Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers
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 First edition cover |
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| Author | Rob Grant & Doug Naylor |
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| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Series | Red Dwarf |
| Genre(s) | Science fiction, Comic novel |
| Publisher | Penguin Books |
| Released | 2 November 1989 |
| Media type | Print (Paperback & Hardback) |
| Pages | 304 pp (first edition, paperback) |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-14-012437-3 (first edition, paperback) |
| Followed by | Better Than Life |
Red Dwarf (often referred to as Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers to differentiate from the television series) is a book written by Rob Grant and Doug Naylor and published in 1989, and is based on the first two series of the sci-fi comedy television show Red Dwarf. Its main feature is that it gives the reader a much deeper insight into the characters of Lister and Rimmer than the television series, and also gives a lot of background information about the human race at the time of Red Dwarf. It contains scenes and elements from the episodes The End, Future Echoes, Kryten, Me² and Better Than Life.
Contents |
[edit] Plot summary
[edit] Signing up
The book begins in 2180. Most of the solid planets and moons in the solar system have been colonised. Commercialism is still rife, and most of Earth's natural resources have been depleted. The Jupiter Mining Corporation is one of many companies which mines resources from moons and planets such as Ganymede, Triton and the asteroid belt.
Orbiting Saturn is the Spanish-owned moon of Mimas, a major supply port in the Solar System. This is where we first see Lister, working as a taximan in a 'hopper', a vehicle that leaps over obstructions and eases traffic congestion. It's later revealed he stole it.
Lister ended up on Mimas after celebrating his 24th Birthday by binge drinking in London on a Monopoly Pub Crawl. When he sobers up, he's somehow ended up on Mimas, with no money to get a shuttle ticket home. His attempts to generate the money needed by stealing hoppers haven't been successful because of his need to drink, and the high price of Alcohol on Mimas. Also, Mimas isn't very safe, and he's been mugged at least once.
A man in a false mustache who works in the Space Corps hires his hopper to go to the Red Light District of Mimas, supposedly to experience genuine Mimian Cuisine. Upon arriving, the man immediately enters a brothel. After waiting to pick him up for 40 minutes, Lister goes to get him. It's at this point Lister gets mugged by a Bliss Freak (a drug addict), who needs the money to feed his girlfriend who is a Game Head.
The brothels of Mimas aren't what the reader might expect, as instead of women, highly life-like prosti-droids of women, men and sheep are used. Lister is led to where the man is complaining that one of the droids 'nearly pulled the damn thing off'. Upon spotting Lister, he denies what it looks like until Lister drops him off at the shuttleport, where he proceeds to blackmail the man for 100 Dollarpounds. During this exchange, Lister sees in the man's wallet that his real name is Arnold Rimmer.
The encounter with the Astro inspires Lister to sign up with the JMC, with the intention of boarding an Earth-bound ship and going AWOL upon arriving. He is assigned to Red Dwarf, one of the older mining ships with a top speed of 200,000 mph and a crew of 11,169. This is where he first meets Olaf Petersen, a Danish Astro. Lister is horrified to discover that Red Dwarf is going to Triton first, then to Earth, a journey which takes four and a half years at Red Dwarf's natural cruising speed.
Upon boarding Red Dwarf, Lister sees Holly for the first time, and tests his knowledge with information about Jim-Bexley Speed, a Zero-Gravity Football player. Lister is escorted to his sleeping quarters which, as fate would have it, he shares with Rimmer. Instead of an Officer, which was how he was dressed on Mimas, it transpires he is a First Technician, and in charge of Z-Shift, a maintenance shift that only handles menial tasks considered a waste of time for the service droids.
The next day, at a disco to celebrate the revival, as a hologram, of a man who had committed suicide to escape his gambling debts, the reader learns that Peterson has bought a large mansion on Triton for just $£2000, and is working his way across the solar system. The reason it's so cheap is because there isn't a breathable atmosphere yet, so he'd have to float around in a space suit.
While most of the 8,000 people get up to dance, Lister sits at a table and watches them. Nobody knows that in seven months, they will all be dead.
[edit] Life in space
Five months later, Lister has settled into the dull, monotonous routine of life aboard Red Dwarf. While he waits for Peterson to arrive so they can go for a drink, the reader is given insight into Rimmer's background.
Born on Io, he is the youngest of four sons. His brothers have all had tremendous success in the Space Corps, partially at the behest of their mother, and that success fills Rimmer with jealous rage. His mother's low opinion of him has shaped his single desire: to become an officer. Despite his complete ineptness and lack of interest in the skills and subjects required to become an officer, he strives to pass the Astronavigation Exam - the prerequisite to become a Navigation Officer - which he has failed 12 times.
He usually fails because he actually hates studying, so devotes most of the three months before the exam constructing a timetable for studying, which normally leaves him with a week before the exam to cram three months of studying. At least once the resulting anxiety forced him to deny his own existence, so at the exam he wrote 'I AM A FISH' 500 times.
As Rimmer continues to build his timetable, backed by his resolution that things will be different, Peterson arrives, and he and Lister goes for a drink. When they arrive, Lister catches sight of Kristine Kochanski for the first time. He falls madly in love with her instantly, and after a few attempts, he gets her to go on a date with him.
For five weeks they go out, and Lister is madly in love with her. However, it's revealed that she was going out with a flight coordinator until he left her for somebody else, and was on the rebound when Lister met her. He'd come back to her, and she'd fallen in love with him again. For the next three weeks, three days planet leave on Miranda aside, Lister misses her deeply.
While Lister goes off to try and get Peterson to have a drink, Rimmer finishes his revision for the night. He has resolved to actually studying, and his newest timetable only took two hours to make. He decides to spend the rest of the night in a Stasis Booth. Stasis Booths work by freezing time, so anything caught within the stasis field temporarily ceases to exist. The object stays in the same state and age until released, and it doesn't notice the passage of time. Rimmer uses it to slow his aging process, and has so far been able to save up a year using it.
On the last day of his life, Rimmer pairs himself up with Lister to perform their Z-Shift duties. Shortly after 10:00, a rival First Technician named Petrovich arrives, and summons Lister to see the Captain. Before leaving, he asks Rimmer why he isn't at the Astronavigation Exam. Believing the Exam is still a month away, Rimmer runs back to his Sleeping Quarters, and discovers he included September twice on his timetable. With a month's worth of revision still to go, Rimmer opts to cheat, and copies as much of his textbooks onto his body as physically possible.
Petrovich escorts Lister to the Captain's office. After finishing a phone call, she asks him about a cat. Lister plays dumb until she shows a photo that Lister took of himself and the cat. After refusing to hand over the cat, she sentences him to stasis for the remainder of the trip for breaking quarantine regulations.
Meanwhile, Rimmer arrives at the exam room, an hour late. Because of his absolute fear of being caught cheating, he is convinced that the Examiner knows that he's cheating. He waits for half an hour, sweating profusely, for the examiner to do something about it, before deciding he doesn't actually know. Upon actually examining the exam, he realises there are four of the five questions he can answer perfectly, meaning he would pass. However, when he looks at the answers he copied down, his earlier sweat has dissolved the writing, leaving an inky blob on his arm. He slams his hand on the answer paper, leaving a palm print, signs it and faints.
Lister is escorted to a stasis booth by Petrovich. Petrovich gives him one last chance to surrender the cat, which Lister refuses. It transpires that Lister wants to enter stasis. With his relationship with Kochanski over, there is nothing left for him, so his original objective of returning to Earth becomes a priority. He discovered that Stasis Booths were used for punishment of a variety of rules, including breaking quarantine regulations. On his last day of planet leave on Miranda, he bought a high-pedigree cat named 'Frankenstein', and had her inoculated against every disease. He hid her in the ventilation system, which was too large to ever search properly. Lister reckoned three years wages was worth it to find himself instantly back at Earth.
Lister couldn't have picked a better time to go to stasis, because one of the nuclear reactors aboard the ship begins to malfunction, and a combination of technical faults and at least one instance of human error means nobody notices it. Rimmer is given sick leave, and decides to spend it in a stasis booth. However, he decides to stop and comb his hair. This delay proves critical, as seconds before Rimmer would have entered a booth, the reactor reaches critical mass and unleashes its radioactive payload, rushing through the ship and killing everybody it encountered. Rimmer's last thought before it reaches him is of a bowl of Gazpacho Soup. He, and the rest of the crew, dies in seconds.
This does not leave Red Dwarf lifeless, however, because Holly was able to seal the supply bay before any radiation reached there. In this place, Frankenstein and her new-born kittens are eating.
[edit] Three million years later
Upon release from stasis, Lister realises how quiet everything is, and wonders where everybody is. Holly informs him that they're dead, explains what happened, and mentions how he has had to pilot Red Dwarf out of the Solar System, in case any radiation contaminated a planet. Holly couldn't release Lister until the radiation had reached a safe background level. However, because the Cadmium II which had leaked has such a long half life, Lister has been in stasis for 3,000,000 years. Over these years, Holly is concerned he has gone somewhat peculiar. He is most concerned as, despite having an IQ of 6000, he cannot remember simple facts, such as who knocked Swansea out of the FA Cup in 1967 (Swansea were knocked out of the FA Cup that year by Nuneaton Borough).
This, in conjunction with the possibility that he is the last human alive, drives Lister insane. He doesn't dress or eat and drinks whiskey constantly. After five days of this, Lister collapses, and wakes up in the medical unit to find Rimmer, now a hologram. The fact that he now has a companion, even if it is Rimmer, helps Lister cope with the situation and regain his sanity.
A few days later, Lister tells Holly to turn Red Dwarf around and head back to Earth. Fully aware of the likelihood that mankind has long gone, Lister reckons that Earth is home, and there's really nowhere else to go. As he packs his few belongings in a vacuum trunk and prepares to re-enter stasis, Rimmer objects to the idea, on the grounds that if mankind has survived, he won't need to be switched back on. Lister berates Rimmer for going on about his death, and tells him to move on. In the midst of this argument Holly interrupts, telling them that, shortly after opening the radiation seals on the cargo decks, he senses a non-human lifeform.
Grabbing a Bazookoid (A heavy-duty portable mining laser), Lister and Rimmer take a lift down through the cargo area, past food, water, wood, mining equipment and raw silicates. Eventually, the supplies dry up, showing hundreds of empty floors. Upon reaching the floor that the life form is detected, they discover a desolate city, with hundreds of tiny cubicles with blank books inside. Further investigation unveils a television with an episode of the Flinstones playing. As they reach a cafe area, Lister's visor shows the life form to be in the area. Suddenly, Lister is pinned by a man in a pink suit, who sniffs him, then uses a portable iron to smooth out a crease in his suit. He then apologises to Lister for attacking him, as he thought he was food.
It transpires that during the time Lister was in stasis, a race of cats evolved from Frankenstein and her kittens. In the last 2,000 years before Lister's emmergance, they fought a Holy War over the name of the saviour of Cat Kind (Cloister vs Clister), before leaving Red Dwarf to search for their saviour in commandeered shuttlecraft, leaving the weaker members of their race to die. The Cat was born to the very last two of these weaker members.
It is also interesting to note that during this three million years, Holly sees all sorts of astronomical phenomenon, but grows increasingly bored with them, and eventually gets into romance novels. By the time Lister arrives, he has read just about everything, concluding Football, It's a Funny Old Game by Kevin Keegan is the worst book ever written.
Lister and Rimmer question the Cat about his culture, before the Cat grows bored and takes a nap on top of the storage locker. Lister announces he's going to take him into stasis, and leave Rimmer behind.
[edit] Future echoes
Shortly after Lister and the Cat argue over how many suits he can take, Holly realises that due to three million years of constant acceleration, Red Dwarf is about to reach the speed of light. They are accelerating so much that reverse thrusters have no effect. The ship smashes through the light barrier, everything becoming warped and distorted, before snapping instantly back to their original shape and mass.
Lister goes down to the recreation deck to tell Rimmer they're travelling faster than light.. Rimmer, however, appears to be speaking to somebody who's invisible and ignores Lister. As this Rimmer leaves the room, another Rimmer enters from the opposite side, and his reactions to Listers repeated questions of 'How did you do that?' turns out to be what the first Rimmer said. Believing him mad, Rimmer makes his way back to the sleeping quarters, passing the Cat as he laments a lost tooth. Lister catches up with him at their quarters, where the Cat is standing, having just seen himself leave.
Holly explains that these are Future Echoes, a side effect of light speed travel. They are travelling so fast that they are over taking themselves in time, and seeing flashes of the future as a result. As if to prove his point, a polaroid photo appears on Lister's bunk, showing him holding two babies. Lister reaches to grab it, but it vanishes. He wonders how it's possible to get two babies when there are no women on board.
Later, as Lister is trying to get breakfast from a malfunctioning dispensing machine, an explosion rocks the ship. Lister dashes into the drive room to see Rimmer, who claims to have seen a future echo of Lister dying in a navi-comp accident. Despite his initially being shocked, Rimmer revels in the idea that Lister is going to die shortly. Trying to defy fate, Lister reckons if he can stop the Cat breaking his tooth, as seen in the previous echo, then it means he won't necessarily die. He concludes the Cat will try to eat his robot goldfish and races off to stop him.
Indeed, the Cat is attempting to eat one of the fish as Lister arrives. He tackles the Cat and sends them crashing to the floor. The fish is unbitten, and Lister believes he is saved. However, when the Cat landed on the floor, one of his teeth was broken off. Accepting his death as an inevitability, Lister sits down and drinks whiskey, while Rimmer mocks his earlier advice to stop going on about his death. Eventually, Holly informs them that the navi-comp is malfunctioning, unable to cope with the influx of data at light speed, and someone needs to make a bypass or the ship will explode. Resigned to his fate, Lister puts on the clothes Rimmer saw him wearing and heads to the Drive Room.
Guided by Holly, Lister sets up the bypass and boots it up by flicking twelve switched. Upon flicking the last switch, the bypass works and the navi-comp is stabilised. Lister realises that it's not going to explode anytime soon, and that he's still alive. He and Rimmer argue about it on the way back to the sleeping quarters, where they see a very old man on Lister's bunk. The old man is Lister, and he explains that it was Lister's grandson that Rimmer saw die in the Drive Room. He tells Lister to get his camera and run to the medical unit.
As he arrives at the Medical unit, the reverse thrusters take effect and Red Dwarf finally begins decelerating. As they get slower, the future echoes should be nearer to the present. Suddenly another Lister comes out of the medical unit, holding twin babies (Jim and Bexley), and smiles for the camera. Present Lister takes the picture they previously saw in the sleeping quarters. Rimmer still wonders how they get babies without any women, but Lister just reckons it's 'gonna be a lot of fun finding out'.
[edit] Kryten
The next chapter begins on board the Nova 5, a ship from the twenty-third century. The crew are on a deep space mission to find certain types of stars and fire missiles at them to cause supernovas. The resultant explosions will cause the phrase 'COKE ADDS LIFE!' to blaze across the earth's sky for months.
As the crew settles into stasis and prepares for the trip back to earth, the ship plows into an icy moon, killing all but three crew members. It turns out that Kryten, the ship's mechanoid, washed the navigation computers, causing them to malfunction.
Back on Red Dwarf, Holly informs the crew that they are receiving a distress call. As they attempt to establish contact, Holly mentions that he hopes they have some extra supplies, The Red Dwarf is dangerously low (Lister finds out, to his horror, that he's been putting dog's milk in his tea).
Kryen manages to communicate with the crew. Three young, female members of the crew are injured and in need of rescue. Thrilled at the though of female contact, the boys hit the showers. Rimmer attempts to get Lister to build him up in front of the girls, which he of course refuses.
Upon boarding the Nova 5, Lister notices that the ship's engines are far more advanced than the Dwarf's. When Kryten introduces Lister, Rimmer and the Cat to his female charges, they realize he forgot to mention one thing: the girls have been dead for millions of years; they are nothing but fashionably dressed skeletons. Lister makes light of the situation by trying to build up Rimmer like he asked. When Rimmer confronts Kryten about the dead girls, Kryten has an emotional breakdown. He had convinced himself they weren't dead, he enjoyed being needed.
Kryten informs the crew that he now has no function, removes his head, and shuts himself off.
[edit] Rimmer's self confrontation
The crew salvages the two halves of the Nova 5 (thankfully, there is actual cow milk on board). Lister attempts to repair Kryten. After much work, he brings the mechanoid back online and asks him about the Nova's mysterious duality drive. Kryten reveals that the new technology could bring the crew back to earth in a matter of months, but the fuel decayed years ago.
Rimmer, meanwhile, explores the second half of the Nova 5 and finds it too has a hologram projection unit. He is crushed to learn the crew's personality disks were destroyed in the accident. He had been hoping to have a hologramatic companion. Rimmer then decides to make a duplicate of his own disk, since no one else likes him.
Lister decides to repair the Nova 5. He, the Cat, and Kryten will fly to a nearby moon to mine for the isotope needed for fuel, while the Rimmers will stay behind and repair the ship. Thing do not turn out as planned. The Cat refuses to work more than a few minutes at a time, and Kryten goes into full blown panic mode at the thought of such responsibility.
The Rimmers have their own problems. They soon find themselves trying to one-up each other, working harder, exercising longer, and going without sleep.
After months of work, the mining trio return to the ship. The Nova is repaired, but the Rimmers are having a fight. The original Rimmer realizes that he cannot even get along with himself (though he wonders if it would be like that for everyone). Lister then drops the bomb: only one Rimmer can go back to earth. He flips a coin, and the original Rimmer loses. He is to be erased in the morning.
Rimmer spends a miserable night, reflecting on how much of life is luck (and how he never had any). He tells Lister he wants to be turned off then.
Lister asks him about gazpacho soup and why it torments him. Rimmer, with nothing to lose, confesses. At a dinner with the captain, his soup was cold and he sent it back to the kitchen to be warmed up. He didn't know the Spanish dish was meant to be served cold. Rimmer attributes his failure in the Space Corps to this gaffe.
Lister tries to convince him that anyone could have made that mistake and it wasn't worth tormenting himself. He then tells Rimmer that he really erased the double, he just wanted to know about the soup. Rimmer will be returning to earth with the crew, and Lister promises never to mention a certain soup again.
Well, maybe just once.
[edit] Returning home
The section opens on Christmas Eve, with Lister closing his Indian food store in the small town of Bedford Falls. The trip on the Nova 5 was a success, the crew has returned to earth. Humanity is more or less unchanged, and the crew become heroes.
Lister hated the notoriety and moved to the small American town to live in peace. Bedford Falls, as it turns out, is almost exactly like its namesake from Lister's favorite film, It's a Wonderful Life. Lister married Kristine Kochanski (a direct descendant of the original Kochanski from Red Dwarf). They have twin sons, Jim and Bexely, and Lister has never been happier. However, his arms have begun hurting for no reason, and he's starting to worry. When lister applies ointment to the painful spots, he's shocked to find the pain spells a word: DYING.
Meanwhile, Rimmer is the third richest man in the world. He invested the money he made as a product spokesman into hologramatic research, and developed the 'solidgram.' He now has an indesructable body. He lives in a penthouse above Paris and is married to a Brazilian actress named Juanita Chiquita. However, she has not let Rimmer touch her for over a year, and she admits to sleeping with the pool man.
Back in Bedford Falls, Lister is starting to panic. He realizes his life is impossibly happy: meeting Kochanski, babies that change each other's diapers, and it being Christmas Eve every night.
Lister flies to Paris to meet Rimmer, who is having a huge party. He informs Rimmer that they are playing Better Than Life, and are actually still on Red Dwarf. Rimmer balks, but decides Lister may have a point. They agree to fly to Denmark to meet the Cat.
En route, Rimmer wonders why, if he's really playing Better Than Life, his wife cheats on him. He realizes his self-hatred is so ingrained that the program decided he wanted to be unloved and humiliated. He envies Lister's simple fantasy. Lister, on the other hand, feels like a dope for still obessing over Kochanski, and envies Rimmer's fantasies.
When they arrive in Denmark, they have no more doubts about playing Better Than Life: The Cat is living in a castle surrounded my a milk-filled moat, serviced by an army of giant Valkyrie warriors.
After explaining the situation to the Cat, Kryten (whose fantasies only involve getting a new mop) arrives and explains what happened. The Cat had found a cache of game headbands in Petrovich's old quarters and put one on. Lister and Rimmer were both drunk and tried to go in the game to save him, but never came out. Holly convinced Kryten to laser warnings into Lister's arms. When that didn't work, he went in himself.
The book ends with Lister driving toward Bedford Falls. Now that he knows he's in the game, all he has to do is want to leave. But not on Christmas Eve. He decides to just spend one more night with his family, and leave after the holiday.
But in Bedford Falls, it's always Christmas Eve...
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| Characters: | Dave Lister · Arnold Rimmer · Holly · Cat · Kryten · Kristine Kochanski · Other characters | |||
| Media: | Episodes · Red Dwarf Remastered · Prelude to Nanarchy | |||
| Books: | Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers · Better Than Life · Last Human · Backwards | |||
| Concepts: | Smeg · Computer senility · Dollarpound · Felis sapiens · GELF · Silicon Heaven · Space Corps Directives | |||
| Other: | Rob Grant · Doug Naylor · Grant Naylor · Dave Hollins: Space Cadet · Red Dwarf ships | |||
