Red Dwarf

Red Dwarf, 1992, by Grant Naylor is one of my favorite books of all time. This is the first science fiction/humor novel that I ever read that managed to capture the hyerbolic plots and fish-out-of-water humor of Douglass Adams, and the absurdity of Terry Pratchet, and actually makes sense.

Whereas with these other writers, I accept some loss of logic for the sake of satire, Grant Naylor does an exemplary job of writing a book with a plot I can believe. There are no random gods playing dice or sudden ability to fly by deciding to flip the bird at gravity. Everything that happens in this book actually makes sense within the context of the story.

It makes sense the Lister ended up on a self sustaining space ship travelling eternally in one straight line, three million years from when he started. It makes sense that even though he is the only human left on this enormous vessel, there are other human-ish characters; a hologram with an attitude, a moody computer, and a highly evolved cat.There is a logical explanation for everything, and I laughed out loud countless times while reading it.

The characters are well-developed and rich. The prose is interesting, witty, and professional.

Red Dwarf is on of my biggest inspiration for my book, Substitute Gods. Particularly in my efforts to make everything make sense, and not just be a flippantly random satire that excuses itself from logic now and then.

Red Dwarf went on to become a very popular (in England) sit com that lasted nearly a decade. I saw it one time, and it was very funny. It also had many characters on it that I did not know, and I have no idea how they plugged in the extras.

Grant Naylor is a pseudonym for two writers who wrote this collaboratively. They were contracted for two sequels, but could never agree with each other enough to pull it off. Eventually, they each wrote one sequel, each of which took a very different path than the other. I understand neither was well received, and I have never read either.
Red Dwarf gets 100 from me. It achieves in all the categories I analyze. It is the epitome of the kind of novels I mean to write.