Literature / Red Dwarf

"The human race began as slime and ended as slime.
His name was Lister.
Celebrating his twenty-fourth birthday on a Monopoly board pub crawl round London, he ended up three million years from Earth, marooned in the wrong plane of the wrong dimension of the wrong reality, and down to his last two cigarettes..."

— Red Dwarf Omnibus blurb

Between 1989 and 1996, four Tie-In Novels were published for Red Dwarf, but in a different continuity (which split into two continuities itself after the show's creators ended their collaborative partnership).

The first novel provides substantially the same opening as the TV series, but with more detail. David Lister's birthday party begins in Brighton, and apparently ends on Mimas. At any rate, that's where he wakes up with a wicked hangover, no money or ID and a worrying rash. He takes to stealing taxis in order to try to make enough money for a ticket home. One of his fares is Arnold Judas Rimmer, a low-ranking crewman on board the Jupiter Mining Corporation spaceship Red Dwarf. After some hijinks involving Rimmer's visit to a robo-brothel, Lister signs on with the Red Dwarf in the mistaken belief that this will get him to Earth faster. When he learns that the ship is on a multi-year mission to the outer solar system, at the end of which he will be an old man (over 25, by Lister's calculation), Lister comes up with a scheme to spend the voyage in stasis, and keep his youth. He purchases a cat at the next landfall, and ensures that he is found to own it, upon which he is put in stasis as a penalty for bringing an unauthorized life-form on board. Shortly afterwards, the rest of the crew is killed by a radiation leak, and Holly, the ship's computer, takes the ship into deep space. Three million years later, the radiation has fallen to survivable levels, and Lister is let out of stasis, to find that his only companions are Holly, Arnold Rimmer's holographic ghost, and the last living descendant of his pet cat, although they soon find a crashed ship inhabited by the mechanoid Kryten, who killed the crew and destroyed the ship by giving the computer components a good wash.

Novels (spoilers):

Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers by "Grant Naylor" (1989)

The above summary describes the events of this novel. In the climax, after an adaptation of the "Me²" storyline, the crew seemingly arrives at Earth... only to end with The Stinger that they have, in fact, fallen into the grips of the Total Immersion Video-Game "Better Than Life".

Better Than Life by "Grant Naylor" (1990)

The only direct sequel of the four novels, this opens with Lister, Rimmer and the Cat escaping from "Better Than Life", only to find that in their absence, Holly has had to switch off due to a failed attempt to restore his intelligence that instead drastically reduced his lifespan. This has left Red Dwarf on minimal power and plummeting into the path of a planet. Attempts to blast the planet out of the ship's way leave Lister stranded on the planet, and the rest of the crew stuck on the event horizon of a black hole. By the time they escape, Lister has become an old man on a long-abandoned planet, which he has begun slowly terraforming back to a livable state with the aid of the giant cockroach inhabitants. When he returns to the ship, a polymorph sneaks aboard and starts stalking the occupants for their emotional energy. Although they ultimately kill it, Lister dies of a heart attack. The rest of the crew fix this by placing Lister into a dimension where time runs backwards, promising to return for him when he has reverse-aged back to his young adulthood, and giving him a chance to enjoy a backwards life with Kristine Kochanski.

Last Human by Doug Naylor (1995)

The first of the "trilogy closer" novels, and where the continuity of the book first forks. Having de-aged back to his young adulthood, Lister and Kristine return to Red Dwarf and the forwards-temporal universe. After a number of offpage misadventures, they run into trouble when they enter a civilized space-nation made up of Gelfs, where Lister falls afoul of corrupt laws being used to gather people to be used for a terraforming experiment. Things are further complicated when it turns out that his prison is also home to a Lister from a parallel universe, one where Lister became a psychopath, who escapes and is taken aboard Red Dwarf before they realize who he is. The terraforming world turns out to be home to a violently destructive psionic entity called "The Rage", a living embodiment of the resentment and fury of all the unjustly-imprisoned and tortured souls who were forced to be part of the experiment. The Rage ultimately kills the Evil Lister, before Arnold Rimmer, having been emboldened by meeting the son he never knew he'd fathered on Yvonne McGruder, commits a Heroic Sacrifice to destroy the Rage. The experiment is finally completed successfully and the planet becomes a paradise, where Lister and Kochanski decide to become the Adam and Eve of a new human civilization.

Backwards by Rob Grant (1996)

The second of the "trilogy closer" novels, and notable as amongst a very small amount of Dwarf material written by Grant solo. The novel opens with Rimmer, Kryten and the Cat returning to Htrae, the backwards Earth, to pick up Lister, only to find themselves caught up in an unforeseen chronal incident involving Kryten accidentally reverse-murdering a man, stranding them on Htrae for a further ten negative years. Returning to their own dimension, they find that Red Dwarf has been captured by the last remnants of the Agonoids — Killer Robots created and then abandoned by humanity centuries ago who have transformed the Dwarf into a prison/torture palace/obstacle course, where they plan to imprison Lister — the last surviving human being — and then fight it out to see which of them will get the privilege of torturing him to death. With Starbug severely depleted of power, the Dwarfers have no choice but to return to mother ship, but are interrupted when Ace Rimmer, a parallel version of Rimmer who is a total badass instead of a total smeg-head, transports into their dimension. They make plans together to overcome the Agonoids, but ship repairs are disrupted when one Agonoid, having been launched into space as a result of internecine conflict aboard the Red Dwarf, lands on the 'Bug. Ace Rimmer makes a Heroic Sacrifice to kill the Agonoid, and the Dwarfers grimly return to the Red Dwarf, where they find that the Agonoids have been all wiped out by the most malevolent and ambitious of their kind, as he launches from Red Dwarf and traps them aboard Starbug. They manage to defeat this last Agonoid, but not before he infects Starbug's NaviComp with the Armageddon Virus, which will send Starbug and Ace's attached ship crashing into a nearby planet. Kryten makes a Heroic Sacrifice to try and come up with an antidote to the Armageddon Virus, with the crew assisting him by using the Virtual Reality gaming console to link into Kryten's mind, but the virus is destroyed too late; Kryten and Rimmer are both dead, and Starbug doesn't have enough fuel to stop from crashing. Lister and the Cat cram into Ace's ship, detach from Starbug, and jump to a random new dimension. By good fortune, they arrive in a parallel reality where Kryten and Rimmer never interfaced into the "Better Than Life" game, resulting in this universe's Lister and Cat starving to death. Asserting that this is as good as it'll probably get, Lister and the Cat begin docking procedures, ready to make a fresh start in this dimension.

In November 2023, Rob Grant announced that he was working on a prequel TV series called Red Dwarf: Titan with an accompanying novelization.

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The novels provide examples of:

• Aborted Arc:
  • The "Future Echoes" featured in Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers show Lister with twin boys at some point in the near future, with a future echo of a very old Lister also appearing. However, both Last Human and Backwards ended with the Dwarfers in another reality, meaning it would be impossible for those future echoes to come to to pass.
  • The entire Nova 5 duality jump drive arc is dropped after the first book. Of course, by the time the crew escapes the Better Than Life simulation, they have slightly more pressing concerns and in both authors' separate books, returning Lister from his resurrection on Backwards Earth is something that requires a smaller vessel.
  • In Better Than Life, the newly super-intelligent Holly reveals that Lister is the creator of the universe. This revelation is never brought up again. However, it does get a passing mention in the series episode Back to Reality where the technician mentions that if the game is played "Correctly" the fictional Lister will in fact jump start the second Big Bang and as such technically be God.
  • In Better Than Life Lister's objective after being rescued from Garbage World is to somehow tow it (actually the abandoned Earth) back to our solar system. After his death and resurrection in the backwards universe, neither Last Human or Backwards ever mention it again.
• Absent Aliens: Same as the show, though it mentions that scientists were somehow able to prove there was no other life in the universe, two thousand years after Lister's time.
• Accidental Murder: A really weird one due to the laws of the Backwards universe. While the crew are searching for missing parts of Starbug, Kryten comes across the corpse of one of the hillbillies they'd previously escaped from, with a pickaxe lodged in his chest — who then lurches back to life, screaming horribly. Kryten, trying to help him, manages to dislodge the pickaxe, whereupon the mountain man buggers off. It's only when he replays the incident "forwards" he realises he just bludgeoned the man to death.
• Acquaintance Denial: In the first novel, Lister first meets Rimmer when the former is driving a (stolen) taxi cab and the latter hires the taxi to take him to an android brothel while (ineffectually) pretending to be a high-ranking officer. For various embarrassing reasons, when Lister is later "introduced" to Rimmer as his subordinate, Rimmer pretends not to know Lister.
• Actionised Sequel: Whereas Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers focuses largely on coping with life in space, Better Than Life sees escape from a black hole; abandonment on a frozen planet and contest with a Polymorph. Last Human, with a GELF penal colony; an elemental gestalt of pure rage, and a sociopath Alternate Universe version of Lister, has a more turbulent pace. Much of Backwards sees the crew struggling either to escape or survive.
• Adaptational Backstory Change: The Polymorph. In the show proper, it's explained to be a Bio Weapon Beast designed from the start by humans who was sealed away in a genetic waste container when it proved to be too insane to be actually used for war. However, Better Than Life explains that they are the descendants of the GELFs who were dumped on Garbage World (actually Earth) instead.
• Adaptational Early Appearance: In the show, Kryten only appears at the start of series 2. Here, he's found almost immediately after the portion of Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers adapting '"Future Echoes", and is actually present for some of the adapted "Me2", a series 1 episode.
• Adaptation-Induced Plot Hole: In contrast to the TV series, the disaster that wiped out the Red Dwarf crew was caused not by Rimmer's incompetence, but by a series of malfunctions that the crew were unable to notice. For some reason, the disaster did not happen in Ace Rimmer's universe, despite it having no connection to his presence (or lack thereof) on the ship, with the one real difference being that Ace was held back in school, while Prime Rimmer wasn't (which led to Lister having a bunkmate on the ship who encouraged him to apply himself).
• Adapted Out: A lot, due to compression, but some biggies include:
  • While Kochanski, Petersen, Chen and Selby all appear the novel replaces the main officers from the pilot episode. Captain Hollister is replaced by a woman named Kirk (seemingly just so the writers can do a Star Trek joke), while Todhunter becomes a shadier character called Petrovich.
  • The elderly Cat Priest from "Waiting for God". Instead, the Cat is the only Cat person left on Red Dwarf.
  • Lister trying to revive Kochanski as a hologram, and the whole plot of "Balance of Power" and "Confidence and Paranoia". Instead, Rimmer creates the duplicate by using the Nova 5's systems.
  • Lister trying to teach Kryten to rebel against his programming never happens, and Kryten instead remains an Extreme Doormat, until after Better than Life.
  • Last Human has a version of "DNA" happen, but Rimmer's attempt to turn himself back to human doesn't occur, and therefore neither does the vindaloo monster or Lister turning himself into a tiny cyborg. Also, Kryten's Spare Hand, as well as Holly.
  • In "Dimension Jump", the Cat had a counterpart in Ace's universe, in the form of an elderly chaplain. No such character appears in Backwards.
  • In the audiobook adaptation of Backwards, the entire western simulation in Kryten's psyche is excised with Kryten and Rimmer instead being sucked out into space when Kryten shoots out Starbug's hull to get rid of D'juhn Keep. The end result is more or less the same, as in the book Kryten doesn't create the dove program in time to save the ship's navicom, forcing Lister and The Cat to use Ace's ship. Still, it's a pretty smegging big thing to remove as the western simulation made up around a third of the book or more!
• Adaptational Intelligence: The show's Lister would eventually show he was actually pretty clever in his way, being more Book Dumb than anything else. The books' Lister shows, through meticulously researching his plan to get put into stasis to get back to Earth without doing any work, that he's far more intelligent from the off.
  • In the novel, the reason he is the lowest ranked member of the ship is because he only signed up as a crewmember so he could get a paid ride back to Earth, and didn't particularly care what position he had.
  • The first book shows what he can do when he applies himself. He not only manages to repair Kryten, but also becomes an expert on thorium mining after three days of hard study.
• Adaptational Jerkass:
  • In Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, to Lister's horror, the Cat's digitally sculpted fantasy sees him, solely for recreation, shoot a dozen hunting dogs — Better Than Life notes "unnecessary cruelty to small, furry animals" to be integral to his psychological makeup. In Backwards, when the Apocalypse Virus affects Rimmer's light bee to boil him alive, the Cat sees him off with a sarcastic jibe.
  • Everyone bar Kryten in Backwards: compared to the original books and Last Human there's far more genuinely mean-spirited bickering, arguments and jibes between Lister, Rimmer and Cat, to the point where virtually none of the reluctant cameraderie of the show is present - best seen when Cat completely seriously tells Lister at the end that Rimmer's death was a good thing as he won't be around to annoy them any more. Justified in many ways: they've been stuck in a backwards world with only each other for company for a decade, Lister and Cat have deaged to teenagers and thus are even more immature than normal, and once they return to the main universe they find out they've lost their ship to an army of psychotic Agonoids and have to regain it before their supplies run out. Needless to say, tensions are incredibly high.
• Adaptational Job Change:
  • Petersen was Catering Officer aboard Red Dwarf in the TV series and actually outranked Rimmer. In Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, he's a lowly Third Technician who falls under Rimmer's command in Z-Shift.
  • Rimmer himself is a First Technician instead of a Second, at least in the first book. In Last Human, he references being a Second Technician.
• Adaptational Nice Guy:
  • Downplayed in that it's Rimmer we're talking about, but even he has a few of these moments throughout the first two books. While he still gleefully makes fun of Lister when he thinks his immediate future is getting blown up in the drive room, when the moment actually arrives, he tells Lister not to go in an impulsive attempt to avert his death (as opposed to his ghoulish enjoyment in Future Echoes). He also makes sure Lister's will is carried out to the last insane detail when he dies fighting the Polymorph — and is actually joyful when Holly comes up with a plan to resurrect him. Even more so when he figures out what, or rather who, is being sent to Backwards Earth with him.
  • In "Gunmen of the Apocalypse", Lola the bartender laughed along with everyone else when Jimmy taunted Kryten. In Backwards, Lola (renamed "Hope") is one of just two people who treat him with kindness.
• Adaptational Ugliness: In "Gunmen of the Apocalypse", Death looked like an ordinary human. In Backwards, he is described as having pallid green skin, milky gray pupils, and appearing as though he's nothing but bones underneath his outfit.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • Rimmer's brothers. The show generally shows they were pretty horrible to him, once playing a "prank" where they tied him down and smeared him in jam, before covering him in ants, but here they nearly killed him at one point, requiring Rimmer to need CPR. Also, Frank apparently encouraged a young Rimmer to throw stones at a Dead Person's Rights march.
  • Subverted in Backwards: we're introduced to Ace from the viewpoint of a failing test pilot convinced he'll fail his next exam. When Ace pulls rank privileges (like claiming all the barstools in an empty bar), is a spectacular Jerkass to him and threatens the barmaid he has a crush on, the trainee knocks him out — giving the impression Ace will (somehow) be a complete dick here. Later on, it turns out Ace and the barmaid set up the incident to give the pilot confidence in his own abilities.
  • Kryten's sheriff persona in "Gunmen of the Apocalypse" was just a cowardly drunk. In Backwards, he's also shown to be a shameless swindler who thinks nothing out of cheating the one friend he has (little Billy Belief) just so he can get some drinking money. He briefly feels bad about it, but he still does it.
• Adaptation Deviation:
  • The Polymorph's methods in Better Than Life differ from the forms it takes in the show.
    • When attempting to push Lister to the brink of fear, it turns itself into a rat, rather than a snake.
    • Instead of using the appearance of Rimmer's mother to provoke his anger, the Polymorph turns itself into digital data, invades Rimmer's personality files, and forces him to relive countless frustrations and moments of anger.
  • Since the events of "Marooned" and "White Hole" are merged, after Starbug's crash on the ice planet, rather than Lister and Rimmer bickering while stuck, Rimmer gets dragged back to Red Dwarf after his hologram starts drastically slowing down, leaving Lister entirely on his own (admittedly after a good dose of said bickering).
  • Last Human adapts the events of "DNA", but where there Kryten's transformation is the result of the Cat's screwing about, here it's deliberate on Kryten's part as a result of his desire to become human.
  • Backwards takes the events of "Gunmen of the Apocalypse" and gives them a much grimmer twist. Unlike the episode where defeating the virus frees the group unharmed to avoid the imminent crash by the skin of their teeth, here Rimmer and Kryten actually die beating the Apocalypse Boys and the virus isn't cured in time to stop the ship crashing into a planet. Lister and Cat are forced to dimension jump to survive, meeting alternate versions of Rimmer and Kryten in the process.
• Adaptation Distillation: The novels turn an episodic TV series into a sprawling adventure. Each of them takes particular episodes from the series and incorporates their plots into one long narrative, integrated with original material. The first novel is much more heavily based on episodes of the series than its sequels, and also has a much more meandering plot. However, its non-episodic nature means it moves between events far quicker than the series; the crew's encounter with Kryten, which took place in the first episode of season 2 of the show, happens not long after the "Future Echoes" incident (which was episode 2 of season 1). Conversely, the two Rimmers have months here, rather than mere days in the show, to completely fall out with each other.
• Adaptation Expansion:
  • For the episodes that are incorporated into the novels' plots, they go deeply in-depth and add a lot of detail that wasn't or couldn't be realised on screen. The novels' depiction of the AR Game "Better Than Life", as compared to its more lighthearted TV depiction, is a good example. Another is the ship's drive room; initially depicted in the series as a medium size room with a handful of operatives, here, it is much larger, with dozens of crew members working constantly.
  • Other plot events get far more detail than they did in the TV series to give them more depth; in Red Dwarf we see a much more intensive look at the breakdown of relations between the two Rimmers, rather than the single scene of them arguing in "Me 2".
  • Similarly, rather than it being out of nowhere as in "Gunmen of the Apocalypse", Backwards explains the decision for Kryten's subconscious treating his mindscape as a Western scenario as being down to his reading western novels from Starbug's limited library during their time trapped in the backwards reality.
• Adaptation Name Change:
  • The Simulants from the TV series were renamed Agonoids in Backwards, likely because Last Human had also briefly used Simulants.
  • During the "High Midnight" section of the same book — based on the TV series episode "Gunmen of the Apocalypse" — the bartender in Kryten's western fantasy is named "Hope" instead of "Lola". The Jimmy character is given the surname "Guilt" (explaining why Kryten has such a hard time standing up to him).
  • In "Gunmen of the Apocalypse", the AR game character Rimmer played as was named "Dangerous" Dan McGrew. In Backwards, the character's name is instead Big Dan McGrew.
  • The computer virus itself is renamed from the Armageddon Virus to the Apocalypse Virus, which lines up better with the manifestations of the virus in the Western simulation being referred to as the Apocalypse gang.
• A.I. Getting High: The Agonoids use "Scramble Cards" to reroute the signal paths of their electronic mindscapes, creating a temporary, contained alteration of their reality. The narration refers to the practice as "getting robot-drunk".
• The Alcoholic:
  • Petersen, who is introduced swilling down a 12-pack of whiskey, only stopping to let Lister have a sip or two. Holly even cites this as the reason he didn't revive Petersen as a hologram — given Lister had already just tried to drink himself to death, Petersen would've been no help at all, and actually would've likely finished David off. It's noted that he'd been drunk every night of his life since he was 12 years old.
  • Kryten's mindscape uses this as the excuse for Sheriff Will Carton's lack of memories and skill as the Agonoid virus infects and destroys more and more of his core processes.
• Alcohol-Induced Idiocy:
  • Lister winds up on Mimas — and the path to becoming the last living human, 3 million years in the future — after a wild birthday bender. Happens again at the end of the first novel, this time including Rimmer and the Cat, when they wind up in Better than Life.
  • Lister's will and subsequent funeral in Better Than Life is a massive case of this. Unusually, it's played (relatively) seriously, with the funeralgoers knowing how insane it all is but following instructions to the letter out of respect and sadness for their fallen crewmate.
  • In Last Human, Lister has some Kinitawowi moonshine on his wedding night. He only takes a tiny sip, but that is enough to knock him out cold in moments. The narration goes on to mention a rumor that once someone is drunk on Kinitawowi moonshine, they can stay drunk for weeks, perhaps even months (which, to Lister's mind, explains most of his subsequent behavior over the next few weeks).
  • A returning Petersen's drunken rampage in Backwards, culminating in his stapling a guard's penis to his groin. Ouch.
• All for Nothing: Kryten's attempts to create an antidote for the Apocalypse Virus results in not only his own death, but Rimmer's as well. In fact, he doesn't even manage to save the Navicomp in time to get Starbug out of the path of an oncoming planet. The only system the Dove Programme manages to save is the AR machine, which means that Lister and The Cat can exit the western simulation.
• All Girls Want Bad Boys: When an amnesiac Lister and a non-amnesiac Kryten try to figure out just what, beyond simply being the last two of their species, draws Kochanski to David, Kryten eventually shrugs and figures she just "likes a bit of rough".
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: In Backwards, a group of Agonoids board Red Dwarf, strip Holly out, and take the ship for their own.
• Alternate Continuity: The novels are this to the TV show. The novels themselves also fall into this. Grant and Naylor jointly wrote the first two books, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers and Better Than Life. They then separately wrote books called Backwards and Last Human, each of which is a direct alternate-continuity sequel to BTL.
• Alternate Universe:
  • A universe where time runs backwards appears in Better Than Life and Backwards. The former has Holly determine that there are at least four more out there. The main universe is the one getting it all wrong.
  • Backwards and Last Human diverge from each other from the end of Better Than Life.
  • Almost all the events of Last Human take place in an alternate universe wherein their version of Lister is a homicidal sociopath.
  • Backwards had Ace's universe and an alternate universe to that where another version of Ace crossed dimensions too close and was burnt to a crisp.
• Ambiguous Ending: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers ends with Lister about to escape Better Than Life, but hesitating over leaving his fictional wife and children on Christmas Eve, with the narration noting that "In Bedford Falls, it was always Christmas Eve." His decision to permanently stay in the game isn't clarified until the second book.
• Ambiguous Syntax: McIntyre is described as having his nose force-fed to him, and leaves the hotel "carrying his nose" in a napkin in an encounter involving bolt-cutters. It's never made clear if his nose is simply broken, or his nose was actually ripped off his face.
• And I Must Scream:
  • Better Than Life has Kryten, as a result of the horror that is spaghettification, experience what it's like to be Rimmer. He tries to scream, but aforementioned spaghettification makes this impossible.
  • M'Aiden Ty-One's fate in Backwards. Tricked into using a scramble card by D'Juhn Keep that he is told will increase his reflexes, the card actually contains a computer virus which begins shutting down his systems one by one. He starts off as confused and disorientated and gradually grows weaker until he is unable to move or even speak properly. The absolute last thing the virus goes after is his pain receptors, so he is fully conscious and can feel everything as D'Juhn harvests him for the replacement parts he needs to get himself back in full working order.
  • Also in Backwards, Rimmer's death. The Apocalypse virus melts him from the inside out, with first his legs going, then the rest of his body (as the unmelted parts break out in horrendous blisters), finally reducing him to a puddle of liquid flesh containing just his eyeballs. And he's conscious the entire time.
• Anyone Can Die: Each of the main characters dies at some point over the course of the novels, except for the Cat (and even then, two of his alternate selves die at some point). Particularly jarring in Backwards where both Rimmer and Kryten die in their confrontation with the Apocalypse gang only a chapter from the end of the book.
• Armchair Military: Always a facet of Rimmer's character in the show, here it's taken to spectacular new heights. Unwittingly stuck in the Better Than Life game, Rimmer fantasizes the invention of a time machine so that...well, see for yourself.
  Could he have fantasized the invention of a Time Machine just so he could bring back Caesar, Bonaparte and Patton - the three greatest generals in history - simply in order to beat them at 'RISK', the strategic war game for ages fifteen and over? Could he really be that small-minded? ^note  Yes. Yes, he could.
• Armor-Piercing Response: Played for laughs in Backwards: at the end of his tether with the now-teenage Lister and Cat's antics, Rimmer shuts down their needling him about his (non-existent) sex life by pointing out that under the rules of the backwards universe, Cat didn't lose his virginity by having sex with the hillbilly girl, he became a virgin.
• Ascended Extra:
  • Talkie Toaster, a beloved but extremely minor part of the TV series, becomes a major character in Better Than Life, and despite being a talking toaster actually manages to save the day a couple of times. It Makes Sense in Context.
  • Minor characters from The End, such as Petersen and George McIntyre are fleshed out and given backstories and motivations.
• Ask a Stupid Question...: In Backwards after Lister is decapitated by a tomahawk during the western simulation (but is unable to die) an aghast Rimmer asks him if he's alright. Cat (who's just been shot between the eyes) immediately lampshades what a dumb question this is to ask someone whose head is lying on the ground several feet away from their body. Admittedly Lister still makes his headless body continue to advance on the Apocalypse Boys while his head shouts taunts from the ground. When Rimmer is subsequently melted into a steaming puddle of blistered flesh by the virus (while still remaining alive and conscious), Cat sarcastically asks him if he's alright.
• The Atoner: Lister makes a deal with the Earth to make up for the millenia of abuse by humanity.
• Ax-Crazy: The alternate Lister, being a sociopath, is perfectly willing to mutilate himself just to get the chance to deceive and then murder other people for the sheer hell of it.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Love is a strong term, but Rimmer and Lister otherwise fit this trope really well — most notably at the end of Better Than Life, where Rimmer is crushed by Lister's death, ensures his funeral is carried out exactly as Lister requested it (despite that being a massive case of Alcohol-Induced Idiocy) and is the principal mover and shaker in Lister's resurrection. Lister reciprocates in Last Human when Rimmer dies saving them all, noting he'd give anything to have Rimmer back to make his last peace with him.
• Bang, Bang, BANG: In Backwards, Ace Rimmer's CO resigns his commission and takes a bath before pulling out his sidearm and fires it inside the confines of his bathroom (NOT to kill himself as was implied, but to defiantly blow up the bottle of whiskey that had metaphorically ruined his life). The gunshot is so loud that his ears start to bleed and he exclaims "Bugger me, that was loud!" Justified in that he's in a confined and tiled space that would amplify the sound of the gunshot.
• Batman Gambit: Lister intentionally brings Frankenstein aboard Red Dwarf in Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers after finding her on planet leave, in order to get himself a sentencing in a stasis pod and thereby skipping the 4 year journey back to Earth. Bringing unquarantined animals aboard the mining vessel happens to be the least serious crime resulting in a stasis sentence, which Lister had been betting on.
  • Unlike the TV series, the novel goes to great lengths to point out that Frankenstein was not, in fact, an unquarantined animal at all. Lister had very carefully made sure she had all her shots and had been properly quarantined before he purchased her, but never presented the paperwork because he wanted to be put in stasis, since it's the best way to get to Earth without having to wait for it doing work he hated.
• Battle Royale Game: Every Agonoid wants to be the one to kill Lister. So a twisted game is created wherein they race down interconnected corridors, each leading to a single door, with the contestants encouraged to do whatever it takes to make it through the doors before they close. The Agonoid who makes it through the final door will receive the honor of killing Lister. It never gets used for its intended purpose, with a repaired Djuhn'Keep instead using it to wipe out the other agonoids before any of them can steal his place as the killer of the last human.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Towards the end of Last Human, the characters are forced to perform a ritual to protect themselves from the Rage by forming a circle and using it to channel the Rage into one of them, killing that person but saving everyone else. Lister's Evil Twin steals the Luck Virus and takes it to make sure it isn't him. Only, when the Rage actually strikes, it's so powerful and alluring that everyone in the circle is temporarily driven insane so that they want to be possessed by it. But only one of them's taken the Luck Virus, which gives you everything you want...
• Beastly Bloodsports:
  • In Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, the Ganymede Mafia run giant snail fights. The Gambling Addict Macintyre claims there's nothing more thrilling than watching one snail take three hours to score a hit, and its opponent retreat into its shell for the rest of the day.
  • The Cat's Better Than Life fantasies include several of these, such as "Creature Polo" (where a small, furry animal of unknown species is used as a ball), the self-explanatory "Mouse Tennis", and the Cat's version of the traditional "hunting ride", wherein it turns out the dogs racing along ahead of the riders are the quarry, and the Cat guns them all down, describing it as "vermin hunting".
• Because Destiny Says So: Lister abandons his plans to go into stasis to await the ship's return to Earth in the first book because he saw echoes of the future that couldn't happen if he did.
• Believing Their Own Lies: When Lister brings up Rimmer's trip to an android brothel, he manages to summon up genuine indignation, since it contrasts so greatly with the mental image Rimmer has of himself.
• Bemoaning the New Body:
  • Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers kicks off with the dead engineer Saunders being depressed over his new status as a hologram: quite apart from being unable to touch anything, he's also left saddled with a truckload of bureaucracy, not allowed shore leave with the rest of the crew, and left with the awful knowledge that because his marriage is now null and void, his wife will meet someone else. He's so upset that he tries to thump the desk in front of him in a rage, only for his hand to pass right through it and smash himself in the balls. As such, when Flight Coordinator McIntyre commits suicide and dooms Saunders to be switched off so that the more important crewmember can take his place as Red Dwarf's hologram, Saunders nothing short of overjoyed.
  • As with the TV show, Rimmer is immediately gloomy after being brought back as a hologram, and most of his first few lines are to lament how depressed he is about it — to the point that he even talks over Lister, who's still in mourning for the rest of the Red Dwarf crew and almost drank himself to death in grief. For good measure, Rimmer makes it clear that along with the inability to touch anything, he's also bummed over being a "dirty deadie" like the other holograms that he and his brothers used to abuse.
  • In Better Than Life, Rimmer's unconscious self-loathing results in the eponymous VR game inflicting a ruinous streak of bad luck on him that ends with Rimmer being jailed as a disembodied essence, having his repossessed body claimed by Jimmy Jitterman, and ending up trapped in the body of prostitute Trixie LaBouche. Rimmer is not happy with any of it, least of all the pain of having to flee the prison with no bra. In the days that follow, he's stuck in the company of the Jittermans, who routinely subject him to sexist insults, physical abuse, and borderline enslavement, leaving Rimmer silently despairing over just how much he's lost in his new body.
  • Zig-zagged in Last Human. Kryten is initially very happy when he uses the DNA machine to turn himself into a human, despite Kochanski warning him that treating his transformation as the ultimate solution for all his problems is a big mistake. However, he soon becomes gripped with uncharacteristic anger and petulance once he realizes that he's going to die like any other mere mortal, even more so when he's injured for the first time in an accident. Worse still, the fact that his human body makes him less useful to his friends leaves him humiliated and snippy. As such, once the team regains control of the DNA Machine, Kryten decides to become a mechanoid again.
• Berserk Button: The alternate Lister hates being told what to do. Even a mild suggestion makes him wig out and start smashing Lister against the nearest wall.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Kryten, stuck with Talkie Toaster (Patent applied for) for a few days, starts finding him so irritating he has to resist the urge to destroy the annoying little bastard. After the Polymorph removes his guilt, he demolishes the mouthy appliance by jamming it into a waste disposal unit and shredding it.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: In Better Than Life, the main inhabitants of Garbage World are eight-foot long cockroaches.
• Big Fancy House: Petersen has bought one on the moon of Triton, orbiting Neptune, for a ridiculously cheap price and has signed up on Red Dwarf to earn his passage out to it. The estate agent has sent him a sketch of the place and Lister questions why he wasn't given a photograph. Petersen responds that it's impossible to photograph in a methane atmosphere and that they don't plan to terraform Triton for several years yet. Holly later notes that this is not the action of a man suitable to be revived to even keep himself sane, never mind anyone else. This gets a Call-Back in Backwards, where Petersen is working his way back towards Earth because, while he doesn't mind hanging around the house all day in a spacesuit, he's more concerned with the fact that he's forced to do it sober.
• Bittersweet Ending: Each of the novels has one.
  • Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers ends with the crew being stuck in a virtual reality simulation of their fantasies, which gives them all everything they ever wanted, but will eventually kill two of them by starvation.
  • Better Than Life ends with Lister's death and resurrection on backwards Earth along with Kochanski, but unable to leave until the others return for him, not to mention that Holly has less than a minute to live should he be switched back on.
  • Last Human probably gets the best possible scenario of the series. Rimmer, of all people, performs two heroic sacrifices in order for the crew and the "volunteers" for the terraforming project to survive and Lister has been rendered sterile by his Evil Counterpart. Yet, after the planet travels through the Omni Zone and the survivors return to the surface, it is implied that the Luck virus can reverse Lister's sterility and that Lister and Kochanski can begin to rebuild the human race.
  • Rimmer, Kryten, Holly and Ace Rimmer are all killed during Backwards (and since Kryten's cure for the Apocalypse virus doesn't remedy Starbug's problem in time to avoid losing the ship, Kryten and Rimmer's sacrifice was a bit wasteful). Lister and the Cat use Ace's ship to jump dimensions to an alternate Red Dwarf where they had died in Better Than Life, but Kryten, Rimmer and Holly are all okay.
• Black Comedy Rape:
  • Rimmer lost his virginity to Yvonne McGruder, the ship's boxing champion, who may have been suffering from a concussion as she kept calling Rimmer Norman. In a slightly less squicky Retcon from the televised series, McGruder was truly interested in him, but because their respective coworkers had teased them over the awkwardness of their initial encounter and McGruder's concussion meant that she wasn't sure the event had actually happened, they both waited for the other to make the first move in reestablishing contact, something neither did.
  • Happens to Lister in Last Human, on his wedding night with Khakhakhakkhhakhakkkhakkkkkh the Kinitawowi chief's daughter. After drinking Kinitawowi moonshine and passing out, he wakes up to find her riding on top of him.
• Blatant Lies: While trying to convince Lister not to go into stasis and leave him to be switched off, Rimmer claims that he only treated Lister the way he did to "make a man" out of him. Lister doesn't buy it for a second.
• Boarding School of Horrors: Rimmer went to one in his childhood. We get a few glimpses of it when the polymorph rummages around in his memory files. Most of the memories involve Rimmer being given vicious beatings for no reason whatsoever.
• Body Horror:
  • Spaghettification does not in fact cause people to want to consume vast amounts of spaghetti. It causes them to merge into one hideous, contorted, screaming mass.
  • The Polymorph's transformation, free from TV BS&P, are much more visceral than in the show. The description of them is akin to The Thing (1982).
  • Some of the GELFs described sound pretty horrific, such as the living car.
  • Dr. Longman and his two clones transform themselves into horrific human/animal hybrids using the DNA modifier and are stuck that way because their cells gave up.
• Bond One-Liner: Of all characters, Talkie Toaster gets one after it kills a Polymorph.
  Talkie Toaster: Was it something I said? He's really cut up.
• Brick Joke:
  • The novel reveals what became of the ship's supply of dog's milk, which "Kryten" never explained — Lister flushed it all into space.
  • In Last Human, inside Lister's fridge in his tailor-made Hell is, of course, a fresh carton of dog's milk.
• Brutal Honesty:
  • After a few days dealing with a newly hologramatic Rimmer, Lister just out and out tells him that he doesn't like him. Rimmer cannot believe this.
  • Holly repairs the Talkie Toaster in order to get a second opinion on things. After doing so, Talkie makes him promise not to respond with violence to its opinion: He's gone completely senile.
• Butt-Monkey: One notable instance for Rimmer in Last Human: with Lister stuck on Cyberia, his role from "DNA" (where Cat accidentally turns him into a chicken) is given to Rimmer, who proceeds to get it a LOT worse, with the book noting the crew had to go through several hundred tries to get him back to his original form.
• Call to Agriculture: Lister on Garbage World. Waiting three and a half decades for his crewmates, he needed something to do.
• Came Back Wrong: Not that it was a spectacular piece of software to begin with, but after getting fed into the waste disposal unit, once Talkie Toaster is fixed, it's convinced it's a moose.
• Canon Discontinuity: After the Grant/Naylor writing partnership broke up in 1993, both writers penned a new Red Dwarf novel: Doug Naylor wrote Last Human in 1995, and Rob Grant wrote Backwards in 1996. Each one ignores the other and is written as following the second book Better Than Life.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: The only reason D'Juhn Keep hasn't been dismantled for parts is due to his capacity for invention and design keeping the Agonoid fleet going through the centuries. But it's noted that it's only a matter of time before too much of him breaks down to be useful, whereupon he will be nothing but a spare parts repository and so much scrap metal.
• Cat Folk: The novels get a little more time to flesh out the Cat race (but not the Cat himself, since he is mind-meltingly shallow and superficial). Their makeshift city in Red Dwarf's cargo bay is comprised of little igloos, due to their instinctual fondness for curling up in confined spaces, even when they're human-sized, and the Cat himself is no exception. The Cat himself frequently lounges, dozes off, or snoozes, and initially it's a struggle for Lister to get any answers from him at all, since the Cat has the attention span of... well, a cat.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • The Game in the first book. Introduced in the fourth chapter and then seemingly forgotten, until Lister discovers that he and his crewmates are in the Game near the end.
    • On that same note, the "wild rumour" that A-Shift leader Petrovitch was a drug dealer that Rimmer had been spreading when establishing Rimmer's spite for the character. Petrovitch was the reason that the Game was on the ship.
  • The super-intelligent Holly revealing all sorts of fantastic new scientific theories and facts to a thoroughly uniniterested Talkie Toaster in Better Than Life seems like little more than a joke, but becomes vitally important to the plot later on when Holly is offline and can't be turned back on, and Red Dwarf is heading straight for a black hole. Lucky that the Toaster is still around and was forced to go through Holly's lecture on how to survive a black hole!
  • The Oblivion Virus from Last Human. Initially used as a way to knock out the power to the penal colony where Lister's alternate self is imprisoned, Kryten later intends to use it to defeat The Rage, a gestalt entity made up of the rage of innocent prisoners experimented upon to terraform planets. In the end, it's Rimmer who makes use of the virus.
  • When Lister is looking through his alternate self's things, he notices a laser pistol, which the narration specifically notes will cause him trouble later on.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: The Agonoids are unable to create new body parts for themselves when their old ones break down, so the only way for an Agonoid to replace lost parts is to take them from another Agonoid. It's noted that this is both good and bad; Basically, it means that there are fewer and fewer Agonoids as time goes by, but in a strange form of natural selection, only the most ruthless of an already ruthless species survive.
• Cigarette of Anxiety: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers notes that Rimmer, normally a non-smoker, starts smoking 40 cigarettes a day as his Astronavigation exams draw nearer.
• Collector of Forms: The Symbi-morphs of Last Human have the ability to shapeshift in order to fit the desires of their masters, but only once they've been symbiotically bonded with them, so most of the shapes they can assume are essentially "learned" from the minds of those they've been bonded with. For example, Reketrebn initially has no human forms in its repertoire, manifesting only as a female dingotang and inanimate objects; however, once it bonds with Lister, it immediately gains the forms of Kochanski, Rimmer, Kryten, Lister himself, a whole host of human celebrities, and a horse — all of which are put to use in amusing Lister or in helping him escape Cyberia.
• Colonized Solar System: The books go a little further into detail about this than the original series does. The first book depicts Lister on Mimas and it's depicted as a Wretched Hive and there's a brief mention of Lister and Petersen spending planet leave on Miranda, which doesn't allow alcohol. Better Than Life gives more detail as to the rest of the solar system: Mercury provides solar power, Venus and Mars are home to the affluent (Mars especially), Saturn and Jupiter have a thriving tourist industry, Uranus is where much of the mining is done, Neptune has some wonderful architecture, and Pluto is just there for the sake of having been colonised. Petersen buys a house on Triton, but it turns out the moon hasn't even been terraformed yet.
• Compensating for Something:
  • Rimmer's fantasy has him acquire new bodies with increasingly large penises to make up for his own inadequacies in reality. He notes, to his horror, at one point that the insanely large limousine he has implies this about him as well, whereas Lister's choice of an Alleged Car is the opposite way around.
  • Lister's alternate self in Ace's universe, Spanners, reckons that Admiral Tranter is suffering from this, thanks to the enormous desk he has in his enormous office complete with carpet so thick that golf balls get lost in it. Tranter is, in fact, compensating for the fact that his career has sputtered out.
• Competition Freak:
  • In Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, the two Rimmers are left to supervise the reconstruction of the Nova 5 while Lister and the others find the fuel for the ship's Duality Jump. Holly estimates that the reconstruction will take at least two months, but the Rimmers decide to get it finished in a quarter of the time, ready to greet the return of Lister's group. During this time, they keep competing with each other over taxing work regimes that involve less and less sleep, with neither one backing down.
  • When Kryten and Rimmer attempt to restart Red Dwarf's engines, Rimmer naturally decides he wants to complete his part of the work before Kryten. This wouldn't have been so bad but for an unpleasant accident involving about half the Skutters aboard the Red Dwarf.
• Compressed Adaptation: The audiobook version of Backwards not only removes the segment where The Cat sleeps with the hillbillies' daughter, but omits the entire AR machine western sequence entirely with Rimmer and Kryten instead dying during the hull breach.
  • Similarly, the "Radio Show" versions of Infinity and Better Than Life cut out extraneous material, often not featuring the crew or not advancing the plot in some way, in order to be split into episodes for broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
• Conducting the Carnage: When D'Juhn Keep betrays his fellow Agonoids by forcing them into the trap-laden corridors meant for the Dwarfers, he turns up the volume on the speakers and waves his fingers in the air to the sound of their screams of agony, "as if he were conducting the sweetest of sweet symphonies".
• Confidence Building Scheme: The first parallel universe chapter of Backwards introduces a hopelessly neurotic cadet pilot by the name of Billy-Joe Epstein, a man who could make it through flight school and start a relationship with the girl of his dreams if not for his own monumental lack of confidence. However, an officer unexpectedly picks on him at a bar one night, harassing his crush in the process — eventually provoking Billy-Joe into fighting back and kicking the officer's ass. He even manages to accidentally walk away with the officer's St Christopher medal in the process, inspiring him to take the risks he would previously have avoided. It's later revealed that the officer — one Ace Rimmer — staged the fight and deliberately lost in order to motivate Billy-Joe.
• Continuity Snarl:
  • In Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, Lister recalls a girl named Susan Warrington making love to him at the Bootle Municipal Golf Course. In Better Than Life, he recounts much the same thing to Rimmer, only with his partner's name changed to "Michelle Fisher".
    • Notable in that Michelle Fisher is the name used in the series' episode "Marooned" when Lister recounts the same story to Rimmer.
  • During the Rimmers' "supervision" of the reconstruction of the Nova 5, almost all the skutters end up exploding due to being overworked. In Better Than Life, several more appear from out of nowhere.
  • During Better Than Life, Starbug is utterly destroyed by acid rain, with "White Giant" being said to be the only transport ship the Dwarfers have left. However, both Last Human and Backwards feature Starbug as their prime method of transportation, brought back without any explanation.
    • However, the above two can be explained by the gap between novels; Infinity and Better than Life feature a two-year gap while the crew were stuck in the game, and the events of Better than Life are followed by a 36-year gap as the crew wait for Lister to de-age back to normal in the backwards universe (Cat remaining in stasis at that point). With this time scale taken into account, it is likely that Holly and the crew were able to repair the damaged. Last Human even notes that Starbug was rebuilt.
• Cool and Unusual Punishment:
  • The man who commits the first act of GELF murder is found guilty, but given no actual punishment, on the grounds that he has to live the rest of his life with the stigma of being the guy cuckolded by his own chair.
  • The Slugirrafe judge in Last Human, a being so revoltingly disgusting no-one is able to withstanding being around it without vomiting profusely, tells the beings it's putting into Cyberia that if they should attempt to escape, they will be caught and sent back to the prison... but first, they'll have to have sex with it.
• Covers Always Lie: An American cover exists for Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers which portrays the characters quite differently from their normal appearances — among other things, these include The Cat looking like a giant humanoid cat (he's a case of Little Bit Beastly otherwise), Lister receiving a Race Lift to become a white man, Rimmer looking more obviously hologrammatic and Holly being depicted as a pixellated bald man's head.
• Crapsack World, Escapist Sanctuary: Earth is a polluted has-been, working in space is boring as hell, the really nice off-world colonies are off-limits to everyone but the wealthy, and most of the others are either depressing military/industrial outposts or crime-ridden hellholes. Also, there's a new illegal drug sweeping the solar system: Better Than Life, a virtual reality game that makes the user's desires come true in a tailor-made simulation. The game erases all memory of starting play, leaving the user trapped inside until they starve to death — and even if they do realize what's going on, gameplay is so addictive that few users ever voluntarily leave. And yet, there's no shortage of new users willing to risk death for the ultimate escapist fantasy, to the point that one Game smuggler among the Red Dwarf crew expected to make ten years wages from a single shipment to Triton. And things only get worse three million years in the future...
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass:
  • Lister, in keeping with his TV counterpart, is pretty smart and adaptive under his slobbish exterior. In the Better Than Life novel, he's stranded alone on Garbage World/Earth, which reacts to a human presence by trying to kill him with bizarre weather like literal acid rain. He narrowly escapes everything thrown at him until he has nowhere to hide... then convinces the Earth to spare him in return for fixing the damage humans have done to it, and spends the next 34 years building up a large and thriving farm with the help of the evolved cockroaches that are now the dominant species on the planet.
  • The Toaster. He manages to kill a polymorph.
  • Rimmer in Last Human. When the chips are down, he pilots an astro-skimmer (which he's never flown before and can barely control, mostly because he's wearing the rigging backwards) in order to save Lister, Kochanski and his son from Lister's sociopathic double.
• Cruel Mercy: The end of the human / GELF war had mankind unable to kill the GELFs who surrendered, because that would have been murder, so they just left them on Earth, which was turned into a garbage dump.
• Culture Clash: Results in problems for the Dwarf gang in Last Human. Having dealt with a bunch of GELFs who use sperm as currency, Lister and the Cat offer some to the Kinnatawowi, who suddenly get offended. Rimmer quickly pegs the reason: The Kinnatawowi do not use sperm as currency, so Lister and the Cat have just put their foot in it.
• Currency Cuisine: Used metaphorically in the novel Better Than Life; After Rimmer's fantasy takes a dark turn, he is left bankrupt just before his wedding. During the pre-wedding party, Rimmer watches the last of his money being spent, and sees all the guests as consuming great big platefuls of cash a'la Rimmer, devouring what is left of his riches.
• Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon: The Agonoids in Backwards have increasingly elaborate deaths planned for Lister. Justified in that they found out from Holly that Lister is the very last human in all existence, and want to take their time inflicting as drawn-out and agonising a death as possible.
• Dare to Be Badass:
  • In Last Human, Rimmer, in a risky escape attempt to escape the vault, lets Kryten deactivate his projection and drop his light bee down an oxygeneration outlet pipe. He then dons a flame-throwing asro-stripper; flies it into F-deck, and, briefly but crucially, wounds the sociopath Alternate Universe Lister.
  • In Backwards, Ace Rimmer tends to encourage those around him to audacious excellence. Specifically, he lures confidence-lacking Space Corps trainee Billy-Joe Epstein into self-defensively punching him.
• Darker and Edgier: The books in general run with several of the more sci-fi plots the show dropped, and has more of its own. The show is a Sitcom IN SPACE!, and will always snatch itself back down to those roots whenever it starts to stray and become too dramatic. While they remain funny, the books are a sci-fi series with some high stakes (and funny.)
  • The novels retain the absurdist humour, but devotes much of a chapter to Lister having a spectacular mental breakdown in which Drowning My Sorrows is not played for comedy in the least. Rimmer's massive self-image problems and crippling neuroses aren't played for laughs quite so much either, and he's made slightly more rounded as a result.
  • Better Than Life and its effects are notably far more morbid than in the show: it's made quite clear that the game is cripplingly addictive thanks to it tapping directly into the user's subconscious. Most players die a short time after beginning a session, as their bodies simply waste away in the real world due to malnutrition.
  • Backwards compared to Last Human. Kochanski forgets Lister and doesn't leave Backwards Earth with him and the Dwarfers' exodus from the backwards reality, which is skipped over in Last Human as being largely uneventful, is not only frought with complications, is delayed by an entire decade. When the boys do return to their own reality, they are low on supplies and Starbug is on the brink of total breakdown when they are pursued by the Agonoids, who have taken over Red Dwarf and ripped out Holly. Even when Kryten manages to flush D'Juhn Keep into space, the virus locks the Bug's navicomp into a set course right into an oncoming planet. Kryten's attempt at an antidote is too little, too late, as he and Rimmer are destroyed in the process. It's only for the fact that Lister and The Cat make use of Ace's ship that they get out at all.
• Dating What Daddy Hates:
  • Invoked when the recruiter who signs Lister up to the Red Dwarf thinks that if his daughter brought Lister home, he'd happily shoot them both.
  • The narration for Last Human notes that if Kochanski's father ever clapped eyes on Lister, he'd have more seizures than a ward full of epileptics.
• Death by Adaptation:
  • Rimmer dies in both Grant and Naylor's solo novels. Holly and Kryten also die in Backwards.
  • Lister's GELF bride dies in Last Human, violently murdered by Lister's counterpart.
• Deconstruction: The novels deconstruct the premise of a number of their episodes and show how harrowing they could be.
  • Upon discovering he's three million years away from home and totally alone, Lister has a mental breakdown and drinks himself into oblivion until Holly activates Rimmer to keep him company.
  • Rimmer clones himself and the relationship eventually breaks down, just like on the TV version. This time we're treated to Rimmer's thought process regarding why hanging out with yourself generally won't work in the long run, although whether it's Rimmer's personality flaws or the concept itself that doomed the experiment is left open.
  • Better Than Life itself is significantly different as it doesn't actually give the player whatever they wish for like the version in the TV show; rather, it gives the user their deepest subconscious desires. As a result, Lister's reality in particular is based far more on his hidden desires and sentimentalities than the generically extravagant wishes he makes in the TV version of BTL. However, it is mentioned that earlier versions of the game did work as it did in the show, but it wasn't nearly as addictive because people could tell they were in a virtual world as everything came so easily so the immersion was lost. While the TV show made it clear that Rimmer's brain was rebelling against him due to his inability to accept nice things, the novel takes it even further by reinforcing that Rimmer genuinely believes he is worthless on a subconscious level, with the result that the company he has created in the game collapses on the day of his second wedding, his new solid body is repossessed as part of his bankruptcy, and he is subsequently stuck in a female body and almost forced to pimp himself out while stuck with a pair of criminals who have stolen his original body.
  • In Backwards we see the concept of a life lived in reverse through Lister's eyes, and it's not nearly as Played for Laughs as the TV version. Most heartbreaking is the reveal that due to everyone's memory running in reverse (bar his), he lived happily with Kochanski until time reversed to the point they met — then she forgot about him entirely.
  • In the same novel we see quite a few things from Ace Rimmer's point of view: while he is undoubtedly insanely courageous and selfless, we also see he's not quite as sure of himself as the Ideal Hero TV version, quite openly dreading meeting another version of himself in case that Rimmer had somehow contributed more to humanity than him.
  • Also from Backwards Kryten/Sheriff Will Carton's hopeless drunkenness isn't played for any laughs, instead being portrayed as an incredibly depressing story of how he's become The Alcoholic as the virus wipes out more of his functions to the point he doesn't remember who he is and is willing to both beg for scraps from/lie to the personifications of his remaining mental processes to get more booze.
• Deep-Immersion Gaming: "Better Than Life" is even more immersive in the novels than in the TV series, to the point that the game erases any memory of the player beginning to play and conjures semi-realistic explanations for why they suddenly have everything they ever wanted. As a result, players tend to die of starvation in short order unless somebody is caring for them in reality. The game is treated like a street drug and banned accordingly, with analogous "game heads" and "game dealers".
  • Another example appears in Backwards when Lister, Cat and Rimmer use the VR gaming technology to join Kryten in his head (in a simulation resembling a western) to help him fight off the Apocalypse Virus.
• Demoted to Extra: The Cat in Last Human. He's a constant presence and gets a lot of focus in the other three novels, but in this one he's very much Out of Focus outside a couple of token moments, and is conveniently not present for most of the important scenes, including the dramatic final confrontation with Lister's evil double and the Rage.
• Department of Redundancy Department: Rimmer has a bad case of this when he's confronted by the son he never knew existed in Last Human, with Lister having to spell out the truth to his uncomprehending shipmate by also resorting to this.
  Rimmer: My son?
  Lister: Yes.
  Rimmer: That man there. The one who just fainted?
  Lister: The one who's your son, yes. That one. He's your son.
  Rimmer: You're saying that this man, this man, here, who is my son, is in fact my son.
  Rimmer: [faints]
• Didn't Think This Through: In Last Human, the Gelfs in charge of creating a gestalt entity intended to terraform a new planet for their civilization to live on managed this twice.
  • First, they created one from the minds of convicted criminals. The result was, as one later puts it, "a deceitful and bitter God who punished the just, rewarded the wicked and encouraged evil". The entity corrupted the minds of everyone exposed to it, and the planet ended up inhabited only by the cream of evil.
  • The second time around, they manipulated a corrupt justice system to falsely convict people en masse, ensuring that they would have a large supply of innocent subjects for the new gestalt, assuming that this would avert the previous problem. It apparently never occurred to anyone that the innocent victims of this horrendous injustice might be ever-so-slightly angry about it. The result? An entity of pure rage, driven by a vengeful determination to make the planet completely unlivable.
  • Last Human notes this is Lister's Fatal Flaw. While he is much smarter than he gives himself credit for, he never tends to think things through properly.
• Didn't See That Coming: None of the Agonoid ever consider that Djuhn'Keep, the weakest among them, wouldn't be satisfied by the idea that he wouldn't even have a fighting chance to earn the right to kill the last human. Needless to say, his betraying them all is a complete surprise.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: The original script for the first episode said Pete McIntyre died from the radiation leak that Rimmer failed to fix. Here he blows his own brains out after he's force-fed his own nose in public by gangsters for not paying gambling debts.
• Dime Novel: In Backwards, Kryten has been reading one of these for the past fifty years at an incredibly slow rate to stretch it out, as it's the last book on board. This is used to justify why Kryten interprets the struggle with the Apocalypse Virus as a Western.
• Distant Prologue: Last Human begins with a short prologue detailing the birth of the first human three million years ago, before jumping forward six million years to Lister in Cyberia.
• Doppelgänger Replacement Love Interest: When they get back to Earth, Lister marries a descendant of Kochanski who looks exactly like her and is also called Kristine. Turns out he's in a Lotus-Eater Machine.
• Dramatically Missing the Point: As the Nova 5 crashes spectacularly, the crew scream at Kryten for what he's done (as in, washed the ship's computers). Kryten somehow believes their cries of shock and horror are attempts to thank him.
• Dream Emergency Exit: Originally advertised as a video game that's "Better Than Life!", The Game is actually an addictive virtual reality system; once you're in, you can't get out, because The Game protects itself and makes it impossible for you to remember that you're in it. The only way to leave The Game is to want to leave, and to imagine an exit to go back to the real world.
• Dreamville: In the finale of Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, a drunken night out results in the crew playing the illegal VR game "Better Than Life", in which each of them finds themselves in their ideal fantasy worlds. Lister's virtual paradise takes the form of Bedford Falls, the small town from It's A Wonderful Life: here, he has all the money he needs to get by, friendly neighbours, Kristine Kochanski as his wife, and two children. However, Lister will eventually starve to death in the real world unless he leaves, and BTL is programmed to erase all memory of starting a game. The novel ends with Lister becoming aware that he's in VR and vowing to leave, but deciding to leave it until after Christmas just so he has a chance to properly say goodbye... except, as the narration observes, it's always Christmas Eve in Bedford Falls.
• Dream Within a Dream: False awakening is one of the tricks the "Better Than Life" game uses to keep players trapped. If you realize your new ideal life is a game simulation, it lets you "wake up" into a version of the life you had before you entered the game, only slightly tweaked to be more comfortable than the reality.
• Driver Faces Passenger: In Backwards, Lister turns to face Rimmer while the crew is on a perilous reverse car chase up a mountain, freaking out the already-uneasy hologram. Lister points out that, due to the effect-and-cause physics of the Backwards Earth, it is impossible for them to crash, so there's no real danger in the act.
• Drunk Rolling: In Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, the introductory chapters on Mimas introduce a pair of homeless drug addicts by the name of Denis and Josie. With Josie completely immersed in Better Than Life, Denis has to provide for both of them, most commonly by stealing from drunken spacers on shore leave: the last decent meal he's had is a slice of pizza nicked from one such tourist two days prior. In the end, this doesn't work out, so Denis resorts to taking some Bliss for Dutch courage and mugging his targets instead — the first of them being Lister.
• Earth All Along: Garbage World is eventually revealed to have been Earth that was abandoned, used as a giant waste dump, and eventually broke free of its orbit around the Sun. It seems to have gained some sort of sentience too, as it tries to kill Lister until he makes a deal to try and set things right.
• Entitled Bastard: Rimmer.
  • When Lister admits that he doesn't actually like him, Rimmer is shocked. Despite acknowledging to himself that he'd never liked Lister either, he can't imagine why Lister wouldn't like him.
  • Despite taking great pleasure in Lister's supposed impending death (and mocking him for it), when he sees the Future Echo of an elderly Lister, he starts begging him to tell if he ever became an officer.
  • In Backwards he mentally gripes about how the rest of the crew haven't learned to respect him, despite the fact that he doesn't show them any respect at all.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: In Better Than Life, when Lister crashes on a planet which turns out to be Earth, the planet itself seems to be out to get him.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Or at the very least, Total Smeghead Cannot Comprehend Good. Rimmer is baffled by the idea that Lister's deepest held desire is... just to be Happily Married in a nowhere town with two kids.
• Evil Doppelgänger: Last Human had the crew go up against a sociopathic version of Lister from another universe, who had murdered his crew in cold blood and is seeking to obtain the genome of all life forms for the intent of becoming a God.
• Exact Words:
  • McIntyre's constant reminder to everyone that "Being a hologram solved all my problems" at the start of Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers — having fatally shot himself, he no longer owes money to the mafia because he's dead and technically not the person who owed money, because he's now technically not a person.
  • Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers ends with Lister vowing to leave the game... but after Christmas. It wouldn't be right to leave his wife and kids, even if they're not real, on Christmas. But in Bedford Falls, it's always Christmas.
• Executive Excess: Justified. Rimmer ends up becoming one of these when he returns to Earth, using the publicity to kickstart the creation of a business empire. However, despite his supposedly world-famous business acumen, Rimmer is never seen at work as CEO at any point, instead usually hosting lavish parties atop his Paris HQ, going on drunken joyrides across history in the company time machine, and playing strategy games with Julius Caesar, George Patton and Napoléon Bonaparte. It turns out that the crew never returned to Earth at all, and they're actually trapped in a game of Better Than Life: in Rimmer's part of the game, his fantasy of being successful has become a reality, allowing him all the benefits of being a wealthy CEO with none of the drawbacks. Until his psyche ruins it.
• Failed a Spot Check: Invoked in Backwards in Ace Rimmer's universe, when a second version of the Wildfire ship appears at the research station with Ace Rimmer's corpse inside it three days before the scheduled test flight. Scientists all assume it's a result of the ship being capable of time travel, until Lister's counterpart "Spanners" examines the in-flight recorder and notes that the date listed is the date the station recovered the craft, when if it was time travel the recorder should have logged a date in the future. The admiral is naturally incredulous that the scientists were so caught up in the idea that they had cracked time travel that they failed to do the obvious of checking the date on the ship in question (Ace subsequently explains that this, along with a few other clues, led him to conclude that the other Wildfire is from an alternate universe).
• Fantastic Drug:
  • Bliss, from the first novel. A brown powder substance notable for causing addiction just by looking at it (which made drug busts notoriously difficult), and for its effects. It causes the user to believe they are God, all seeing, all knowing, infinite in power and the creator of all things. Kind of laughable as you couldn't even tie your own shoelaces while high on Bliss. Its high lasted a few minutes, followed by decades of suicidal depression, the only relief from which could be bought with another hit.
  • Better than Life, which was a sort of Lotus-Eater Machine in the books rather than the more innocuous artificial reality video game of the TV series, is treated like an addictive drug. One of its victims is included among a group of drug addicts in a scene in the first novel, and a character selling copies is referred to as a drug dealer.
• Fantastic Fireworks: Rimmer's Better Than Life fantasy incorporates such a display; first, the fireworks create a portrait of Rimmer and his wife in a pink Valentine's heart. Then the portrait animates, with the Rimmer image winking to the watching crowd and kissing his wife's image. Finally, the image changes into the logo of Rimmer's fantasy corporation. The narration states that this display resulted in a standing ovation that lasted ten whole minutes.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • In the first book, it's stated that holograms are discriminated against and treated as second class citizens because they are seen by the living as a reminder of their own mortality. Holograms often hold equal rights marches. Given the power and computer run time requirements, only the mega rich and mission critical Space Corps personnel are resurrected as holograms. Rimmer had once thrown a stone at one of these marches as a child and one of his early thoughts after his death is that he's now a "dirty deadie".
  • Lister is horrified when he realises that Kryten is essentially a willing slave in his eyes and notes that it's nothing more than a progression from slavery with blacks and housewives.
  • In the second book's chapter detailing the backstory of the GELFs, it's noted that the GELFs are technically human, having been engineered from human chromosomes. However, they are not allowed to vote and killing them is technically not considered murder. This leads to a small uprising, which is swiftly put down. In an extraordinary coincidence, this occurs around the same time as humanity's garbage problem, so the GELFs are all dumped on Earth and left to die.
  • In Last Human, the GELF State supposedly offers citizenship status to all GELFs regardless of origins, even the objectively revolting Snugiraffe; though the society is a dystopia in all but name, none of these genetically engineered life-forms are discriminated against by the majority... except for the Symbi-Morphs, who are treated as animals and granted no rights whatsoever, requiring them to be "broken" like horses before they can service their masters. Upon meeting Reketrebn and witnessing the level of abuse she/it/they're subjected to, Lister is revolted, especially when he discovers that Symbi-morphs are conditioned to find Happiness in Slavery.
• Fingore: In Backwards, Lister, unaware that he's lost his character's special skills, tries to throw a knife at Famine Apocalypse. Instead, his own severed finger hits the corpulent villain (and Famine promptly eats it).
• Flaw Exploitation: Kryten is initially immune to Better Than Life's temptations because he's an android, and therefore has no desires of his own beyond a new mop. However, the game is able to distract him by leaving a pile of dirty washing nearby, and Kryten's inability to leave dirty washing unattended traps him too.
• Fleeing for the Fallout Shelter: In Last Human, it's eventually revealed that the current star system the Starbug crew have set up shop in is slowly being drawn into the Omni-Zone, with apocalyptic results for the local civilization. In the finale, Lister, Rimmer, Kryten, Kochanski, Cat, McGruder and Reketrebn all end up on a habitable planet with deep caves where they can shelter long enough to survive the crossing into the Omni-Zone... but unfortunately, the godlike entity known as the Rage is blocking their path to the caves and they have no time to find another shelter. In the end, Rimmer infects himself with the Oblivion Virus and uses his light bee to spread it to the Rage, destroying it once and for all — leaving the path to the caves clear with just a few minutes to spare.
• Flipping the Bird: In the show, Rimmer tries to cheat in an exam by writing the answers on himself but the ink runs and he leaves a handprint on the paper. Here the handprint has only one finger sticking up.
• Foreshadowing:
  • In Better Than Life, upon learning that Lister is the creator of the universe, Talkie Toaster asks Uber!Holly "If the creator of the universe doesn't like toast, then what's it all about? Why is life so pointless?". Uber!Holly responds with "Nonsense. Life makes perfect sense. It only seems nonsensical to us because we're travelling through it in the wrong direction." This foreshadows the ending of the novel where Lister, after having died, is revived by being buried on an Earth where time runs backwards.
  • In Backwards Kryten is shown to pass his limited leisure time by reading a wild west novel from Starbug's limited library — explaining why, when the other Dwarfers later patch into his mind to help battle Djuhn'keep's virus, it appears as a Western town. Doubles as the explanation the TV series never provided as to why on Io Kryten's psyche would fantasize fighting the Apocalypse virus as a Western.
• A Fool and His New Money Are Soon Parted: Lister's attempts to make enough money to leave Mimas in the first book are often sabotaged by his need to combat the depressing atmosphere by going to bars and spending all the money on drinks.
• A Fool for a Client: In Last Human, Lister is put on trial for leading an assault on the Cyberia prison complex in order to bust his other self out. He elects to conduct his own legal defence and studies the legal system of the Blerios asteroid belt beforehand. Unfortunately for him, he studies the legal system of the wrong sector of the belt and ends up with a sentence longer than normal because he inadvertently ends up entering the wrong pleas. At that point, he just gives up, removes his uncomfortable trousers, and starts drinking for the remainder of the trial.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: Subverted. When Lister is offered a chance for a commuted prison sentence in exchange for volunteering for a scouting mission to a terraformed world, he's given a luxury suite with the unrestricted use of a Symbimorph named Reketrebyn for whatever he desires. Naturally, Reketrebyn takes on Kochanski's form to try and please him. Lister retorts that he can't function with Reketrebyn in this form, as he has effectively lost Kochanski to his other self at this point. When it takes Rimmer's form, he also brushes it off. After this, Reketrebyn takes on its Shapeshifter Default Form, which makes Lister more at ease.
• The Friend Nobody Likes: While Rimmer has always been this in the TV show, the crew usually have enough moments of true companionship to show they do care for him on some level. In Backwards, on the other hand, Cat's reaction to Rimmer actually dying in the Apocalypse Western simulation is to snidely comment that one of the plus points of having to flee to a new alternate reality is that at least there's no Rimmer.
• The "Fun" in "Funeral": Lister's funeral at the end of Better Than Life is an astoundingly tasteless affair, due to Rimmer following Lister's will, scrawled out while he was well plastered one evening, to the letter.
• Gag Penis: In the first novel, the characters are unknowingly in the game Better Than Life. In Rimmer's fantasy he is incredibly wealthy, and continuously buys new bodies to inhabit, allowing him to live as a human once again. Upon acquiring his latest model, he comments that the penis "still isn't big enough". His butler informs him that any larger and he'll have severe problems with balance.
• Gaia's Vengeance: When Lister finds himself on Garbage World, the planet tries to kill him in several sadistic ways until he asserts that he'll make things right on the ruined world. Turns out he's on Earth.
• Gender Flip:
  • Captain Hollister is a woman in the novels (and named Kirk), although her role (and even most of her dialogue) remain identical to that of the male Captain Hollister in the TV version.
  • In a particularly Mind Screw version of this trope, Holly's Gender Flip from the TV series doesn't take place in the novels, even though the male Holly takes on a few of the female Holly's story lines from the TV show (such as the IQ upgrade). Gets especially weird if you're listening to the audio book, hearing Chris Barrie's pretty decent impression of Norman Lovett saying lines you're used to hearing from Hattie Hayridge...
• Genius Ditz: In Last Human, the Cat (with some help from the luck virus) is able to come up with both the means for Starbug to cross an entire galaxy to get to Lister, but also devise a way to power such a jaunt.
• Gilligan Cut: In Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, when Lister and Kochanski have been dating for three and a half weeks, he lies in bed with her watching It's a Wonderful Life and laughing together over a story from his past, certain that they'll be together, forever. Fast forward just over a month and we learn that they broke up about a week later.
• A Glitch in the Matrix: In Better Than Life, the characters are stuck in a virtual reality simulation of their greatest fantasies. At first they are alerted to their situation by Kryten signalling them from outside, then entering the game himself, which wouldn't qualify as this trope. However, when they decide to leave they wake up on Red Dwarf unharmed by the weeks they have spent effectively comatose, Lister notices that toast always lands face up when dropped, and finally three people are discovered alive and in stasis; Lister's crush Kochanski, his drinking buddy Petersen, and Rimmer's living self. Lister realizes that things are still perfect, and that they are therefore still in the game. They wake up for real, and find they are in horrible shape from their experience.
• A God Am I: Played with; taking Bliss makes you think you're God. Denis, one of the homeless couple in the prologue of Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, takes some in order to work up the courage to mug someone. Unfortunately for him, that 'someone' is Lister.
• Good Shapeshifting, Evil Shapeshifting: The Polymorph in Better Than Life is first encountered transforming by splitting open and turning inside out, accompanied by sickening crunching sounds, firmly identifying it as a villain long before it attacks. By contrast, Reketrebn the Symbi-morph of Last Human shapeshifts by simply turning blue and folding in on themself. Plus, despite having a range of forms almost as impressive as the Polymorph's, Reketrebn never uses their powers for offense: even when cornered and directly threatened, they prefer to hunker down as a sofa until her attackers get bored - indicating that they're more trustworthy than the Symbi-morph mutineers aboard the Mayflower.
• Groin Attack:
  • In the first chapter of Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, Simmons, frustrated over his new status as a hologram, attempts to slam his fist onto his desk. Naturally, his fist passes right through the desk, and crashes "with astonishing force" onto his crotch.
  • Rimmer is implied to have suffered this courtesy of a malfunctioning Prosti-droid, going by his statement to the management that the experience was akin to "being trapped in a milking machine".
  • In Last Human, Kochanski nails an attacking human-leopard amalgam between the legs with a rubber band.
  • In Backwards, Lister is kicked in the groin by a police officer, though given that this takes place in the Backwards Universe, Lister feels better afterwards.
  • In the same novel, a drunken Petersen staples a Shore Patrolman's manhood to his thigh. After Ace Rimmer arranges for Petersen's release, another Patrolman warns him that the victim is planning to return the favor — with hot steel rivets.
  • While talking about how he would kill Lister if he had the honor, the Agonoid Chi'Panastee states that he could repeatedly kick him in the gonads with a steel-capped boat until they resembled (in both color and consistency) boysenberry jam.
• Groupie Brigade: In his Better Than Life fantasy, Rimmer is surrounded by sex-crazed, panty-hurling young female admirers practically every time he goes outside. When he is finally forced to confront what his fantasies say about him and, in particular, his attitude to women, he realizes with a sinking heart that every single one of his groupies was based on a woman who had rejected him in reality.
• Hair-Trigger Temper: Rimmer's first wife in Better Than Life, Juanita, is prone to falling into destructive tantrums over the tiniest of things. Even minor annoyances, like the telephone being dirty, or there being nothing on television she wants to watch, end up costing Rimmer millions in damages.
• Halfway Plot Switch: Better Than Life and Backwards have elements from the episodes they're named after from only for the first act of both books. From there, the former book switches to the black hole, Garbage World, and Polymorph plots, while the latter deals with the problem of the Agonoids and the western AR simulation that results from the Apocalypse virus.
• Handwave: Rimmer taking Lister's place in being turned into a chicken is explained by Kochanski as the transmogrification machine simply turning his hard light into flesh and blood, though with the caveat that even she isn't entirely certain how that works.
• The Hero Dies: Lister has a fatal heart attack at the end of Better Than Life. Fortunately, the passage of time on Backwards Earth can fix this.
• Heroic BSoD: Both Rimmer and Lister briefly have this near the end of Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, once they realise they're stuck in Better Than Life.
  • Rimmer is appalled that not only is his fantasy insanely small-minded - incredible wealth, power, beautiful wife, humiliation of those he hates - but that he can't even allow himself to be happy there, fantasizing that his wife is cheating on him with the pool boy. He uses his Time Machine to bring back his own father just to be his chauffeur, and even he's aghast at his own pettiness when he works it all out.
  • Lister's much more normal-seeming life is envied by Rimmer - but Lister is secretly kicking himself for constructing his entire fantasy life around Kristine Kochanski, a woman who he's still obsessed with after three million years despite only dating for not even two months before she dumped him for a catering officer. He's well aware of how sad this is, and how empty his life is as a result.
• Heroic Sacrifice/Dying Moment of Awesome:
  • Rimmer of all people gets two of them at the end of Last Human. The first is rescuing his crewmates and his son from Lister's other self, who shoots out his light bee. The second is using the Oblivion virus to destroy The Rage.
  • Ace in Backwards, saving Lister from the Agonoid Pizzak'Rapp by jettisoning them both into space.
  • Also in Backwards, Kryten chooses to use what little time he has left after being mortally wounded by the Apocalypse Gang to cure the Navicomp instead of saving himself. It doesn't save Starbug, but it does buy Lister and Cat enough time to get to Ace's ship and jump to a different reality before it crashes.
• Hidden Depths: In addition to being generally more intelligent than his show counterpart, in Last Human Lister is told that he is actually plenty smart anyway, but lacks self-confidence in himself and therefore has Kryten tell him what he already knows. Reketrebn even points out that the fact it's drawn this extrapolation from his mind is proof enough.
• Hillbilly Incest: In Backwards, the crew are accosted by an enraged hillbilly and later encounter a dead body that looks a lot like that hillbilly. Kryten surmises that the corpse is probably the first hillbilly's brother or cousin, and Rimmer snidely remarks, "Probably both. Probably his uncle and his father, too."
• Hollywood Evolution: One chapter of Better Than Life details how Polymorphs evolved from GELFs who managed to survive not only the poisonous atmosphere of Garbage World, but the endless winter as the planet floated through space, bereft of a sun. Considering the GELFs had each been genetically engineered to serve one purpose only, it seems incredible that they were able to accomplish this.
• Homeworld Evacuation: Last Human reveals that, a few decades after Red Dwarf left the solar system, the president of America did something tremendously stupid involving the Sun and some nukes which means the sun's expiry date has sped up considerably. His top scientists tell him that while it's not exactly an immediate problem, mankind should probably start looking for new digs. Possibly in another galaxy, just to be safe.
• Hope Spot: Just as Rimmer's life in BTL starts going completely to crud, his Hot-Blooded ex-wife (who'd been engaged to his brother, Frank), visits him and explains that she loves him. She's always loved him, and has now had personality surgery to make herself much nicer. Just as things start looking up, Rimmer's body is repossessed.
• Hopping Machine: The primary mode of transportation on Mimas are "Hoppers", vehicle that get around by leaping through the air.
• Horrible Housing: In Last Human, Lister is sentenced to a long stay in a Mind Prison for crimes against the GELF State, and though the VR scenario allows him civilian housing, his virtual home is easily the most disgusting place he could have ended up in: the bedroom is putrid even by Lister's standards, the kitchen is befouled with dirty dishes and cooking fat, the fridge is overflowing with putrescent gunk, and the neighbors are unconscionably noisy. Everything here is tailor-made to make Lister feel as uncomfortable and disgusted as possible, and it's so bad that Lister does everything he can to avoid staying at home... not that it's any better outside.
• How We Got Here: Last Human opens with Lister being sent to the Hellhole Prison Cyberia for crimes against the GELF state. The next few chapters after that are spent explaining how Lister got into this situation in the first place.
• Humans Are Bastards: Something of a recurring theme in the novels. The first notes that the Earth has been purged of all its natural resources "like an enema", and that the current Colonized Solar System is the result of humanity unleashing its "rapacious appetite" on the other worlds, as well as doing so much damage to the ozone layer they needed to construct a giant "plug" to cover it. The second takes it up a notch by revealing that after Red Dwarf left the Solar System, Earth itself was designated as the system's garbage dump. Furthermore, humans also created multiple species of GELFs from human DNA and with human-level intelligence, and then treated them as slaves with no rights whatsoever; after they unsuccessfully rebelled, the surviving GELFs were simply dumped on Earth along with the rest of humanity's garbage and left to die.
• Humans Are Psychic in the Future: As in "Quarantine", Last Human introduces artificially concentrated psychic viruses, including luck — which Kryten notes to involve a form of telekinesis. In Backwards, Ace Rimmer takes a quip from Rimmer to imply him to be "telepathically endowed".
• Humiliation Conga: The gazpacho soup incident gets upgraded from the TV show's simple social gaff to the last insult of an already deeply embarrassing night for Rimmer. Having been invited to the captain's table, Rimmer tries hiring a date from an escort agency, even spending all his savings in the effort. Then the woman, and the agency itself, vanish without a trace, taking Rimmer's money with them, and leaving him to sit through the meal unable to explain what happened without looking like a fool (he panics and claims his date was killed in a traffic accident). Then the soup comes along. No wonder he considered it the single worst night of his life...
• Hypocrite:
  • During their first meeting, Rimmer scoffs at the idea of Lister wanting to join the Space Corps, claiming they "don't just let any old body in". A few chapters later, it is revealed that Rimmer signed on with Red Dwarf without having any qualifications whatsoever.
  • In Better Than Life, Talkie Toaster mocks Kryten by claiming that he can't accomplish anything important because he's a sanition droid — ignoring the fact that he himself is just a toaster.
  • In Backwards, Rimmer informs Lister that the only way they'll be able to survive and find the lost Red Dwarf is through "rigid disciplice" — in spite of the fact that Starbug almost collided with an asteroid because Rimmer got bored with watching the long range scanners and started reading instead.
• Identical Granddaughter: When they get back to Earth, Lister marries a descendant of Kochanski who looks exactly like her and is also called Kristine. Turns out he's in a Lotus-Eater Machine.
• I Gave My Word: In Better Than Life, Rimmer is forced to leave Lister behind on the crashed Starbug with no food, but promises that he'll come back with help. Unfortunately, he returns to Red Dwarf just as it's about to fall into a black hole, and he and the others are forced to deal with that, but even throughout that ordeal, Rimmer's main concern is rescuing Lister. When he finally makes good on his promise, the time dilation of the black hole means he's a few decades late, and Lister is a very smegged-off old man. Rimmer genuinely feels bad, but it explains why he's so delighted when Holly finds a way to fix things.
• Ignored Epiphany: Rimmer momentarily wonders if spending all his free time in stasis on account of having nothing better to do is the reason he's got nothing to do and no-one to do it with... and then decides that friends aren't worth the hassle.
• I Have Many Names: Admiral Tranter has several nicknames. Some are good ("Bungo" and "The Old Man"), others not so much ("Skunkfoot" and "Vinegar Drawers").
• I Just Want to Be Loved: Lister pegs this as being Rimmer's greatest desire, after a look over at his fantasies — that he wants to be adored. Rimmer later notes with some horror that every woman in his fantasy, from his ex-wife to his second to his mass of adoring fangirls, are all women he knew in life: women who rejected him, women who he'd been too afraid to approach, wives or girlfriends of previous family members and, in one disturbing case his own mother.
• I'm Melting!: This is how Rimmer dies in Backwards, being melted from the inside out until he's just a pile of human flesh containing his eyeballs, thanks to the Armageddon virus making it into his light bee. He's aware of the whole process too.
• Implausible Deniability: When Lister goes to collect Rimmer for his return fare, he finds Rimmer arguing with the staff of the android brothel. When Rimmer realises Lister is there, he immediately starts acting like he was made to believe he was in a restaurant the whole time.
• Industrialized Mercury: Better Than Life mentions Mercury having solar power stations, which provide the entire solar system with cheap, clean energy.
• Informed Attribute: In Better Than Life, the narration states that Polymorphs are creatures of sheer instinct, with no capacity for abstract thought. Despite this, the second Polymorph is able to enact clever strategies, carefully inflating the Cat's ego, and infiltrating Rimmer's personality files to stoke extreme anger in him.
• In Spite of a Nail: Despite the alternate Lister being vastly different from regular Lister, he still wound up on Red Dwarf, and then on a Starbug alongside Rimmer, Kryten, the Cat and Kochanski.
• Interspecies Romance: The GELF war started as the result of one. A man named Valter Holman arrived home one day to find his wife having sex with their GELF sofa and Holman promptly shot the couch. The GELFs rebelled after he was only given a six month suspended sentence.
• In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves: Better Then Life brings up the many wars humanity indulged in during their time on Earth, claiming that the reason is because all humans think all other humans are insane, just in varying amounts. It also claims that this is the result of a defective gene, the discovery of which would have changed the world... if the group who had made the discovery hadn't gotten so caught up in fighting over what to eat for a celebratory meal that they never made their findings public.
• Killer Bear Hug: In Backwards, Famine Apocalypse brings Lister into a crushing embrace that breaks nearly every bone in Lister's body.
• I Reject Your Reality: When Lister bluntly, but not rudely, tells Rimmer he can't stand the man, Rimmer is aghast that Lister doesn't like him. Rimmer had thought they were friends (even though he doesn't like Lister), and decides that what Lister has said cannot be true. Also applies with his "disguise" as Toddhunter. Even though Lister knows it's him, and Rimmer knows he knows, Rimmer still cannot, even when in a screaming match with himself, admit that he was in a brothel.
• I Resemble That Remark!: Rimmer, watching his double sneaking mints while (badly) concealing it from Rimmer's view, declares him psychologically mean and tight-fisted, even as Rimmer is doing the exact same thing (and naturally, the duplicate Rimmer is thinking the same as him).
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Zig-zagged in Last Human: Reketrebn the symbi-morph, who is a genderless shapeshifter, is referred to as "it". Gelf society doesn't consider symbi-morphs to be real people, but Lister continues referring to Reketrebn as "it" even after they escape together.
• It's All About Me: The Cat is convinced he's the center of the universe, to the point where his Better Than Life fantasy doesn't even bother providing an explanation for how he attained a solid gold castle surrounded by a moat of milk and staffed by eight feet tall barely clothed valkyries. Simply believing he deserved it.
• Kick the Dog: When he's in Better Than Life but unaware of it, Rimmer notes at one point he intends to buy Lister's hometown of Bedford Falls to turn into a maggot farm. Because he can.
• Kids Driving Cars: In the final section of Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, Lister's son Bexley can drive; apparently everyone in town thinks this is "funny" and the local cop doesn't do anything about it on the grounds that Bexley is a better driver than he is. Bexley is fifteen months old. Finally realising how ridiculous this is is part of what finally clues Lister in to the fact that he's actually playing Better Than Life.
• Killer Bear Hug: In Backwards, Famine of the Apocalypse Boys envelops Lister in a crushing embrace, breaking every bone in his body.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Rimmer, of course, doesn't figure this out with regards to his astronavigation exams and dreams of becoming an officer. The novels add a bit of Willy Loman-esque tragedy to this by implying that he's actually pretty good at graphic design and could have been happy and successful if he'd just realised this instead of devoting himself full-throttle to the Space Corps.
• Laser-Guided Karma: Throughout the latter half of Better Than Life, Talkie Toaster continually mocks and looks down on Kryten. After Kryten loses his sense of guilt to the Polymorph, he shoves Talkie into a garbage disposal.
• Literal Transformative Experience:
  • While trapped in Better Than Life, Rimmer finds himself subjected to increasingly unpleasant experiences as the game begins taking cues from his deeply-buried self-loathing, concluding with him ending up trapped in the body of a prostitute. He's quickly subjected to increasingly demeaning treatment by the Jittermans, ranging from sexist insults to physical abuse. As a result, Rimmer begins to reflect on his attitude towards women, and how most of the female characters in his BTL fantasy were there to fuel his ego or sexually excite him; eventually, he finally realizes how miserable and screwed-up he really is especially after discovering that the woman he was to marry before the body swap was a younger version of his own mother. Perhaps as a result of this, after escaping from BTL with the rest of the crew, Rimmer is a much nicer person — to the point of deferring to Kristine Kochanski in Last Human — though he never loses his trademark sarcasm.
  • In Last Human, Lister is forced to sign up for a Suicide Mission in exchange for being released from Cyberia, but is allowed to spend his final night with an enslaved symbi-morph by the name of Reketrebn. Though she attempts to make him happy by taking on the forms of various loved ones, she's ultimately encouraged to relax in her Shapeshifter Default Form — leading to them sharing a meal together and becoming genuinely friendly. Later, Reketrebn assumes Lister's form and finally understands just how miserable her current host really is while separated from Kochanski, leading to her helping him escape from prison.
• Lotus-Eater Machine:
  • "Better Than Life" is a Virtual Reality Game that can make all your deepest fantasies come true. The game is almost impossible to leave, because in order to leave, somebody has to not only realise they're in the game, but also want to leave. As a result, the person's real-life body will eventually waste away and die. The first novel ends with Lister having to make the decision whether to stay in the simulation or travelling back to an Earth six million years in the future where he may well be the last human as he understands it. Talk about a Downer Ending. The second novel reveals that the Lotus Eater Machine digs deep into their psyche, granting their deepest desires. The Cat is so vain and self-absorbed that he lives in a golden castle with a milk moat, being waited on by 6-foot topless Valkyries — this finally convinces the others that they cannot accept this as reality. Kryten can come and go freely as he has no hopes, dreams, or desires besides getting a new squeezy-mop — but the game takes advantage of his servility and gives him plenty of cleaning chores to keep him happy. For Lister, all he wants is to be happily married with a family — which is a perfectly healthy desire which the game easily fulfils. Rimmer however utterly loathes himself, and BTL builds him up with a handsome new body, vast wealth and fame, screaming fangirls and a fabulously beautiful (but shallow and spoilt) wife, for the sole purpose of tearing it away — eventually dumping his consciousness in a cheap hooker and very nearly being pimped out. And then, when he goes looking for the others to escape, it destroys their lives too, as his subconscious simply doesn't like other people being happy either; Kryten's mop breaks, the Cat's Valkyries rebel as the milk curdles, and Lister's family leave him as the town is basically destroyed.
  • Cyberia is essentially the opposite. Prisoners are aware of the simulation and each one of them is forced to live in a Self-Inflicted Hell.
• Make Games, Not War: In Better Than Life, it's explained that sports became a major focus for humanity toward the end of the 21st century, as it was no longer possible to have a war without wiping themselves out. Unfortunately, this ended up going very badly, as detailed under Pseudolympics and Fantastic Racism.
• The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: In Backwards, the crew misses the window to return to their home universe, having to wait ten years for the next opportunity. During this time, Lister and the Cat de-age back to being teenagers. Despite being far older mentally, Lister is unable to prevent himself from acting like a typical petulant, angry teen.
• Mind Prison: Cyberia, in Last Human. Essentially a Penal Colony for those found guilty of crimes against the GELF State, inmates spend their sentences in virtual reality scenarios tailored to their personalities: while their bodies float endlessly in a huge suspension lake, their minds are trapped in worlds designed to be as boring, uncomfortable, irritating and depressing as possible... as Lister discovers. As it turns out, the whole thing's part of a scam: the GELF State needs explicitly innocent volunteers in order to create a gestalt entity for their terraforming program, and have arranged a system in which they can be convicted of imaginary crimes and coerced into signing away their lives. Faced with a choice between sacrificing themselves and going back to Cyberia, most inmates agree to participate.
• Mind Screw: Backwards. Most obvious when it comes to Kryten's accidentally murdering one of the hillbillies. Due to not grasping how the universe worked (and his innate desire to help humans) he thinks he's trying to help the hillbilly remove an axe from his chest until it leaps into his hands: played forward it becomes obvious he's smashed it into the yokel's chest by accident and in trying to help he's only forcing it deeper.
• Mix-and-Match Critters: In contrast to their depiction as Human Sub Species with heavily warped bodies designed for specific tasks from Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers and Better Than Life, the GELFs from Last Human are presented as mostly being a result of splicing human and animal genes, or bizarre chimerical hybrids of two or more animals. Notable examples include the Dingotangs (half dingo, half orangutang), the Dolochimps (dolphin/locust/chimpanzee), the Alberogs (albertross/bear/frog), and the Snugiraffe (cobra/slug/giraffe).
• Moral Myopia: In his debut chapter, the Agonoid M'Aiden Ty-One is stated to have killed several of his comrades for spare parts, and felt "nothing but contempt for their weakness". But despite losing an eye to another Agonoid a few days ago, he doesn't consider himself "weak" at all.
• The Most Dangerous Video Game: The VR game "Better Than Life", while it can't directly kill you, is so immersive and addictive that players are unable to take care of their basic needs and die without an external caretaker. The book also describes incidents where the characters would wander into dangerous situations and injure themselves without realizing it while acting out actions in the game.
  • In Backwards, the VR tech the crew use to join Kryten in his head to fight the Apocalypse Virus (in the form of the demonic cowboy "Apocalypse Boys") turns into this when the virus spreads into the VR game system itself — they lose the special skills that allowed them to hypothetically stand up to the virus, become able to feel actual pain as they're mutilated (despite remaining unable to die), and worst of all, can't get out any more until Kryten destroys the virus. When the virus spreads from the game systems to the hologram systems, Rimmer is melted into a puddle of boiling flesh, and dies once the simulation ends. Kryten is gunned down by the Apocalypse Boys in the act of neutralising the virus and is also completely burned out in the real world.
• Mundane Made Awesome: In the Cat's Better than Life fantasy, he has an epic rock band to play his "I'm Gonna Eat You" song at dinner.
• Mythology Gag:
  • According to Last Human, Yvonne McGruder said of Rimmer that he is "a decent person trapped in the body of a coward", a line taken from Rimmer's other major romantic figure in the show, Nirvanna Crane.
  • On meeting his son, Rimmer figures that he's probably one of those sorts who says things like "smoke me a kipper, I'll be back for breakfast." His son denies it, dismissing this as astro-jock talk.
• Naked Nutter: In Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, Lister hits the Despair Event Horizon after finding out that he's been in stasis for three million years, his fellow crewmembers are all dead, the ship's lost in deep space, and he's the last human in the universe. Not seeing any point in dressing from then on, he spends most of his time wandering around the ship completely naked in a bewildered stupor, usually while drunk and hallucinating; this remains the case until Holly goes so far as to resurrect Rimmer as a hologram so Lister can have a bit of company.
• Named by the Adaptation: In "Gunmen of the Apocalypse", Kryten's sheriff persona had no name. In Backwards, he is called "Iron" Will Carton.
• Nasal Trauma:
  • Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers introduces George McIntyre negotiating with a group of debt collectors — one of them toting a pair of industrial cable cutters. The conversation ends with the unfortunate flight coordinator having his nose removed with the cutters and being made to eat it in front of everyone in the coffee lounge.
  • While surveying Garbage World for any sign of Lister in Better Than Life, Kryten takes a sniff of the air. His nose immediately suffers an overload from the sheer quantity of decomposing waste and then explodes; being a mechanoid, Kryten easily replaces it, but the next one explodes as well (even after Kryten turns its olfactory sensors down to the lowest level).
  • Backwards delivers a quadruple whammy: in combat with a gang of cowboys in Kryten's virtual world, Rimmer punches a man's nose flat "like a cowpie"; then, he tackles the next man in line by hooking two fingers up his nose and flipping him over his head, into a card table; later, after the Agonoid virus spreads to the VR console, Cat loses badly in a fight with Pestilence and ends up getting smashed in the face with a hitching post, squishing his nose against one cheek; then, Lister gets the Cat's unconscious body thrown on top of him, breaking his nose as well.
• Natural Disaster Cascade: Played With in Better Than Life. When Lister arrives on Earth — which has been pretty much destroyed by humans' ill treatment of it before they abandoned it — the planet reacts by hurling pollution variations of natural disasters (acid rain, oil storms, earthquakes and lightning) at him specifically until he offers to make things right in Gaia's Vengeance proper.
• No Antagonist: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers has no villain, since it's based mostly around Series I and II of the show and is mostly set aboard the Dwarf. Better Than Life has no major villain with an overall arc, except for the Polymorph, which is more of a Diabolus ex Nihilo, and possibly the titular game itself, the escape from which makes up the book's first act. Grant and Naylor's solo novels do have clearly defined villains, however.
• No Challenge Equals No Satisfaction: The original version of Better Than Life (as in the version from the original series) ended up being boring and unplayable after a few days because the player just instantly gets what they want with no justification. Updates to the game make it so that the brain concocts a semi-plausible way for the player's desires to be realised, though some of these are a stretch; Rimmer's company invents a time machine to bring back various historical figures for him to pal about with and Lister marries Kochanski's direct descendant who happens to look exactly like her to such ludicrous levels as having a mole on her arse in the exact same spot.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: In Last Human, it's Kochanski who stipulates that the crew find and rescue the alternate Lister, figuring he's in danger. This results in a lot of misery for pretty much everyone.
• Noodle Incident: The first novel clarifies Rimmer's "spasm", idly mentioned in the show's first episode: While procrastinating for one of his exams, Rimmer got his hands on some amphetamines, and the spasm was the result.
• No Prison Segregation: When Rimmer's Better Than Life fantasy goes sour, his body is repossessed, and his essence reduced to a soundwave that is placed in a cell with several others. One of his cellmates is the female Trixie LaBouche, with the narration stating that the sound cells are too overcrowded to be divided into male and female groupings.
• Objectshifting: Last Human introduces the Symbi-Morphs, genetically-engineered prostitutes capable of shapeshifting into just about anything their symbiotically bonded clients desire — including objects. While Lister is imprisoned in Cyberia, he's assigned one by the name of Reketrebn as a reward for participating in a Suicide Mission. Unfortunately, Reketrebn doesn't like being separated from her previous master, and protests by transforming into a sofa so the guards won't be able to get her through the door — and when that doesn't work, turning into a huge pile of dung in order to deter them. After getting to know Lister, however, she transforms into a vase of white roses as a sign she's beginning to warm to him. Later still, when she and Lister decide to escape the prison together, she turns into an impenetrable sphere of reinforced glass in order to protect him from attack.
• Obsessed Are the Listmakers: The first novel described Arnold Rimmer doing this repeatedly when he tried to take the officers' exams: he would meticulously create his study plan in such great detail that he ended up spending most of his time on it, then had to revise it for the time left, with the same effects until he had no time left for the actual studying.
• Obvious Rule Patch: During the backstory for the GELFs in Better Than Life, it's mentioned that each sport had specific athletes created for each sport, with even further specialised players for various positions in team sports. Scotland fielded a goalkeeper in the 2224 football world cup who was a large oblong of flesh whose dimensions were the exact same as the goal, making it impossible to score against them. Hilariously, they somehow failed to progress to the second round of the tournament. The rules of the tournament had to be changed after this to allow limitations on what could be allowed.
• An Odd Place to Sleep: During his time on Mimas Lister ends up sleeping in a luggage locker suitable for storing only two smallish suitcases. It's mentioned that when he gets to Red Dwarf that at first he can't sleep unless he basically sleeps in a ball, sitting upright, with his arms around his knees.
• Off with His Head!: Inside the western simulation, Lister gets decapitated by a tomahawk. Because the crew can't die inside an AR simulation, Lister survives this.
• Ominous Hair Loss: The first "Game Head" encountered in Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers has been addicted for so long that her once-long hair has been reduced to "a series of greasy whips," presumably as a result of malnutrition.
• Only Sane Man: The Toaster tries to be this when the other members of the crew have had various emotions sucked away by the Polymorph. Unluckily for him, Kryten has lost his guilt, and as the Toaster had been spectacularly condescending towards him earlier, Kryten just jams him into the waste disposal unit, crushing him to bits.
• Original Man: The prologue to Last Human describes the birth of the first Homo habilis, a girl. Her australopithecine mother is alarmed at the child's short limbs, high forehead and large head — clearly, she isn't going to be like anyone, ever.^note  This is, of course, a gross misrepresentation of the evolutionary process — the transition between species occurs slowly, over many generations, not in a sudden leap from one to the next.
• Other Me Annoys Me:
  • In the first book, Rimmer's relationship with his own copy ends up completely breaking down, partly due to his tendency to be ultra-competitive with himself, but also (in another element expanded on from the TV version) because Rimmer has changed over the time he's spent with Lister since his activation compared with the copy who is a "fresh" version of Rimmer's original personality disc, making them no longer perfect copies of each other.
  • Rimmer and Ace, naturally, in Backwards. Interestingly we go into Ace's head a little on the subject: where the TV version has Ace effortlessly rise above Rimmer's criticism, here he's inwardly appalled at Rimmer's cowardice and pettiness, wondering what on Earth happened in the past that produced such a pathetic alternate version of himself.
• Parental Incest: In his fantasy in Better Than Life, Rimmer divorces his unbearable (and unfaithful) first wife and remarries... a woman he later (painfully) realises is a younger version of his mother. And it's hinted they did the deed at least once before the wedding. Made marginally less squicky in that "Helen" wasn't actually Rimmer's mother, just an original character the game made based on her (the same way the woman Rimmer's first wife Juanita was based on wasn't Brazilian in real life, but French).
• Police Brutality:
  • The Shore Patrol of Mimas are stated to indulge in this, as the narration states that anyone who messes with them will get their skull rearranged to resemble a relief map of Mars, canals and all.
  • In Backwards, the Niagara Falls police administer a brutal reverse beating to Lister.
• Precision F-Strike: A superintelligent Holly turns himself off after realizing he's got minutes to live, only briefly turning himself back on to call Talkie Toaster a bastard.
• Precrime Arrest: In Last Human, the crew encounter a GELF civilisation in an alternate universe that have arrested Lister's alternate self, the last survivor of that version of the crew, and Kryten is able to meet with the Regulator of the Forum of Justice on Arranguu 12 to ask exactly what the other Lister's crimes were. According to the Regulator, the mystics had foreseen that Lister was going to be responsible for the destruction of an asteroid, a Starhopper, and various other deaths, including the Regulator. Kryten immediately dismisses this system of justice as just an excuse to get rid of people the government don't like, which turns out to be true, although they're actually doing it as part of a wider plan to create a telepathic gestalt to help terraform a planet.
• Prefers the True Form: When Lister is offered a chance for a commuted prison sentence in exchange for volunteering for a scouting mission to a terraformed world, he is given a luxury suite with the unrestricted use of a Symbimorph named Reketrebyn for whatever he wants. Reketrebyn tries to please him by taking on Kochanski's form but Lister states that he can't function with Reketrebyn in this form, as he has lost Kochanski to an alternate version of himself at that point. When it takes Rimmer's form, he also brushes it off. It's only when Reketrebyn takes on its Shapeshifter Default Form (an androgynous humanoid with a matrix color scheme) that Lister feels more at ease.
• Primal Polymorphs:
  • Exaggerated in the case of the Polymorphs in Better Than Life. Though their ancestors were intelligent Genetically Engineered Life Forms, millennia of exile in the brutal wilderness of Garbage World gradually whittled away at them until their shapeshifting descendants were essentially little more than animals. As such, though Polymorphs can turn into anything from inanimate objects to beams of light, they are driven entirely by hunger, and even their human impersonations are motivated entirely by predatory instinct.
  • In Last Human, the Symbi-morphs were deliberately engineered to be more primitive than the other GELFs on the colony ship. Though intelligent, they behave like domesticated dogs, being slavishly loyal, unthinkingly eager to please, and psychologically dependent on their bonded masters. Though commonly "employed" as prostitutes capable of taking literally any form and fulfilling any sexual taste, Symbi-morphs are treated as animals by the rest of the GELF State, to the point of being "broken" before they can be used and even threatened with spaying as punishment for disobedience.
• Pseudolympics: Mention is made of version of the Olympics where drugs were legal and later a separate version for Genetically Engineered Life Forms (GELFs) who were specifically engineered to excel at a particular sport.
• Punny Name: The Agonoids all have these; examples include Pizzak'Rapp and Djun'Keep.
• Put on a Bus: Holly is entirely absent from The Last Human because the crew make a wrong turn and end up in a different universe.
• Rag Tag Bunch Of Misfits: The droids Lister uses to help him assault the Cyberia complex consist of a variety of droids in various states of disprepair. Some of them are more or less intact, but some are missing limbs, one has no head, another is only a pair of legs and one is even just a hand.
• Read the Fine Print: Crosses over with Unreadable Disclaimer. At the start of the first novel the reason George McIntyre is so in debt to the Ganymede mafia is because there was a clause in the contract he signed to take out a loan charging him an interest rate way, way more than the original loan. Said clause was concealed in a microdot in the dot of a letter i in the fine print.
• Red-Flag Recreation Material: In Last Human, a visit to the alternate Starbug reveals that Lister's alternate self has a room overflowing with cheap horror paperbacks, heavy metal records, and magazines featuring a worrying number of Nazis. Our Lister - who prefers Frank Capra movies and reggae/rockabilly music - considers his other self's tastes to be a bit disturbing, but ultimately dismisses any concerns he might have, believing that his alternate has to be enough like him to be worth rescuing from Cyberia. He's wrong. The alternate Lister is a brutal psychopath who murdered his shipmates, kills several defenceless guards during the prison break, and forces his rescuer to take his place at Cyberia.
• Red Light District: The colony on Mimas has one, known to the locals as "Shag Town" (the only prostitutes we see are robots, although it's implied there are human ones as well). Lister and Rimmer first meet when the latter flags down the former's (stolen) taxi to take him there. It's indicated to be fairly hostile, as there are numerous pimps in the vicinity carrying barely-concealed weapons; two of them get into a fight outside the cab while Lister waits for Rimmer to come back, which leads to both of them losing an ear and then one of them being killed. Lister carefully ignores all this.
• The Real Remington Steele:
  • When trapped in a Lotus-Eater Machine in Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, Lister sires two sons called Jim and Bexley with Kochanski's Identical Granddaughter. In Backwards he actually has the boys with Kochanski on Backwards Earth. Given that it's Backwards Earth, the boys are called "Mij" and "Yelxeb".
  • Not a character but Rimmer has a "solidgram" in said Lotus-Eater Machine that lets him be tangible. The gang actually find one on a derelict spaceship some time before Last Human.
• Related Differently in the Adaptation: In "Gunmen of the Apocalypse", Death was a brother to the other Apocalypse Boys. In Backwards, he's their father.
• Reluctant Psycho: Downplayed in Better Than Life with Tonto Jitterman, who considers killing people to be "such a downer". This doesn't stop him from invoking four "downers" while breaking his brother Jimmy out of sound jail.
• The Resenter: Rimmer, pathologically so. His brother Frank, first and foremost, which is why Rimmer's first wife in Better Than Life is Frank's actual wife. But also of everyone else, Lister included. Shortly before he dies, Rimmer plans to get Lister's sentence commuted not because he thinks Lister is innocent, or even cares about Lister's opinion. He just doesn't want Lister having four years advantage over him.
• Retcon:
  • "Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers" has Rimmer's Better Than Life fantasy involve him swapping bodies. "Better Than Life" changes this to him having invented the solidgram body (in other words, the hard-light hologram). The Omnibus edition of the first two books did some rewriting so the solidgram explanation is the one used throughout.
  • The omnibus edition of Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers changes two Take Thats directed at Kevin Keegan (lifted from the TV series) and Brian Kidd to fictional historical figures instead.
• Ret-Canon: Quite a few of the concepts introduced in the books would be worked into the TV show, replacing earlier ones restrained by the early series' low budgets.
  • As of Series IV, Lister's backstory with Kochanski is Ret Conned to one closer to in Red Dwarf: Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers than series 1 and 2, giving a more rational explanation of being hung up on someone he dated for months and never got over instead of someone he'd barely ever talked to.
  • In one case, an episode was adapted from a section of a novel rather than the other way around: the episode "White Hole" is based on the "Garbage World" section of the novel Better Than Life — specifically the crew's encounter with a black hole.
  • Despite being invented for the first novel, the idea that Kryten caused the Nova 5's fatal crash by washing the navigation computers was actually retroactively added to the TV series' canon, being discussed in passing in the season VII episode "Ouroborous".
• Retronym: While Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers was part of the artwork for the first book's front cover, the official title was simply Red Dwarf, which is also used in some editions of Better Than Life and all editions of the Omnibus. Infinity became the official title in the audiobook edition.
• Rewind Gag: At the end of the novel Better Than Life, Lister finds himself in an alternate universe where time runs backward. Initially it's played more for drama than gags, both because Lister has no idea what's going on at first and because Lister had just died, and his comrades stuck him in the backwards universe so he would undie and recover from the other traumas the novel had inflicted, but the sequel, Backwards develops the comedic possibilities more.
• Ridiculous Procrastinator: Rimmer's various freak outs and attempts to relax and / or plan his revision in the lead up to his exams are usually what cause him to never be able to actually revise. To the point where he'll regularly end up with the requirement of fitting several months of revision into a single day.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Invoked in Last Human regarding the arrest of Lister's alternate self; for various reasons, the courts that sentenced him were trying to 'arrest' the innocent, so they only arrested the alternate Lister on smuggling charges that they knew he hadn't committed even though he was genuinely guilty of murdering the rest of the alternate Red Dwarf crew.
• Robosexual: Prostitutes on Mimas are robots. Customers can mix and match prostidroid parts for a custom lay. Boy and sheep droids are also available.
• Robot Religion: The concept of Silicone Heaven is carried over from the series and different electronic characters have different takes on it. Kryten is a devout believer, as is Holly once he reverses his intelligence compression to become stupid again. The skutters (who weren't fitted with belief chips because it wasn't cost effective to do so) and Talkie Toaster (who didn't get a belief chip because the company that built him was too cheap) are atheists.
• Running Gag: Talkie Toaster's name being spelled out Talkie Toaster (TM) (patent applied for), and the mention of it being a whole $£19.99, with tax.
• Sadist Teacher: In his youth, Rimmer had a gym teacher by the name of "Bull" Heinmann, who despised any students he considered to be "wets, weirdos and fatties", and especially hated Rimmer, whom he considered both wet and weird. Heinmann delighted of making impossible demands of Rimmer's small frame, then beating him when he inevitably failed.
• Sanity Slippage: In the show Rimmer was resurrected as a hologram to give Lister some company as a matter of course. The book's much darker in demonstrating the need for companionship, showing Lister having a breakdown upon learning that it's three million years in the future and he's the last living thing on the ship, possibly in the universe. He drinks excessively, stops wearing clothes because nobody will ever be there to see it, and starts screaming at people who aren't there. He passes out after a nasty bender and wakes up in medical to find Rimmer standing over him.
• Sapping the Shapeshifter: Last Human features the incarcerated David Lister being given one night with a symbi-morph as a reward for participating in a Suicide Mission the next day. However, the symbi-morph he's assigned, Reketrebn, is one of the few that hasn't been "broken" and rebels at being separated from their current master by turning into a sofa so that the guards can't get it through the door. Instead, the guards batter it into submission with their pronged batons until Reketrebn's forced to shapeshift into something can withstand the onslaught — and while it's in between forms, the guards take the opportunity to drag it into the room, eventually coercing it into bonding with Lister.
• Sarcasm-Blind: In Backwards, Ace finds Rimmer standing outside a room filled with sheet metal, and asks why he hasn't retrieved them. When Rimmer sarcastically claims that he was trying to use the power of his mind to move the metal, Ace briefly believes that his counterpart actually does have mental powers.
• Second Place Is for Losers: In Backwards, a scene in Rimmer's childhood shows him nearly winning a race before another boy trips him up, and we're told his father's favourite phrase is "Winning isn't everything, but losing is nothing". We are later shown Ace Rimmer in the same sports day, and he throws the race, because he realises another boy really needs to win it. While his mother stares in disbelief, he thinks "After all, losing isn't nothing", showing that he's grown out of that mindset.
• Self-Inflicted Hell:
  • Like the TV episode it was adapted from, the novel Better Than Life sees Rimmer's deep-seated self-hatred destroy the fantasy world he's built for himself and then go on to destroy his crewmates' fantasies... only here it's even worse — he becomes the world's richest man married to the world's No.1 model/actress (a volcanic nymphomaniac diva who bullies, humiliates and frequently cheats on him), divorces her only for her to take up with his brother Frank, marries a woman who turns out to be a younger version of his mother, loses his fortune overnight and then his body, winds up in debtor's prison as a soundwave, escapes only to end up in the body of a hooker whilst his body's taken over by a unhinged cop-killer, and is forced to go on the run with him and his equally murderous, psychopathic brother, both of whom make him essentially their domestic slave/punching bag and eventually try to pimp him out before he finally gets away.
  • The Cyberia prison colony in Last Human is essentially the polar opposite of Better Than Life. Prisoners are forced to serve their terms in their own personal hell. Lister ends up living in a dump of an apartment where his neighbours play drum solos and James Last and everywhere he goes he sees a Kochanski lookalike wrapped around a beefy sailor type.
• Sentient Vehicle: In Better Than Life, when explaining how the creation of Genetically Engineered Life Forms transitioned from super-athletes to consumer products, the first example given is living cars, with bony exteriors and flesh interiors, that drove themselves and ran on "carfood" made from pig offal. Like all the other GELFs, they were essentially modified humans who were treated as slaves; when the GELF rebellion started, a VW Beetle is stated to have been involved in the first uprising.
• Sequel Hook: Backwards ends on one. Whether Rob Grant gets around to writing it is another story... until he does, however, the novel remains a bit of a...
  • "Shaggy Dog" Story: Pretty much nothing the Dwarfers do or experience in Backwards amounts to anything. A special mention has to go to the "Western" segment, which sets up tons of development for Kryten, only for him to fail to stop the virus and get killed along with Rimmer, dooming Starbug and forcing Lister and the Cat to escape in Ace's ship, meaning that the entire stint accomplished nothing. And then Lister and the Cat escape to an alternate reality where they're dead and Rimmer and Kryten are alive, meaning that even Rimmer and Kryten's deaths were ultimately pointless, story-wise.
• Shapeshifter Showoff Session:
  • In Better Than Life, the Polymorph is first introduced impersonating Lister, only being found out when it turns out that the real Lister is actually in his sixties thanks to Time Dilation on Garbage World; seconds later, it partially reverts to its monstrous true form and goes on the attack, trying to encourage as much fear as possible.
  • Later, another Polymorph recreates the famous reveal scene from the original episode, though instead of becoming a python, it becomes a plague rat and takes a flying leap at Lister's face.
  • In Last Human, symbi-morphs are shapeshifters that transform to better fit their their bonded clients' fantasies; as such, when Lister is bonded with a symbi-morph by the name of Reketrebn as a reward for participating in a Suicide Mission, Reketrebn immediately begins showing off to prove that it can accommodate Lister's desires. In short order, it becomes a rose in a vase, a completely naked Kristine Kochanski, Kristine Kochanski wearing a ballroom gown, Arnold Rimmer, before finally settling in its Shapeshifter Default Form — which Lister prefers, allowing him to enjoy a friendly dinner with the symbi-morph.
• Shapeshifter Struggles: Symbi-Morphs have the ability to turn themselves into just about anything... but have been bred to use their abilities to sexually service their creators, and even after their masters aboard the Colony Ship were overthrown, their fellow genetically engineered life-forms continue to exploit them in a similar fashion. Symbi-Morphs are the only inhabitants of the GELF State that lack even the most basic rights, can find no work except as sex slaves, have to be "broken" before they can service clients, are beaten if they become too attached to one of their clients (which they were designed to do), and are threatened with spaying as punishment for resistance. For good measure, they're conditioned to only find Happiness in Slavery - to the point that an "unbroken" specimen by the name of Reketrebn doesn't even consider using their shapeshifting powers to escape until they are bonded with Lister.
• Shapeshifting Sound: In keeping with the darker tone of the novels, the Polymorph first transforms with a terrifying sound of crunching bones and screams.
• Shoot Your Mate: The Cat tries to threaten D'Juhn Keep with a bazookoid when he gets on board Starbug. D'Juhn just laughs, since he's Made of Iron and shooting him with a bazookoid would essentially be Shooting Superman. However, he manages to fluster the Agonoid by turning the bazookoid on Lister, thereby robbing him of the torture and kill he so desperately requires.
• Shout-Out:
  • After drinking twelve cans of beer (to avoid paying duty), Petersen quickly becomes sick — Exorcist-level sick.
  • During the "Garbage World" section of Better Than Life, Lister, a human from the near future who has ended up in the distant future and has crash-landed on what he thinks is an alien planet, sees the giant human head(s) of a famous American landmark^note  Mount Rushmore, in this case jutting out of the landscape, and comes to the horrifying realisation that the planet was Earth All Along. Sound familiar?^note  Although here it's an Internal Reveal, as the reader had been let in on Garbage World's true nature at the beginning of the section.
  • In Backwards, Kryten attempts to stop an out-of-control Starbug by grabbing one of the legs. When this act only makes things worse, Kryten berates himself for his foolishness, asking if he thought he was an "ex-patriot of the planet Krypton".
• Simulated Fantasy, Post-Apocalyptic Reality:
  • As with the series, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers features Lister emerging from stasis three million years in the future to find that he's the last human in the universe. When copies of the illegal VR game Better Than Life are found on Red Dwarf, the Cat plays out of curiosity, while Lister and Rimmer start playing in a drunken attempt to rescue him... only for all three to have their memory of starting play erased by the game, leaving them trapped in worlds based on their deepest desires. Once Kryten reveals the truth, however, the three decide to continue playing despite the fact that it will eventually kill them — in Lister's case because he can't bear to leave his happy life in Bedford Falls with his wife and children in favor of the dull, joyless, post-apocalyptic real world. After Rimmer's subconsciousness ruins the game in Better Than Life and finally forces them to leave, the post-apocalyptic nature of the setting is brought into sharp relief when the four of them stumble upon the ruins of Earth floating in Deep Space, having long since been repurposed as Garbage World by an uncaring human race before slipping out of the solar system entirely.
  • In Backwards, Lister — regressed to his teenage years due to the years he spent in the Backwards universe — becomes obsessed with VR gaming to cope with life aboard Starbug, which is now even more tense than usual due to Red Dwarf's disappearance. As with the episode "Gunman Of The Apocalypse", this becomes the basis for saving Kryten from the Armageddon Virus when he tries to combat it in his Western fantasy world. However, unlike the episode, the story ends with the virus being purged from the system too late to save Kryten, Rimmer, or Starbug, forcing Lister and the Cat to flee for another dimension — leaving the human race effectively extinct in the universe they just left.
  • Last Human is set in a completely different dimension, but with a similar history to the main one, complete with the apparent extinction of the human race. Three million years later, GELFs escaped from human captivity have built their own nation in a remote asteroid belt and now use virtual reality as a form of punishment: individuals found guilty of crimes against the GELF State are sentenced to Cyberia, a Penal Colony where their bodies are left to float in a suspension lake while their minds are imprisoned in simulations designed be as uncomfortable, awkward, and depressing as possible, as Lister discovers first-hand. The twist is that the GELF State is on the brink of its own apocalypse: the asteroid belt is being drawn towards the Omni-Zone, and in order to survive the crossing, the GELFs need to terraform a planet and move their population to it... but the terraforming can only be enacted by godlike entities born from multiple sentient minds — taken from Cyberia's inmates.
• Sleeper Starship: They're used to explore other solar systems to search for alien life. The Dwarf is equipped for it with a stasis deck with over a thousand booths but they only really use it as a Cryo-Prison.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Infinity and BTL both tend towards cynicism. The chapter on the genesis of the GELFs in BTL really plumbs the depths of cynicism when it puts forward the premise that human beings are fundamentally broken because they're genetically predisposed to disagree with each other, due to the genetic flaw causing all human beings to assume all other human beings are mad. The only time they can agree with each other is when they are at war with each other. When a team of geneticists discover this flaw in human DNA they're so excited that they decide to go out for a meal to celebrate... only they couldn't agree on what kind of meal to go out for, fell to squabbling and never published their results (with which nobody would have agreed anyway).
• Small Name, Big Ego: Talkie Toaster. After helping the crew to escape a black hole (using information the super-intelligent Holly shared with him before Holly shut himself off to save his life), he becomes insufferably arrogant, talking down to Kryten especially (who starts having uncharacteristic fantasies about attacking the Toaster with a chainsaw).
• Small Role, Big Impact: Rimmer's immediate superior Petrovich is in the first novel for only a few pages, mainly to escort Lister into stasis. However it turns out later on he was a drug dealer in life, and is how the Better Than Life game so crucial to the end of the first novel/start of the second got on the ship.
• The Sociopath:
  • Lister's double in Last Human.
  • The Agonoids in Backwards are a whole race of sociopaths.
• So Hideous, It's Terrifying: Last Human gives us the Snugiraffe, a Mix-and-Match Critter GELF which is described as one of the most repulsive beings to have ever existed since George Formby, to the point that even just looking at it will cause the observer to puke (or dry-retch in the case of holograms and mechanoids).
• Something-Nauts: The explorers of humanity's early, disappointing, slower-than-light interstellar voyages are referred to as "stellarnauts".
• Something Only They Would Say: After jumping to an alternate reality at the end of Backwards, Lister is able to prove to Rimmer it's really him by reminding him of the gazpacho soup incident, something only the two of them shared in the first book.
• Space Age Stasis: When they get back to Earth, not much has changed in three million years. The only new technology is Rimmer's solid body and time machine. Things even seem to have stepped backwards somewhat as there's only one mention of the Colonized Solar System from the start of the book. It's justified when they realize they're in a Lotus-Eater Machine
• Space Is Cold: Lister dumps the Red Dwarf's supply of dog milk into space where it instantly freezes into an asteroid that the narration says future civilizations can ponder.
• Spaceship Slingshot Stunt;
  • In Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, the Red Dwarf does this around a planet in order to turn back towards Earth without spending 3 million years decelerating.
  • In Better than Life, Lister implies that he wants to do this around an Unrealistic Black Hole in order to accelerate over the speed of light and tow Earth back to the solar system.
  • In Backwards, the crew are stranded on Backwards Earth and have to wait ten years until When the Planets Align so Starbug can slingshot around them and go through the Omni Zone and back into their own universe.
• Spared by the Adaptation: We find out in Last Human that Yvonne McGruder was transferred off Red Dwarf when the ship reached Miranda, the last port of call before the radiation leak happened, so unlike her TV series counterpart, didn't die on board. Being pregnant with Rimmer's child might have had something to do with it.
• Spotting the Thread: In Backwards, Kryten's sheriff persona starts to realise something is off with his life when Lister starts asking him questions about who his parents were, or where he came from. He soon realises that he can't remember what happened before sunup.
• Strongly Worded Letter: In Last Human, after the bit with the psi-scanner, it's noted Kryten wants to send a strong letter to the company that produced it, despite knowing full well there'd be no point, what with the company and indeed the entire species that made it being three million years in the rear view mirror, but it'd just make him feel better.
• Surprise Incest: Rimmer's second wife in his fantasy in "Better Than Life" is a de-aged version of his own mother. He's horribly Squicked out by it once he works it out.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: The books introduce a rival of Rimmer's named Petrovich who's handsome, well-liked, and passes the astronavigation exam that Rimmer himself continually fails. Later on it turns out he was also a dealer of VR headbands, mainly the addictive, life-threatening version of "Better Than Life". That gives Rimmer some satisfaction for his rival not having been the paragon everyone thought he was.
• Token Heroic Orc: Reketrbn of Last Human is the only shapeshifting GELF^note Camille doesn't count as she is more like a psiren, in that she doesn't shapeshift, merely psychically projects an image of herself into the minds of the people around her in the entire franchise that doesn't end up in some kind of antagonist role, serving as an ally to Lister during his escape from Cyberia and his time on the Rage Planet. For good measure, though Last Human adapts the Kinatowawi of "Emohawk: Polymorph II", the domesticated Polymorph does not appear in the novel.
• Too Dumb to Live: After taking possession of Rimmer's body, Jimmy Jitterman shows a complete disregard for his own safety, getting involved in gunfights where he doesn't stand a chance of winning. This costs him dearly the second time around.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: In Backwards Rimmer seemingly reverts to type after being kind in the ending of Better Than Life (where he was genuinely happy to have Lister resurrected and even arranged most of it himself) he spends virtually the entire novel sniping and complaining with his crewmates, even before Ace shows up. At one point he's even all too happy to abandon Lister in the backwards universe when he doesn't show for their meeting.
• Took a Level in Kindness: In Last Human Rimmer's very much this. He's notably less adversarial with his crewmates, only really jawing with them in segments lifted directly from the series (the famous red alert scene, for example) and is even actually courteous at points. While he doesn't get on with Kochanski, it's only because she doesn't fit his idea of how an officer should act (and that, having been able to throw his weight around as the highest-ranking person around, he's chafing a bit at having an actual officer around to give the orders) rather than genuine dislike. In the novel's ending he's even able to man up and save the crew — including his son — from both Lister's double and The Rage, at the cost of his own life.
• Torture Technician: Practically every Agonoid is this; well aware of how fragile humans are compared to them, they specialize in brutalizing their victims just enough to keep them alive and in total agony for as long as possible.
• Touché: In Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, when Lister reveals they're not actually back on Earth, but are playing Better Than Life, Rimmer inwardly admires Lister's digitally realised ideal of a loving family, friends and kebab emporium in Bedford Falls — the fantasy "of a man at peace with himself." Lister, similarly, admires Rimmer's ambitiously fantasised wealthy extravagances.
• Tragic Dream: Lister's aim of getting Kochanski back, particularly when Rimmer discovers the photo frame in the Garbage World part. Though the ending of Better Than Life and Last Human renders it not so tragic after all...
• Trapped by Gambling Debts: The reason George McIntyre kills himself at the start of the first book is that he's in way over his head with the Ganymedian Mafia after taking out a loan to cover his debts from betting on snail fights. He sees suicide as a safe way out because he expects to be resurrected as a hologram.
• Trauma Conga Line: The polymorph in Better Than Life subjects Rimmer to one of these as it rifles through his memory banks in the hologram projection suite, forcing him to relive memories of being stood up on a cinema date, struggling to put together a study desk with four missing screws and smashing his thumb with a mallet, dropping his teething ring as a baby and having his cries ignored, getting stuck in traffic for six hours during a home weekend furlough in his early Space Corps years, being unable to make a once-in-a-lifetime trip to see the Russian circus because he didn't mow his parents' lawn, failing yet another exam, bringing a girl home only to find her kissing his brother John, being beaten in boarding school for talking during lunch (specifically, saying "Pass the salt"), being beaten in boarding school for snoring "with malicious intent", trying to study for yet another exam while the people in the next room are having an increasingly loud party, and being passed over for promotion for the sixth year running... all of which culminates in Rimmer unleashing a Big "NO!" of pure rage.
• Travelling at the Speed of Plot: It's established that the ship did a Spaceship Slingshot Stunt to turn towards Earth without spending millions of years decelerating but it's able to settle into orbit around the planet the Nova 5 crashed with Blue Midgets able to easily move from ship to planet and back again.
• Two Lines, No Waiting: The first section of Better Than Life alternates between two stories: one centred on Rimmer (in which his own self-hatred gets the better of him and turns his fantasy into a living hell), and one about Lister (in which a hooker in a 10-ton truck lays waste to his town, and inadvertently also convinces the townsfolk he's been cheating on his wife). As it turns out, Rimmer's story is actually a How We Got Here to Lister's — he is the prostitute, having wound up in her body as a result of the Humiliation Conga his psyche subjected him to, and now his mind has taken the opportunity to destroy Lister's fantasy as it previously had his own.
• Unconventional Formatting: In Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, a lengthy elevator ride down through Red Dwarf's cargo levels is conveyed by repeating the word "down" almost every other line, and finally it appears written as "D - o - w - n", with each letter on a separate line.
• Unexplained Recovery: Starbug is the primary vessel in both Last Human and Backwards, despite the ship being destroyed beyond repair in Better Than Life, which explicitly identified White Giant as the only surviving shuttlecraft. That said, the sequels each take place over thirty years after the preceding book (Lister having spent the intervening time getting younger in the backwards universe while the Cat is in stasis), so it is plausible that Rimmer, Kryten and the skutters were able to repair Starbug in the intervening time. In fact, Backwards has a throwaway line that states that Starbug has been rebuilt.
• Unfortunate Names: The Agonoids in Backwards have been given intentionally insulting names by their human creators. Examples include M'Aiden Ty One (Made In Taiwan), D'Juhn Keep (Junk Heap), Pizzak Rapp (Piece Of Crap) and Chi Panastee (Cheap And Nasty).
• Unrealistic Black Hole: Zig-zagged with the black hole in Better Than Life. It pulls in objects from a solar system away, and in escaping the event horizon, the Dwarfers discover that that 34 years have passed for the rest of the universe.
• Weird Currency: In Last Human, the Dwarfers enter a region of GELF-controlled space where a number of species, most prominently a race of pigmen GELFs, suffer from such low fertility that they use sperm as the currency of choice. They are very confused by how Lister seems to be so wealthy...
• "Well Done, Son" Guy:
  • Played straight in Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers: when the Dwarfers have linked themselves into the Game, Rimmer's subconscious constructs a fantasy wherein his father (retrieved via time travel technology that Rimmer's company had developed) was his personal limo driver who was "so proud" of his son. He is introduced in the book after Rimmer has been informed that his entire life is just a fantasy; he is suitably embarrassed.
  • Inverted in Last Human; Rimmer has to face the extreme disappointment of a son who had been told extravagant lies about his father's heroism by his mother. He eventually redeems himself in his son's eyes, resulting in him finally letting go of all of his neuroses.
• What Did I Do Last Night?:
  • Lister goes on a Monopoly pub crawl for his twenty fourth birthday in which the objective is to have a drink on every street on the board. On his own, he wakes up the following morning in a McDonald's on Mimas, wearing a lady's pink crimpelene hat and a pair of yellow fishing waders and in possession of a passport belonging to someone named Emily Berkenstein.
  • Rimmer starts off Better Than Life having a fairly epic one of these, given that in his fantasy he has a time machine and gradually realises he and his time displaced cronies (including Napoleon and Julius Caesar) went on a bender throughout all of time that culminated in their gatecrashing the Last Supper
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • In Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers, the crew spend a great deal of time repairing the Nova 5 and mining thorium to fuel its duality jump drive, in order to return to Earth. After the crew escape the Game in Better Than Life, no one even mentions the fact that they have a ship capable of interstellar travel in the docking bay — even when Red Dwarf faces obliteration by an oncoming planet.
  • There is a scene where Holly, whose IQ has been boosted to over 12 thousand, deduces that Lister is the creator of the universe. This is never mentioned again.^note There might be a reference to this in the TV episode Back To Reality, where when Andy, the "real world" game technician, claims that Lister's destiny is to jump-start the second Big Bang, meaning that "Lister — the ultimate atheist — turns out, in fact, to be God." It's never brought up in the novel beyond that one scene, though.
  • Talkie Toaster is destroyed by Kryten in Better Than Life, but is specifically noted as getting repaired at the end of the novel (even if he now thinks he's a moose). The character then completely disappears from both writers' sequel novels, with only a fleeting mention by Holly in Backwards even acknowledging his existence.
  • In Last Human, several vials of the Luck virus are involved towards the end...and one vial of broccoli, which Kochanski picks up because it feels important (while under the effects of the Luck virus). This vial is never mentioned again, unless it means to imply that the crew and new human race are stuck living on the vegetable forever.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: The skutters. They certainly seem to be sapient enough (for instance, in the second book a group of them are found hanging out playing a game of poker), but they tend to get destroyed with reckless abandon. In the first book, the two Rimmers overwork eighty or so of them to the point that they explode, and nobody seems to view this with anything more than annoyance; in the second, a further 40 are crushed to death while testing the engine pistons, and the worst reaction anyone has to this is Rimmer cursing his own idiocy and realising that they will be unable to restart the engine before the ship is destroyed.
• Would Rather Suffer: Lister is initially so against the idea of not going into stasis that he claims he'd rather drink a pint of his own diarrhea than hang around Rimmer — or a pint of someone else's, every hour, on the hour, for the next fifty years.
• Wrong Line of Work: One chapter of Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers makes it clear that Rimmer simply isn't cut out for work in the Space Corps. The same chapter also implies that Rimmer's real talent lies in art or cartography, describing how he creates color-coded revision timetables that could be considered minor works of art.
• Wretched Hive: Mimas. It's implied that the place is such a shithole that Lister spends any money he makes on sangria.
  • Lister is shown trying to very carefully ignore a fatal fight between two pimps occurring right outside his Taxi Hopper in Mimas' Red Light District, AKA "Shagtown".
• You Can't Fight Fate: Backwards shows that it is impossible to influence events in a backwards universe, as they have already occured, something of which Rimmer has trouble with wrapping his head around. As a result, the crew end up stuck on Backwards Earth for a decade longer than intended due to the extent of damage done to Starbug.
• Your Mom: After Jimmy's goons threaten to beat him up in Kryten's Wild West mindscape towards the end of Backwards, Rimmer responds with a simple take on this, saying their mothers are romantically linked with diseased pigs. When one of them threatens to off him for it, Rimmer doubles down all the way with an absolutely spectacular clarification before effortlessly thrashing them.
  Rimmer: Perhaps I can make it a little less obscure for you. Your mothers, each and every one of them, shagged pigs so frequently their underpants smelled like smoky bacon.
  (Beat, as the cowboys listen in disbelief)
  Rimmer: Furthermore, your mothers were so peculiarly ugly and undesirable the pigs had to be blindfolded before they could achieve an erection.

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