Better than Life (Red Dwarf) [Paperback]

Grant Naylor (Author)

Book Description

Series: Red Dwarf | Publication Date: March 1, 1993

When Holly, the Red Dwarf's computer, suddenly goes dumb, David Lister, the holographic Arnold Rimmer, Cat, and Kryten, the cleaning robot, become trapped in a game called ""Better Than Life,"" and it is up to a talking Toaster to save them all.

Product Details

• Paperback: 304 pages
• Publisher: Roc (March 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0451452313
• ISBN-13: 978-0451452313
• Product Dimensions: 6.9 x 4.1 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (25 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #737,150 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Science fiction at its funniest, June 11, 2002

By 

Daniel Jolley "darkgenius" (Shelby, North Carolina USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Better than Life (Red Dwarf) (Paperback)

This is the equally hilarious sequel to Red Dwarf, so you really want to make sure you read the first book before reading this one. As the novel opens, our heroes--the bumbling yet enterprising David Lister, who is now millions of miles as well as three million years away from the earth he unintentionally left when he got royally drunk on his 25th birthday, the born loser Arnold Rimmer, whose string of incredibly bad luck in life continues unabated in death, the Cat, a humanoid feline cat with at least eight and a half of his nine lives devoted to his own vanity and self-worship, and Kryten, the mechanoid who takes commitment to service, especially when it involves cleaning things, way too far--are trapped inside the highly addictive (and illegal) VR game called Better Than Life, each enjoying his own brand of subconsciously created paradise. With their actual bodies wasting away due to lack of nourishment, they must find a way to escape the game and return to reality. Reality, though, does not welcome them back with open arms. Among the crises the crew of the Red Dwarf must now face are the virtual death of the onboard computer, an impending collision with a very large planet, the capture of their ship by a black hole, a crash-landing on a planet used as a system-wide garbage dump, time dilations, and even death.

This book may be even funnier than the first Red Dwarf novel. By now, the reader has come to know and "love" the characters, so the authors can just propel them into one humorous situation after another without wasting time setting up the jokes. As an added bonus, the characters seem to really evolve emotionally by the end of the book, and we also find out (as if we didn't already know) the major "problem" each character suffers from (anger, guilt, vanity, cowardice). Rimmer, though dead, actually shows a nice, thoughtful human side on occasion. If you were trapped in a room with any of these characters, you would probably be ready to strangle them before too many hours, but the ability to watch their interactions from the safety of your own reality makes for some of the best comedy ever put on paper. You will laugh out loud at least once, and you will wish the book would never end, especially since no more Red Dwarf novels are forthcoming. I haven't seen any of the Red Dwarf TV episodes, but I can't imagine they could be any funnier than the books.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Second RD novel continues in tradition of first, March 27, 2004

By 

Daniel J. Hamlow (Narita, Japan) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Better than Life (Red Dwarf) (Paperback)

Better Than Life continues directly from Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers. The four members of the Red Dwarf crew, Dave Lister, the hologram Arnold Rimmer, the Cat, and the service mechanoid Kryten, are trapped in the ultimate game, where the player creates one's own paradise out of one's greatest dreams, or, as things turn out later for Rimmer, one's worst nightmares, and is addicted to the point that they eventually die because their real selves die. Would I go for a game like that? Heck yeah!

In the meantime, Holly, the ship's computer, and Lister's insufferably talkative and chirpy Talky Toaster (patent applied for), get involved in trying to get Holly's IQ back into the quadruple digits like it was before, a process that invariably causes the computer's remaining time to exponentially decrease. Result, Holly shuts himself down to preserve what little remains of his life. Further result: the ship's powerless as a result. Further further result: a runaway planet is on a collision course with them.

However, one sobering aspect of the future that Grant and Naylor work into this novel is a garbage planet. One of the planets in the Solar System is chosen to house all the other planets' waste, and guest which planet that is? North America gets the bottles, Europe the sewage, Australia domestic waste, and Japan the graveyard of motorcars, etc.

Lister finds himself on this kind of planet, and attacked by lethal pollution storms by the planet itself. "Then he knew. He'd done everything to Earth. He'd crucified it. He was a member of the human race, part of the species that had spread like bacteria over the planet...finally rendering it fit only for use as a dumping ground for all humanity's garbage." Panic-stricken, he pleads for mercy, promising to make it right again." The concept of the Earth as a giant organism, with us unaware that it's organic is taken here. To that end, he forms an alliance with a creature most of us would immediately say hello to with the sole of our tennis shoes. This reminder of how we're polluting our planet is the best segment of the book, interesting for book derived from a comedy series.

A brief history of Earth's genetic mutations for new and weird sports, such as twenty-feet tall basketball players and soccer playres with five legs and no mouths, to sentient vacuum cleaners, wars against these creatures, later called GELFs (Genetically Engineered Life Forms) is given as an intro to a creature that appears in the TV story Polymorph. And GELFs are encountered in the 6th and 7th seasons.

Another insight into humans: "The thing about human beings was this: human beings couldn't agree. They couldn't agree about anything. ... And the reason was this: basically, all human beings believed all other human beings were insane, in varying degrees." That leads to wars, but by the 20th century, human beings "got so good at war, it couldn't have one anymore." Some of this Douglas Adams style humour is wry, and also appears in a section when Rimmer royally messes up by accidentally destroying a whole bunch of scutters (Red Dwarf's tiny arm-shaped service robots) in testing the engine's pistons.

Here are the stories worked into this novel:

Better Than Life, Season 2, Episode 2
White Hole, Season 4, Episode 4
Marooned, Season 3, Episode 2
Polymorph, Season 3, Episode 3
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, Season 3, Episode X

Once again, revealing what that last story is would spoil the fun, but the sequel would actually take place in the fourth and not the third book.

Like its predecessor, it's more than just a TV tie-in, but an actual book that delves more into the personality of the characters, especially Lister.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars If you've seen the show..., April 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Better than Life (Red Dwarf) (Paperback)

...then you don't really need to read this. It's essentially a novelization of 5 or 6 episodes; "Backwards", "Marooned," "Polymorph," "White Hole"--but oddly enough, bears little or no similarity to the eponymous "Better Than Life." The first half of the book is original; the second half, taken piecemeal from the episodes above (some of the dialogue is verbatim)--but without the actors' comedic talent. It's okay--but not a must-have.