Customer Reviews

Red Dwarf - Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers

5 star:		(67)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

No sense ruining a good story by telling you how it turns out. Better to describe it, so you can tell whether or not it fits your tastes.

This is a hilarious, laugh-out-loud sort of book, appealing to the same tastes as the "Mash" series does, but in a dry, British sort of way. It's written in a deadpan, tongue in cheek style not unlike Terry Pratchett, but more sci-fi, like Douglas Adams. In fact, it has quite a bit in common with "Hitchhiker's", and I think that Marvin and Kryton would probably get along marvelously well. Perhaps this is something of a developing genre, the male comic adventure in space unquest. If that's the case, I might lump in "Venus on the Half Shell" (Kilgore Trout, nee Farmer).

For those of us who catch this through BBC Prime or PBS, and didn't have the opportunity to watch the original broadcasts in sequence, this book is a boon. Believe it or not, starting in the middle, I was able to watch a dozen episodes before reading this book and discovering that little incident with the stasis field. Talk about your "AHH! That explains it!" moments. You have a whole new incentive to watch that late Saturday night PBS rerun when you actually know the complete story. It just seems like coincidence layered on top of infinite impossibility..... until you recognize the cosmic plan at work here.

If you buy this book, you might as well buy the sequel, because you won't want to stop, and that way you won't get stuck wanting to know how it turns out and not being able to find part 2. For me, the book was very true to the TV show, and neither one ruined the other for me. If you've seen all the shows in sequence, then maybe the book won't be as much of a treat-but my guess is that most literate fans of the show will like the book.

You don't need to have seen "Red Dwarf" to enjoy the book. I loaned it to a co-worker with a sense of humor and he's having a great time with it-without ever having seen the series.

Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers is the first of the four downright twisted and hilarious novels from Rob Grant & Doug Naylor, the collective British writing team, and their sci-fi/comedy creation, Red Dwarf.

This novel covers all there is to know of the first three seasons of Red Dwarf in the best fashion possible: one collective and condensced novel that doesn't lose any of the comical and ingenious writing that the episodes had to offer.

The storyline is simple and easy to follow, the subplots and background conversations and meetings are everything that a Red Dwarf fan could ever want. From the first meeting between Dave Lister and Arnold Rimmer on Mimas to three million years in the future, from your own death (and how to cope with it) and disaster, not to mention the crew's desires in "Better Than Life" and their overall hatred with a passion for each other, this book has everything!

They say that Red Dwarf is the best thing to hit sci-fi since the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- they were damned right! British comedy is definately among the best in the world!!!

Red Dwarf is the funniest science fiction book I have ever read, featuring a cast of unforgettable characters. First there is Lister; he celebrated his 25th birthday by taking part in a Monopoly-based pub crawl on earth and somehow ended up stuck on Mimas, one of Saturn's moons. He desperately wants to return to earth but cannot raise the funds; tiring of living inside a storage locker and stealing taxis to earn money, he decides to sign up for service with the Space Corps and jump ship as soon as he is back on his home planet. First Technician Alfred J. Rimmer is a truly remarkable and hilarious personality. Rimmer is basically in charge of keeping the vending machines operating on the ship Red Dwarf, and Lister finds himself working under and bunking with this incredibly strange and rather pitiful underachiever. Rimmer is the proverbial born loser, failing at virtually everything he does. He desperately wants to pass the astronavigation exam and become an officer, and he works incredibly hard at preparing for the test despite the fact he has already failed it 11 times (actually, two of those times he got an X for unclassified, such as the time he wrote "I am a fish" 500 times on each answer sheet after panicking and convincing himself he did not actually exist). Rimmer's preparation consists of establishing incredibly exact, inclusive schedules for studying; the problem with this approach is that his constant revisions of the schedule take up all of his preparation time, and he usually ends up cramming three months' of study into a few hours just before the exam begins. Lister annoys Rimmer to no end. As fate would have it, an explosion ends up killing everyone on board Red Dwarf. Lister, having been put in stasis for smuggling a cat on board, is reawakened by the ship's computer Holly three million years later when the radiation levels have returned to safe levels. Holly also resurrects the quite dead Rimmer as a hologram, and the fact that he has died does nothing to help Rimmer's attitude. Lister and Rimmer are soon joined by a highly evolved yet fastidious, incredibly vain feline descendant of the cat Lister originally smuggled on board. This incredibly strange crew attempts to return to earth, and their efforts are as funny as they are ill-fated.

Lister is a simple man just trying to get by in life, wishing for nothing more than a basic, happy family existence such as that of George Bailey in It's A Wonderful Life. Rimmer's inferiority complex and stubbornness are unmatched.. His failings and pessimism are comically ridiculous yet somehow plausible, and one can't help pitying a man who fails in life, in death, and even in his own fantasies. I have not seen the Red Dwarf series, so I cannot compare this book to its television counterpart. I can declare this book hilarious; anyone with a sense of humor (even those who hate science fiction) will, I believe, enjoy this book immensely. If you read this book apart from its sequel, though, you will be disappointed by the ending because it is not really an ending at all--I would recommend buying the sequel Better Than Life along with Red Dwarf because you will surely want to follow the comical travails of Lister and Rimmer as far and as long as you can. Only the late Douglas Adams has ever produced such wickedly funny science fiction as Red Dwarf.

Red Dwarf, for people stuck in the states- happens to be the one of the greatest science fiction shows to ever show up on telly-and had the distinction of being the most ratings in viewship for BBC2. For viewers who have had problems understanding this brilliant series, or understanding some of the accents- this is a great book to help understand the series and the psychology behind Cat, Kryten, Lister, not to mention the charachter you love to hate- Arnold Rimmer! I have had this book and the sequel for about 4 years now- and I find I read them each about once a month. They have been known to cheer me up completely when I am blue-lets face it- your trouble are nothing compared to poor dave lister stuck for the rest of his life with Rimmer. And the idea of Felis Erectus is brilliant. Red Dwarf is like potato chips- once you start, you cannot stop. I loved the two books by Grant Naylor- unfortunately, the two written solo by them, available in the UK- dont have the magic, nor has series Seven that the two writers have had together. But still and all- a must read for anyone who likes to laugh and likes a bit of "soft core", science fiction, or an insight to the human psyche.Or just want a wonderful book to read on a weekend. This would be one of the ones i would choose, with out question. Hail to the small rouge one!

I've lost count of how many times I've read my now dog-eared copy of this novel. I have school memories of class mates reading the book under their desks during lessons, because they couldn't put it down! I even convinced my brother to read it, who like Lister, had never read a book in his life. The reason- It's a masterpiece! It's not often you come across a book that can be cool, clever, imaginative, sensitive and hilarious all at once. And it's not common for sci-fi novels written in third person to have such emphatic impact on the reader either. But Grant and Naylor are sublime crafts men of characterisation, invention, language and comic timing. Every sentance sparkles with a unique magic and its superlative from beginning to end. My favourite moments include the delightful first meeting of Lister and Rimmer in a taxi hopper on a cespit moon called Mimas. There's other joys such as Rimmer's bizzar revision techniques, Lister lost-puppy love for Kochanski, and a heartbreaking chapter describing Krytens blind servitude for the long dead Nova 5 crew. Then there's "Better than life", an ingenius concept that wasen't done justice in the episode of the same name. But more than anything else, I LOVE the ending. It is perfectly unexpected and bitter-sweet. The last sentance will give you goose-bumps. I swear to you.

I am an avid Red Dwarf fan thanks to my British hubby who introduced me to it 2 years ago. I purchased this book recently because we wanted a hardback version of Red Dwarf:Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers.

This is just a word regarding ONLY the Hardback version listed here on Amazon with the ISBN above. It is a 2 in 1 volume with Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers AND Better Than Life.

The description listed here is not clear on that. While it's probably not a big deal to most, it's not clearly advertised and I thought people should know before they purchase it JUST IN CASE! = )

Both are great books that are an easy and fun read when you're in the mood for some good comedy. The US versions leave out any random British references that can and do confuse some US readers who are unfamiliar with terms etc. I found this amusing in and of itself. The Americanization of it didn't go over well with the TV show and I'm not entirely jazzed about it in the books, but it makes for something new to look for in them and usually gives you a laugh either way!

Great books and shows. I hope they finally get the movie done before I die too... = )

I found "Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers" when I was a junior in high school. Instantly, I fell in love with it. I must have read it three or four times before I discovered the second novel, "Better Than Life," which I inhaled with as much enthusiasm as the first. Then I waited with baited breath for the third book to come out. Which it never did. Disappointment abounded as I eagerly checked the bookstores every few months for the new installment. Eventually I gave up.

It wasn't until two years later, when I was flipping through channels late one night, that I discovered that these books were, in fact, based on a television show! This floored me, since most novelizations of tv shows/films are utter smeg. I soon became a huge fan. However, none of the 52 episodes ever grabbed me quite the same way as these two books did. Makes me wish that G&N scrapped the show altogether and concentrated on the books.

Naylor and Grant made a fantastic team and it's such a tragedy that they won't be writing any more books together. Their solo efforts leave much to be desired. Rob Grant's "Backwards" had great characterizations and dialogue, but had very little plot or direction. Doug Naylor's "Last Human" had a rip-roaring plot, but the dialogue was hackneyed and the characterizations had the consistancy of cardboard.

Sigh. Where is Ace Rimmer's dimension jumping ship when you need one?

With many TV series, novelizations are basically TV Tie-ins, which make the assumption that the reader has already seen the show, knows the characters and situations involved, which doesn't necessitate any background information or character development. The tie-in doesn't qualify as quality fiction in any sense.

Not so with Red Dwarf. For the first novel, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, RD creators Rob Grant and Doug Naylor took certain ideas from the series are either expanded (the best things in this novel), altered (also great), or dropped altogether from stories of the first two seasons and strung them together in a continuous story. In places, dialogue is replicated, but in other places, it's done in the narration of the text.

Naturally, the first episode worked in is the debut The End, but before that, we learn how Dave Lister signed on aboard the Jupiter Mining Corporation vessel Red Dwarf, how and where he first met Arnold Rimmer, the man synonymous with the name Smeghead, and the events that led to Lister being the surviving human being. Some aspects of the story are changed, such as the captain of RD being a woman, but the most interesting thing that's given more of a background story is how and why George McIntyre, seen as a hologram in the TV series, died, and there's a dark aspect in that. Another shows why Rimmer flunks his astronavigation exams, and that's his spending more time making making revision timetables instead of actually studying. The Cat, a humanoid evolved from the ordinary housecat, and Kryten the mechanoid also feature in the story.

Holly's computer senility is detailed after spending 3 million years alone. For example, he knows that Isaac Newton's a famous physicist, but he can't remember why. But the more human parts of the characters are covered, such as Dave initial coping with his sole existence aboard, or George Saunders's agonized coping with the fact that he's a hologram in the first chapter.

Speaking of holograms, there's an interesting discussion between a hologram and a psychologist. On Red Dwarf, the most recently deceased crewmember is kept on as a hologram, consisting of a light bee transmitting 3D projection of the crewmember, duplicating that person's personality. The hologram is a simulation of a possible or probable person who died, and adding Descartes' cogito ergo sum to the equation, only that principle is altered because "it's the computer making you think you're thinking, therefore, you possible are." I think I'm thinking, therefore, I possibly am... Hmmm...

The description of Dave's girlfriend for five weeks, Kristine Kochanski, and the ideal love of his life, is as follows: "It wasn't a beautiful face. But it was a nice face. It wasn't a face that could launch a thousand ships. Maybe two ships and a small yacht. That was, until she smiled. When she smiled, her eyes lit up like a pinball machine when you win a bonus game. And she smiled a lot." I could go for a girl like that.

One part of Chapter 6 is a great written montage, intercut between Holly the computer's activities following the radiation leak, and the gradual evolution of the Cat Race, something not given too much detail to in the TV series.

Five of twelve stories from the first two seasons were worked into this novel:

The End, Season 1, Episode 1
Future Echoes, Season 1, Episode 2
Me Squared, Season 1, Episode 6
Kryten, Season 2, Episode 1

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, Season X, Episode X

The reason for the X's is that aspects of this episode make room for a sequel novel, which there is, and I don't want to give things away. Besides, this is my favourite part of the book, as it's something I'd definitely want to do. Anyone originally not familiar with Red Dwarf would like it, as it's a quick read, and with the storyline and concepts of the novel outweighing the humour. Fans though will definitely enjoy it as I did.

This is possibly one of the most hilarious books that I have ever read! It's one of those books that I can pick up and read over and over again. It's very rare for me to actually laugh out loud with reading a book, most of the time I just smile or giggle a little. But with this book, full out belly laughs were definitely required.

Even if you're not a fan of science fiction, get this book. It's well worth it!

I happened upon this book by chance. Don't know why I bought it. I'm not a sci-fi fan. I didn't even care for the Hitchhiker series. But it turns out my purchase of this book was one of those rare, gleeful instances of sublime chance when you stumble over something FANTASTIC! I've never seen the TV show (it's British, right?) so I can't say whether you'd be disappointed in it by comparison, but even going in cold I found this book to be stunningly clever, outrageously funny, and just...charming. I made my husband read it. I made my son read it. This was several years ago, and yet we're still quoting dialogue to one another and doing the "Rimmer" in odd (though appropriate) moments. Go ahead and buy the sequel "Better Than Life" because it's equally good and you won't be able to resist finding out what happens to Lister and company. Why these books aren't blazingly HOT in the US is a mystery to me because they definitely have mainstream appeal. Whenever I find someone else who has read them I up their "coolness" factor.