Where do they get their crazy ideas from?

[Warbodog]

Speculating on the direct influences behind specific sci-fi concepts in Red Dwarf (or philosophical/psychological concepts explored, if you’re deep).

Beyond the established sci-fi and comedy influences on the series’ tone, setting, characters and aesthetics, and episode-specific homages or references that are usually namechecked anyway, have you noticed any other possible influences behind those zany ideas in the multimedia science fiction comedy franchise ‘Red Dwarf’?

Here are some thoughts.

Me2 / Parallel Universe / Ouroboros: Robert A. Heinlein’s ‘All You Zombies’ (1959, more recently filmed as Predestination) is the classic “really elaborate wank” story. David Gerrold’s The Man Who Folded Himself (1973) covers similar ground, with the added B-plot of not getting along with your double. Isn’t it strange that Lister getting pregnant after having sex with his counterpart and Lister being his own father are unrelated plots?

Thanks for the Memory: Back to Earth’s claim that Blade Runner is the unrecognisable basis of the whole series is just bizarre, but it’s likely the basis for this story of implanting false memories in a synthetic being. The mystery plot is obviously from that Star Trek episode that came out three years later.

Backwards: The best known and most eloquent reverse narrative might be that bit in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Philip K. Dick’s Counter-Clock World (1967) is a wider exploration of a world where you eat through your arse that has similar bad internal logic to Red Dwarf’s.

Terrorform: Roger Zelazny’s Isle of the Dead (1969) has psychic terraforming. The book also has accidental oversleeping in stasis, but that goes back to sci-fi takes on Rip van Winkle.

Were there hologram characters before Rimmer?

Does anything else commit so fully to the fatalist approach to time travel seen in Future Echoes / Stasis Leak / Cassandra?

Can you ruin Back to Reality?

[Warbodog]

Does anything else commit so fully to the fatalist approach to time travel seen in Future Echoes / Stasis Leak / Cassandra?

Oh yeah, Bill & Ted (which came later). Though that seemed to be abandoned in the third film, unless they had to commit to going to prison and stuff for show.

[Dave]

I wondered whether Philip K Dick’s The Man In The High Castle might have vaguely inspired some of the alternate reality stuff seen throughout the series – more the Dimension Jump/Inquisitor type splitting/parallel timelines kind of stories, rather than the Parallel Universe/Skipper silly alternate realities.

[Warbodog]

vaguely inspired

I think Rob read a load of science fiction growing up that stayed in his head and sparked ideas or led to other ideas. The film influences are more obvious because they have the associated look.

Like the scene I just remembered where Starbug lands in a park on Earth using its one-episode cloaking device that’s blatantly from Star Trek IV, whether they remembered that or Starbug’s Klingonny look just brought it out.

[Dave]

Does anything else commit so fully to the fatalist approach to time travel seen in Future Echoes / Stasis Leak / Cassandra?

The first Terminator maybe? Which also shows its influence in The Last Day and Inquisitor as well as the simulants in general.

[Warbodog]

Of course! Good one.

Kryten (original), while knowingly being a stock character type, is like C-3PO via Woody Allen’s Sleeper (1973), held up by Doug as a landmark of sci-fi comedy. It also has the head shelf from DNA:

[International Debris]

Does anything else commit so fully to the fatalist approach to time travel seen in Future Echoes / Stasis Leak / Cassandra?

Hartnell-era Doctor Who story The Aztecs. The Doctor tells Barbara there is no point in trying to save lives: “You can’t rewrite history! Not one line!”
Obviously it all changed in later years.

[Warbodog]

Were there hologram characters before Rimmer?

George McIntyre.

[Jenuall]

“You can’t rewrite history!”

“but Doctor, aren’t we already re-writing it just by being here?”

…

“Wibbly Wobbly etc.”

[Pete Part Three]

>Does anything else commit so fully to the fatalist approach to time travel seen in Future Echoes / Stasis Leak / Cassandra?

Uh, well “All You Zombies” for one, which you’ve actually already mentioned under elaborate wanks. Robert A. Heinlein loved this shit. “By his Bootstraps” is an earlier, and perhaps, more notable example as it’s where the term “Bootstrap paradox” comes from.

>Oh yeah, Bill & Ted (which came later).

Interestingly, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure was likely filming at the same time as Future Echoes was being made. It then sat on shelf for two years.

[Pete Part Three]

Beyond the Hitchhiker’s vibes in Krysis, Isaac Asimov has probably got some part of to play in the idea of a sentient universe. He often played with merging of technology and theology under Sci-fi. See The Last Question (or The Last Answer, actually).

[Warbodog]

Revising what I should already know so I don’t look like an idiot didn’t feel like it was in the spirit of the thread.

The End of Eternity was my favourite of the few Asimovs I’ve read. Its judgemental timeline pruning organisation might be similar to The Inquisitor, unless he’s based on that Marvel guy.

[Dave]

Stan Lee?

[By Jove its holmes]

Doctor Who‘s “you can’t cut tragedy off at the root because then you’d be talking to someone you saw dead on a morgue slab” is a good answer as to why time travelers can’t avert the Holocaust or save their murdered girlfriend. Lister, being a total moron who doesn’t care, however…

[Ben Saunders]

Obviously it all changed in later years.

In Doctor Who there are various “fixed points” where things cannot be changed (else there be dire consequences), this is explored in numerous episodes.

[International Debris]

Is that idea used much in the classic series? I know it’s commonly mentioned in the revived era, but the rules of changing time seem very vague in the original run.

[Flap Jack]

“Fixed points” is a new series fudge, yeah. But it’s not really a coherent idea so much as an in-universe handwave for why The Doctor can’t mess with the real historical events that the companions or the audience know about, but generally can mess with invented historical events in our present or future, or on other planets.

Oh, so you can’t let Queen Victoria get eaten by a werewolf because it would screw up history, but bringing down the Harriet Jones government years early is fine? OK, Doc, sure.

[Pete Part Three]

File it alongside “the Sonic Screwdriver can open any door until it can’t” and “the psychic paper can fool anyone until it can’t”.

Here’s a rule that we’ll work to or completely ignore as per the demands of the story we want to tell.

[Quinn: Clochebusters World Champion]

I’ve just found out about a movie from 1981 called Savage Harvest with the tag line “first they prey on human fear, and then they feed on it” which I am now head canoning to be the inspiration for Polymorph, despite the aggressors in this movie seemingly being lions.

[Author]

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