Titan: Part 5 & Epilogue – SPOILERS

[Ian Symes]

Welcome to the spoiler-laden discussion thread for Red Dwarf: Titan Part 5: Terug Op Rooi Dwerg and the Epilogue.

This is a place for no-holds-barred, detailed, nitty-gritty opinions and theories on everything in the final part of the book, and indeed your overall thoughts on the story as a whole. So if you haven’t yet finished the book, get out of here immediately.

Your comments may be used in the DwarfCast Book Club at a future date, so if your point is related to a specific sub-chapter, do mark it clearly.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

 

Topic

[Warbodog]

The contrasting small scale was something I liked about it – down from Red Dwarf, mucking around in this setting for one book, back up to Red Dwarf. It reminded me of when I played Beneath a Steel Sky, all set across levels in one city, after being used to more sprawling adventure games like the Monkey Islands.

[Flap Jack]

It feels too soon to be doing a full ranking, but I can say with confidence that Titan ranks above Last Human for me, because although Last Human is doing more emotionally resonant storytelling with clearer character development in theory, in practice it does it too crappily for me to care.

Also Titan doesn’t have a comedy rape chapter. That counts for a lot.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

Last Human is like Timewave for me, I don’t ever want to read it again. It’s a really badly written book that is so out of step with the rest of the series 

So Titan ranks above, easily

I think the continuity and the fact it feels so much like extensions of the show, written at the same time as the show, Infinity-BTL-Backward will all rank above Titan. But I’d kinda re-read Titan as its own thing and enjoy it for its own sake. Which is what i imagine Rob and Andrew intended. So in a way it’s also hard to rank it alongside the others. It’s like asking me if a book from a different series is better or worse. They’re different things existing on their own merits 

[Podey]

I’ll have more thoughts when I’ve done a reread but there are just loads of original scenes in ‘Last Human’ that I really loved when I first read it and the whole plot of evil Lister killing his crew and taking the place of ours is one of my favourite aspects of all the books, I always wanted to see that adapted. But then, I can understand why so many dislike it as it’s very ‘series VII’ and I’m rare in enjoying the drama/comedy mix. 

With ‘Titan’, I don’t really mind the scope of the story (it’s a fun caper and has plenty of “cinematic” moments), I guess it’s just that the setting/premise never interested me and several really pivotal plot points feel unfinished. This one just has issues with internal logic that I don’t recall finding in any of the others.

[Warbodog]

My teenage memory of Last Human is all about the early stuff with the GELFs and Cyberia, which I liked, and the sex, which was funny to show my neighbour in school silent reading sessions. I don’t know how long it took me to get through the rest (bulk) of the book, but it was a slog that I mostly delayed and might even have skim-read in the end, since I didn’t remember too much before reading it again a few years back.

[Dave]

When I first read Last Human I was quite into the story and didn’t see all of its flaws. It was also quite a big deal for me that it gave Red Dwarf a fairly definitive ending. But subsequent rereading made me realise how sloppy it is in places and how poorly a lot of it holds together. It’s still worth a read as there are some decent ideas in there, but for me it’s comfortably the weakest of the novels.

Unfortunately, IWCD, BTL and Backwards are so strong that Titan might still come in fourth, despite being mostly very good.

[tombow]

I’ve recently wondered, when Doug and Rob first came up with the “baby Lister was found in a box” thing, was it so they could do something with the story of his birth, or originally just a way to make Lister’s origin seem more humble?

[Asclepius]

Agreed with some other writers here. I don’t think Titan really ‘gets inside’ any characters. There’s a bit of surface motivation (Kochanski isn’t that keen on her future husband…) but what makes Rimmer and Lister risk their lives to save…alternate universes? The future in 3 million years…? I don’t know.

Other writers have said they liked the smaller scale. And I suppose that’s the trouble here. 30 years since the last book, and 6 years since the last Dwarf TV, there’s a lot hanging on this. And also when one considers the legal battles, the remove of Doug from the Grant Naylor board, the brakes being put on Doug’s chance of future episodes (that now seems to have been permanent, given that all momentum was killed) and what’s to show for it? A book that’s….just ok. Rob’s “buttskis” remark was widely mocked at the time – it felt as if the fans knew better than him that he’d struggle to get any Dwarf on screen, and over those years he seemed to realise this, too. But all that fighting, the expenses of a court case, and for…this. At the expense of everything else. It wasn’t worth it.

I think, as well, I also didn’t notice the flaws in Last Human when I was 15 and reading it. It was a good plot that powered me along, and put in bits of episodes I knew well. 

[JimReaper]

I’ve recently wondered, when Doug and Rob first came up with the “baby Lister was found in a box” thing, was it so they could do something with the story of his birth, or originally just a way to make Lister’s origin seem more humble?

I seem to remember Doug in an interview saying that they’d planned to do something plotty with Lister’s origins but had never settled on anything and that the he’s-his-own-father storyline was something he came up with himself.

[Ian Symes]

And also when one considers the legal battles, the remove of Doug from the Grant Naylor board, the brakes being put on Doug’s chance of future episodes (that now seems to have been permanent, given that all momentum was killed) and what’s to show for it? A book that’s….just ok. Rob’s “buttskis” remark was widely mocked at the time – it felt as if the fans knew better than him that he’d struggle to get any Dwarf on screen, and over those years he seemed to realise this, too. But all that fighting, the expenses of a court case, and for…this. At the expense of everything else.

Reminder that Doug had written, contractual, legally binding permission from all of Red Dwarf’s stakeholders to continue making Red Dwarf on TV. It was the pandemic that killed the momentum, followed by a fundamental change in the broadcaster’s commissioning strategy.

[Ian Symes]

Plus, it wasn’t exactly Rob’s choice to just do one book and leave it at that.

[Warbodog]

I’ve recently wondered, when Doug and Rob first came up with the “baby Lister was found in a box” thing, was it so they could do something with the story of his birth, or originally just a way to make Lister’s origin seem more humble?

They originally wrote this extremely disappointing scene for Timeslides:

I guess the most interesting thing is that it would have been the first mention of the box story, which they kept for The Last Day regardless.

[clem]

I’m reading Titan again and I’ve been reading these spoilery threads again as well, and have just realised I didn’t even post in this one. So here are some of my thoughts as I was reading Part 5:

I knew a bunch of stuff Willy Wonka says in the 1971 film is quotes from various writers such as Shakespeare, Arthur O’Shaughnessy etc. But I was today years old when I learned that Part 5’s epigraph, from The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, is one of them.

Having read people’s comments in this thread I’m wondering what exactly is happening at the end of the book. When Lister, Rimmer, Cat and Carzon are trying to get off Red Dwarf and back to Titan, don’t they still intend to prevent the radiation leak by getting what they need from Count Silicon to eradicate the virus, and returning to Red Dwarf with it on the sister ship? That’s the plan in  Chapter 5 anyway. If I’ve understood things correctly, all they need to do to save the universe(s) is to ensure that Lister doesn’t get put into stasis so that he won’t exist three million years into the future, which they succeed in doing by getting him off the ship. But Red Dwarf is fucked unless they get back and fix Zorro Holly. Either way Carzon’s plan is pretty crazy. I get his reasoning behind escaping unpredictably in order to evade the Destiny Engine but it seems likely the gargage pod will either crash into the Xanadu dome or crash-land outside it, in the middle of nowhere. 

Anyway, overall I’m really happy with Titan.  I like that its very much its own thing and I’m going to tentatively rate it higher than both of the solo novels. As others have said it’s not as deep as the other novels, especially the Grant Naylor ones, but I think it succeeds on its own terms despite being overly florid and a bit chaotic in places. It’s the Red Dwarf book I didn’t know I wanted. Thanks, Rob. Throb. (And Andrew of course.)

[Flap Jack]

Preventing Lister from being put into stasis or just getting him off the ship entirely would be sufficient to save the universe, but saving the lives of everyone on board Red Dwarf is a desirable stretch goal.

The Destiny Engine is definitely the most confusing aspect of Titan, because it’s essential to everything, but I finished the story with basically no clarity on how it works or what it even is. I get that it’s a malevolent force which is distorting reality so that events are so similar to those in the prime universe that the universes destroy each other, but why are some defiances of destiny merely difficult while others are impossible? It’s apparently critical that the Zorro virus is set, and that Lister gets put into stasis for smuggling a Cat on board, but Lister replacing his cat with a cat-like humanoid and escaping the ship is doable, while warning the Captain about the virus just isn’t.

Maybe the Destiny Engine can be defied more easily as long as it’s still possible for things to get back on course (Lister could go into stasis for a different reason, and they plan to come back to the ship), but that just makes it seem like things are ultimately hopeless no matter what they do.

[Author]

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