Titan Titbits

After the superb video marketing campaign seemingly came to a close on Friday, we are now entering the final ever week in which Red Dwarf: Titan is not either on your bookshelf or in your sweaty hands. There are TEN DAYS TO GO until the fifth Red Dwarf novel is released, and consequently we’re starting to see more and more coverage appear outside of our little fandom bubble. We’re anticipating that this will only increase as the release draws ever closer, so here’s a handy front page post for keeping track of it all. If you spot anything out there in the wild, do feel free to pop it in the comments below, for everyone to enjoy.

To kick us off, over the weekend the honour of the first published review of the book went to Jess Phillips (not that one, presumably) 0f the Daily Express. It’s brief and deliberately vague in order to avoid giving any spoilers away, but extremely positive. It seems to confirm what everybody expected – that Kryten and Cat do indeed appear in the book somehow – and also implies some sort of song and dance routine takes place. Mostly though it’s just filled with praise and enthusiasm, which is very reassuring to see from a reviewer who’s clearly a big fan of the series.

Even more excitingly, G&T regular Dax101 has spotted that audiobook retailer Xigxag includes a three-minute preview in their listing. Don’t worry, it’s completely safe to listen to, spoiler wise. It seems to be the very start of the book, judging by the inclusion of the book’s strapline and what sounds like a foreign and/or alien version of the word “prologue”, and it concerns a hotel employee accidentally making eye contact with her “big cheese” customer, and immediately fearing for her life. And once again, if you need any reassurance that this is Red Dwarf as we know and love it, it’s right here.

Finally for now, as a lot of people have been pondering exactly how G&T will be covering the book, here’s a little breakdown of our plans.

Wednesday 15th July – Let’s Talk About Titan post on the front page, for spoiler-free discussion and first impressions (this may be brought forward if a significant amount of people start receiving their pre-orders early)

Thursday 16th July – A number of spoilerific Let’s Talk About Titan posts in the forum, one for each part of the book. This is for the in-depth, nitty-gritty, anything goes chat. You should be able to dive in to each thread as you finish the corresponding part.

Friday 17th July – Our review published, which will discuss the tone, the style, the structure, the setting and the characters, but not the details of the plot, which means it should be safe to read no matter how much of the book you’ve got through.

Then rather inconveniently we’re all going on holiday together, but from August and into the Autumn, we’ll be resurrecting the DwarfCast Book Club, with a series of podcasts covering each and every chapter of the book in extreme detail. We are very, very excited for this. Here it comes!