Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers is a beautiful piece of sci-fi and comedy history.
PLOT
In the distant future, perennial nobody David Lister ends up on a Saturnian moon after a drunken binge. Stranded and desperate to get home, he gets a job on the mining ship Red Dwarf, only to end up being its only surviving crewmember when a radiation accident wipes everybody out. Lister exits a stasis pod to find the ship adrift in deep space three million years in the future, with only a hologram, a computer, a robot and a cat for company.
ANALYSIS
For an adaptation of a bunch of TV sitcom episodes (only 12 at the time of release!), it's truly awesome how much love and care was put into this book. To the point where anyone would swear the show was merely a second-rate adaptation of what's written here. It's not just that it's funnier or that the characters have been fleshed out, but Rob Grant and Doug Naylor's passionate effort transforms Red Dwarf from a melancholy space sitcom into, well, a saga. There's worldbuilding, there's tragedy, there's imagination unfettered by the budget of the BBC. The attention to detail is so terrific that you'll be finding new things for years to come. It's all so much more grandiose, carefully sculpted, purposeful than the show ever could be. The amount of passion and talent on display here is frankly staggering.
I also have a lot of love for the prose style. It's so disarmingly casual and overdetailed, reading much like a friend telling you an anecdote or even a stream of consciousness. The result: a total page-turner.
Only two flaws stuck out to me, and neither of them are particularly problematic. The first is that the book doesn't capture the quintessential boredom on Red Dwarf. One of the key threads in the early series was that Lister and Rimmer were struggling to find things to do, and went a little loopy from cabin fever. So you'd get episodes about Lister trying to be a chef to outrank Rimmer, or the sad little deathday party on the asteroid or Holly pranking the crew, things like that. In the novel, the storylines of the adapted episodes are all intertwined so there's constantly something going on. The only time jumps take place during major events (for example, Lister spending three months mining while the Rimmers repair the Nova 5 ship). There's never a stable status quo, which I do feel was a missed oppurtunity.
The other issue is the adaptation of Future Echoes. My own personal feelings on the episode aside, it's the only one that isn't tied to the overarching narrative and isn't really expanded on in any meaningful way from the original script. It seems to have just been crammed in the middle of the book because Grant Naylor really liked that story and couldn't think of another way to include it. It just stands out a bit as an awkward detour.
But aside from those two things, there's really nothing to complain about. These writers took a witty space comedy and turned it into a fully fleshed out world. It's only a pity that the show will always overshadow the novel, because it truly is an impressive achievement. One can only wonder how well received it would be if it had been released beforehand.
CHARACTERS
Lister is given a much more astute and droll persona than in the show. The absence of Craig Charles' naivete probably has something to do with that, but the changes in his background are important as well. Instead of being a lazy yet lovable goofball who wound up in deep space as a laugh, the book Lister is bitter, having unintentionally stranded himself. He's also not keeping Frankenstein as a pet, but purely as a pawn to get him off the ship. The result is a tragedy-tinged yet also less likable lead. Still great fun, still moral and still empathetic, but just different. It's definitely more believable for this Lister to be a man of wasted potential, whereas the TV version just seemed like an idiot at times. I think I prefer the latter, but I can understand the writers wanting to make him more complex and real for the book.
Speaking of fleshing out characters, Rimmer must be the most well-defined personality ever put on paper. We get everything - his warped perception of himself and others, his icky desires, his neuroses and paranoia, the source of his desire to become an officer, his need for supremacy, his anal retentiveness. It's all brought out in glorious detail. The chapter focusing on Rimmer's attempts to pass his astro-navigation exam might be my favourite Red Dwarf anything. I could happily just reread that single chapter over and over and still get so much out of it.
Unsurprisingly, the Cat and Kryten are more like prototype versions of themselves. Kryten in particular. This book came out shortly before series 3, so this was the first time Kryten was ever really shown as a member of the crew. The scenes in which he originally breaks his programming (throwing the soup on the bed etc.) are left out, probably to simplify matters, so he remains a very detached and inhuman personality without any of the snarky mother hen aspects that come to define him. The Cat in the show was quickly deprived of his cat-like qualities, so his extremely feline behaviour in this novel feels... well, novel. Partially because we get to see him do things like constantly sleep around in weird places and only work whenever it personally suits him, and partially because as much as I love Danny John-Jules, he's not really cat-like. It's a great acting performance, but he is one of those characters who's always been a caricature in the show. Whereas in the book, I genuinely see him as an anthropomorphic cat.
NOTES
- The episodes The End, Future Echoes, Me2, Kryten and Better than Life are adapted, some more loosely than others.
- Kryten carves the words "U = BTL" onto Lister's arm to communicate to him that he's in Better than Life. Lister actually saw the words on his future self's arm beforehand, a very neat bit of foreshadowing that I only noticed on this read.
- I wish we got more of Rimmer's passion for cartography in the later books. It seems to have been the one thing that made him happy.
- Unlike the show's Captain Hollister, the captain in this book is a woman named Kirk.
- As much as I enjoyed the book, the first two chapters focusing on Saunders and McIntyre are a bit rough to get through. They're not bad or anything, but they read more like disconnected short stories. I'd much rather kick off with Lister on Mimas.
- The hopping taxis seem to have been the inspiration for the series 8 version of Blue Midget.
- I loved getting some insight into the day-to-day routine onboard the ship, like Lister's frequent visits to the Copacabana bar, his romance with Kochanski, his work with Z-Shift, Rimmer's... everything.
- What other book would have an entire chapter dedicated to snoring?
It's a masterpiece.
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