Doug Naylor

Penguin Books

I lament the day Doug Naylor and Rob Grant buried the good old reliable Grant Naylor and chose to co-exist (antagonistically so) as two separate authors.

It’s not that Last Human is a failure. As a hardened fan of the Red Dwarf crowd, I swallowed the book in one gulp and enjoyed the story. My friends learnt to impersonate their answering machines every time they heard my voice babbling excitedly, "Listen to this, Kryten decides to go human, at first it’s a dream come true, but then he notices that his nipples don’t work. Hahaha, get it, his nipples are supposed to regulate temperature..." and so on.

Incidentally, that scene is one of my favourites in the book, and it is with great restraint that I have to force myself not to quote it here in full.

The story resumes where Red Dwarf (Part 2: Better Than Life) left it, skimming over the years Lister spend with Krissy in a backwards universe, and landing our Liverpool hero straight in trouble. In jail. A special kind of jail. But hold on a second. Which Lister is this again?

Last Human is full of good ideas: Cyberhell (Spanish colonial style with yellow-and-cream furnishings), multiple Listers, Rimmer’s son and (for the feminists out there) Krissy in charge of the ship. And it does manage to raise a few chuckles. A must for the Red Dwarf addicts.

Unfortunately, it’s not nearly as witty, as bizarre or as well thought-out as the first two Red Dwarf books.

Rob Grant

(Viking hardcover)

The book is an alternate sequel to Better Than Life, in that it is mutually exclusive to Last Human. Even the history of the characters, of the pre- Red Dwarf time, doesn’t check between the two books. But hey, it’s a totally new reality out here!

The story concentrates on, yes, you guessed it, the time that Lister spent in the universe in which time runs backwards. Again, the author chose to ignore the time that Lister spent in blissful, if reversed, matrimony with Krissy, and concentrated instead on fouling up the rescue plan which would enable Lister to leave the backwards universe.

So, on the one hand, we have Lister and Cat entering puberty straight from early adulthood (the scene in which the fifteen year old Cat gets lucky, in reverse order of course, is hilarious). On the other hand, we have Rimmer, who’s the actual unofficial hero of this book. The modest, heroic, selfless Commander Rimmer. Rimmer whose well-deserved nickname is Ace. Well, that’s one of the Rimmers, at least.

Even though the book does get a bit out of hand towards the end, personally I preferred its humour to that of Last Human. It’s still not a patch on the first two Red Dwarf books, but I liked the notion of destiny as a pliable substance that is shaped by our own actions.

Rob Grant and Doug Naylor

Penguin

This book contains a selection of scripts from Red Dwarf, presented in reverse order (probably to comply with the "backwards" idea, seeing that it features the episode titled "Backwards"). The other five scripts are: the award-winning "Gunmen of the Apocalypse" (where Kryten enters virtual reality to fight the Apocalypse computer virus), "Holoship" (in which Rimmer meets a spaceship full of holograms, one sexy one in particular), "Me²" (Rimmer versus Rimmer), "Kryten" (the first episode ever in which he stars) and my personal favourite "Camille" (in which, to quote the script, "droid meets droid, droid becomes chameleon, droid loses chameleon, chameleon turns into blob...").

At first, it’s difficult to imagine the scenes given cryptic descriptions like INT., OB, MIX TO, DIST, POV, SFX. But before long, the characters appear live before you. My husband and I read the book to one another out loud, and, while for the first few pages we’s say "KRYTEN: "It’s a banana". LISTER: No! Try again. What is it? KRYTEN: It’s no good sir. I can’t lie.", pretty soon we stopped even noticing the offending handles on the page and would just imitate the character’s way of speaking. Loads of fun!

This is worthwhile even if you’ve seen the corresponding TV episodes. Because, wait for it, these scripts are - uncut!

By Yvonne Eve Walus