevant in Part 2 and I didn’t want to risk repeating anyone, but: it’s so perfect that Rimmer pre-accident is obsessed with spending time in stasis so that he’ll eventually be younger than Lister, and then his wish comes true in the most ironic way when he gets killed and brought back as a hologram, stuck with a simulation of his 30 year old body forever. It’s a detail that was implicitly swept away in the TV series due to Chris Barrie aging, but that wouldn’t have been apparent at writing or publication time.

  – This is actually common between the TV episode and the book, but it wasn’t until this re-read that I twigged the Future Echoes plot hole – that Lister should know he’s not going to die in a navicomp explosion (or at least not yet, anyway) because he’s already seen the future echo of the photo of him and his babies, and he hasn’t taken it yet. He points out this contradiction *after* he’s survived his navicomp repair job, but given he was desperate to find a way to deny his oncoming fate, it doesn’t really make sense that he wouldn’t realise that earlier. (You can imagine Lister behaving similarly to in Cassandra, or Arthur Dent in Hitchhiker’s, arrogantly embracing any danger safe in the knowledge that he ‘can’t’ die until after that future echo has occurred for real. In fact he should have done that anyway maybe, given he sees himself as an old man.) Given that it’s both a plot hole and a detail that was tricky to make work emotionally AND they don’t (AFAIK) adapt Parallel Universe at all or pay off Jim and Bexley in the books, it’s kind of weird that Rob and Doug bothered to keep the babies stuff. They maybe could have come up with another way of explaining how Lister could appear to die in a future echo without actually dying.

  – Small detail, but I agree with Loathsome American that “rip his tits off” is not as funny as “rip his nipples off”. I know the former is ruder and so maybe they were excited to be in a medium where they could get away with it, but “nipples” is just a funnier sounding word to me. Maybe it’s the extra syllable.

  – Interesting that, aside from Lister getting irritated at Rimmer for choosing to duplicate himself rather than bring back anyone else, the plot thread where Lister tries to find ways of overriding Holly’s decision to bring back Rimmer is dropped. I guess book Lister had a shift in priorities away from making his life on Red Dwarf more bearable and towards getting back to Earth more proactively. Or maybe Kochanski being his ex in this continuity has made him less deluded about how things would be if he did bring her back. OR maybe Holly’s decision regarding holograms is final in the books, and can’t be overridden just by Lister getting promoted above Rimmer. Seeing how Lister applies himself to learn all about duality drive fuel and thorium mining, there’s no way book Lister would fail the chef’s exam in Balance of Power.

  – I love the sections which detail the history of the cat race deep in the bowels of Red Dwarf. The whole “the cats not only survived, but evolved over millions of years in a spaceship without any other species around” detail has always been the most inexplicable aspect of the premise for me, but the way IWCD tells it makes it the most believable it’s probably possible to be. (Even if extreme good luck is still required for there to be 1 or 2 Cats on board when Lister gets unfrozen, and not either of the 2 most likely options: 0, or a fuckton.)

  – Can’t disagree that getting to hear Holly’s inner thoughts is great, but I do disagree that it makes book Holly definitively better than TV Holly. The absence of a lot of the banter between Holly and the other characters is definitely felt, and unless my memory’s letting me down, the plot of Queeg never makes it into the novels, and Queeg is Holly’s best episode. (Plus book Holly never gets to become the Hayridge version, who I do prefer.)

  – Related to the above point, this part did confirm that the lack of settling into any kind of status quo on the ship did bother me. What we get is great, but by making every story directly segue into the next, the idea that any of these characters have amassed any fondness for each other doesn’t really scan. It’s not for nothing because it does make the setting feel very dangerous and chaotic, but the TV show’s vibe of “most of the time they’re just chilling, occasionally something crazy happens” is a lot more inviting to me.

  – I viscerally dislike Kryten being responsible for the Nova 5 crash (and thus resent it becoming canon in Ouroboros). “Being a cleaning robot on a spaceship” is literally Kryten’s entire purpose and all he’s programmed to do. The idea that he would excitedly clean the insides of computers and such just doesn’t… uh, wash. It’s ironic that IWCD takes away Rimmer’s responsibility for Red Dwarf’s radiation leak too, because he’s the one who’s actually *meant* to be incompetent. It’s just so bleak to burden a character who’s so conscientious and susceptible to guilt with such a tragedy. Even taken on its own terms, I don’t think it works for Kryten’s character arc either. Kryten’s cleaning causes the deaths of his crew, and he reacts to this by… refusing to do any work that isn’t cleaning. Surely this is backwards. What *should* have happened perhaps, is that Kryten should have broken his programming somewhat on board the Nova 5 and took an active interest in engineering, which his crewmates indulged. Then he botches a repair job on the engine or something, and this is what causes the crash. So then he concludes that going outside the bounds of his programming is evil, and retreats into only doing his cleaning duties. Then Lister can convince him otherwise. I still wouldn’t love it, but it would be a lot better (because the crash would be more the fault of his human crewmates for letting him carry out the repair, similar to the Rimmer situation), and that’s my personal headcanon for the TV continuity.

  – The way the plots of Future Echoes, Kryten and Me^2 are tied together is very impressive and gives the story a good sense of forward momentum, but it’s still disappointing to lose the second half of ‘Kryten’. Rimmer (or rather the Rimmers) takes advantage of Kryten’s servile nature, but never gets his comeuppance. And Lister reflects on how he abhors Kryten being a slave and is so close to getting him to open up about his desire to have a garden, but then suddenly pivots to “hey, want to help me with some mining?”. It’s like he could feel Rob and Doug pulling his strings in order to move the plot along. An adaptation of ‘Kryten’ which doesn’t end in Kryten breaking his programming and paving the way for him to become an equal member of the crew is a failure as far as I’m concerned.

  – You mention how Rimmer insists he had no intentions of “funny business” with the escort he hired to be his date on Gazpacho Soup Day, and that this is showing Rimmer’s virtuous side. I totally disagree with this, because there’s nothing inherently immoral about hiring a sex worker to actually do sexual things. If Rimmer got the sense that she was being trafficked or just generally hated her job, then sure, but in context it’s clear that Rimmer is just sexually intimidated by women and would rather think of himself as “above” the desire to hire an escort for anything non-superficial, than try to have sex with her and then bottle it. (Side note: I genuinely LOLed reading “They ask me where my date is, and I panic and tell them she was killed in a road accident earlier in the evening, but I’m over it now.”)

  – “U = BIL? Wait a minute, I don’t understand how you’re supposed to become a brother-in-law without having any siblings or potential spouses who have siblings on this ship.” / “Neither do I, but it’s going to be a laugh finding out!”

  – I would love to read a breakdown of all the changes made for the Omnibus, and I hope it eventually gets written, but I don’t envy the person who has to do it. The atrocity that is “Zero-G Football: It’s a Funny Old Game by Joe Klump” does make we wonder what I’m missing out on by not reading the original editions.

• I wonder where and how Thanks for the Memory would have fit in (supposedly included until a late edit). That might have addressed some of your issues, but probably would’ve been a bit convoluted for a self-contained diversion.

  Future Echoes is obviously the most disposable bit as it stands (cut from the abridged audiobook along with Me2), but I do like it hanging over the rest of the series as a sort of happy ending for Lister and keeping continuity on its toes.

• I wonder where and how Thanks for the Memory would have fit in (supposedly included until a late edit).

  Oooh, I didn’t know that. Where’s that nugget from?

• I wonder where and how Thanks for the Memory would have fit in (supposedly included until a late edit).

  Oooh, I didn’t know that. Where’s that nugget from?

  Vintage TOS: https://www.reddwarf.co.uk/features/history/never-read-a-book-1/

  Also present is the Yvonne McGruder story from Thanks for the Memory. The rest of this story was actually in the proofs for the book until a week before they were handed to Penguin. A fuller look at the cat saga was also excised before publication.

• Also present is the Yvonne McGruder story from Thanks for the Memory

  Interesting that that was left in. Possibly Rimmer’s son was planned for a future Grant Naylor novel.

• Ah, now that is intriguing! I guess that Thanks For The Memory could have fit in between Future Echoes and Kryten or between Kryten and Me^2, although the former would be an easier fit because you’d have to make Rimmer either delay his investigation of the Nova 5’s holo suite so he could party and get drunk with Lister and Cat, or do TFTM with 2 Rimmers.

  It’s a bit disappointing that it didn’t make the cut, because that episode was a great relationship builder for Rimmer and Lister, but in a weird way it might not have worked. Because the plot doesn’t really happen without Lister and Rimmer having already built up their relationship by quite a lot (i.e. they’ve already experienced Me^2); Lister gives Rimmer his memories of Lise because he feels sorry for Rimmer not having had any meaningful romantic relationships in his life, and I refuse to believe that book Lister would even give a shit, let alone give so much of a shit that he shares something that personal with him.

  On an unrelated note, I realised reading this part that I totally misread something in Part 1. I thought that Gazpacho Soup day was also the day Rimmer had his final exam failure and the day he died (somehow), but the line is “Two of the three worst things that ever happened to Rimmer happened to Rimmer on this day”. Two, not All. Whoops. So the momentousness of that day wasn’t *quite* as unlikely as I thought. I must have just glossed over the part immediately afterwards where it explicitly said it happened “thirteen months earlier” too. From the TV show I had always assumed that the gazpacho soup incident occurred while Lister was in stasis for some reason, so that must have influenced my brain while reading.

  But hang on, if GSD was 13 months before the radiation leak and 5 months after Rimmer joined the company, that means Rimmer had only been on Red Dwarf for 18 months total before he died. How does that square with his long service medals, up to 9 years?

• Cutting Thanks for the Memory and more Cat race backstory. Either this sections were somehow awful, or Rob and Doug did us out of some great material that needs to find its way online somehow.

• But hang on, if GSD was 13 months before the radiation leak and 5 months after Rimmer joined the company, that means Rimmer had only been on Red Dwarf for 18 months total before he died. How does that square with his long service medals, up to 9 years?

  He’d served on other ships presumably. In the TV show he says he’d been with the company 14 years. But maybe Rimmer in the book had worked elsewhere within the Space Corp then joined JMC relatively recently.

• Hmm, OK, that’s a good explanation, but so much emphasis is placed on the particular rut Rimmer is entrenched in on Red Dwarf, it definitely feels a bit off if he’s only been there slightly longer than Lister. Makes it seem more like an outright mistake.

• Oh yeah it’s definitely a worse retcon. The show seems to make it more explicit that he’s been on Red Dwarf all that time, which is just sadder and feel wrong because as you say, Rimmer’s hopelessness being stuck in the same position on the same ship … So much of Rimmer’s personality feels linked to that

• The show seems to make it more explicit that he’s been on Red Dwarf all that time, which is just sadder

  Not based on anything, but I prefer to think TV Rimmer was only on Red Dwarf for the last few years of his life, since it’s depressing enough that he’s stuck there forever after. Maybe spending 10 years as a third technician on one or two other functionally similar posts before getting promoted and transferred out of pity / to get rid of him. Okay, it’s not significantly less depressing.

• Something that I don’t think was discussed, but re it being Lister’s grandson who Rimmer sees blown up, do you think at this point Rob and Doug were still intending to resolve that plot point in the books (And even the show) at this point.

  Because otherwise why bother including it?

  After the book was released, series 3 quickly follows with an explanation as to why the twins aren’t around. So they’ve already seemingly decided to move away from that story line

  But in the books they have more opportunity to bring in twins and keep them around had they wanted to.

  It wouldn’t have mattered one bit if the future echos section removed the bits where Rimmer believes he saw Lister die and it turning out to be his grandson. You’d lose a couple of pages of drama and tension but that doesn’t really matter.

  Also, deciding to change it to his grandson, whilst done to make the relative a further generation removed, implies that his sons find suitable female partners … so if they had been intending to resolve that storyline in the books in some way they’d have to be thinking that they’d have to somehow bring more female human characters into it several in story decades down the line.

  I’m sure they weren’t thinking about any of this at all and they just chuck it in the book and forget about it … but it certainly raises some questions about what might have happened.

• Within the confines of a stand-alone novel, it makes Lister’s BTL children more credible for a while, with the nagging doubt of why he’d still be aboard Red Dwarf later (theoretically).

• Yeah you could in the moment of reading the book for the first time, had you never seen the show perhaps, remember the bit about Lister having family (and being old in his bunk) but forgetting that it’s on Red Dwarf and he is supposedly back on Earth.

• >It wouldn’t have mattered one bit if the future echos section removed the bits where Rimmer believes he saw Lister die and it turning out to be his grandson. You’d lose a couple of pages of drama and tension but that doesn’t really matter.

  The reason it’s in the novel is the same as the show; rationalising why Lister doesn’t go back into stasis because he knows he’ll meet a woman if he sticks around.

• But that’s unnecessary, because almost immediately after the future echos they find Kryten and a way home, so the idea of stasis wouldn’t be an issue.

  Also, whilst we generally accept Lister doesn’t go into stasis because he sees he has a future, that’s never confirmed anywhere is it, that’s very much a fan headcanon that we all subscribe too as it makes sense especially with it being the shows second episode.

• “Since Lister realised he couldn’t possibly go into stasis, on the grounds that the future echoes of himself had told him that he didn’t, he decided that he wouldn’t, and instead he’d tried to make the best of a difficult situation”

  The idea of stasis (which was not so much an idea, as something they were literally about to do, before they broke the light barrier) is dismissed before Kryten shows up. Kryten, I’d imagine, would be treated with the same mindset as Rimmer – turn him off until they get back to Earth.

  The TV show, meanwhile, begins with Lister rationalising why he’s not prepared to spend the rest of his life with just Rimmer and the Cat for company, and ends with him telling Rimmer that “it’s going to be a lot of fun finding out” where he gets a woman from. That’s not head canon – it’s clearly resolving the conflict from the start of the episode.

• Ah I forgot that it’s laid out in the book.

  Still though, the part with his future generations could still be removed and not have an impact. They can be preparing to go into stasis, after the future echos, when they get the distress call from Kryten and so on.

• Yeah, I guess the promise of meeting Kryten’s female crew and then the prospect of using the duality drive to quickly get back to Earth (which undermines the potential for Lister procreating on Red Dwarf, anyway) would be a decent distraction from stasis.

  Future Lister does give an effective conclusion to that bit of the book, though. And the drunk Lister stuff is some of my favourite material in Infinity.

• Yeah future Lister gives a nice conclusion, just all feels a little unnecessary when they must have known at that point they would never realise those futures (unlike in the show which they didn’t know where it would go at the time) and especially when they immediately go onto write their way out of having to deal with the twins thing in the show.

  Its just, unlike lots of other areas of the book where they have expanded on story telling, histories, and made sense of some stuff that the show does, it’s like they’ve uncritically lifted the future echos bit wholesale and dumped it in with no thought.

  Unless they did have some idea that future books would lead them to Lister having a family and the break in the writing partnership put a crimp on that. Maybe that’s why Doug ends Last Human on Lister and Kochanski together hinting at having kids. Because Doug had in the back of his mind that was always where the books would lead.

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