Fiction Reviews
Red Dwarf: Titan
(2026) Rob Grant & Andrew Marshall, Gollancz, £25, pbk, 406pp, ISBN 978-1-399-63609-4
This novel comes bitter-sweet as shortly (one week) after it came out we lost Rob Grant. It is also the first Red Dwarf novel in thirty years. Having said that, it is not a straightforward novel spin-out from the series as it is set long before the events of the series, and before the accident that killed the original crew; indeed, the Red Dwarf ship had yet to leave the Solar system. Actually, it is not even a true prequel but is set in a parallel universe three million and thirty-nine years before the series and, importantly, 'one universe to the side'.
The Red Dwarf crew are stopping off on Saturn's moon Titan for some shore leave and Lister and Rimmer end up being security shackled together for each to to keep the other out of trouble. So the first thing they try to do is to find some illegal tech to get them unshackled.
Meanwhile Holly (who has yet to become senile) is puzzling why, before a shuttle left with some of the crew to Titan, he briefly saw Lister split into two with one going one way and the other another, but can now only register one Lister.
On Titan, Rimmer and Lister bump into a servile robot called Carzon and then Lister picks up a cat he wants as a pet…
Now, the thing about the Red Dwarf TV series is that each 25-minute episode had a distinct plot laced with wit and banter, and here's the thing, it had a distinct plot. Alas the novel Red Dwarf: Titan has precious little story and is all banter.
Now, don't get me wrong, the banter is good and it is recognisably Red Dwarf banter at that but, for me, reading Red Dwarf: Titan I felt I was only getting half the Dwarfing experience. Yet I am sure that for some die-hard Red Dwarf fans, the banter will be enough to sustain them.
The likely reason for this being a prequel and set one universe to the side is the legal dispute the show's creators – Rob Grant and Doug Naylor – had a dispute following Grant leaving the Grant-Naylor writing partnership in 1995, seven years after the first series had debuted and six series later. Their sdispute went legal in 2021. Their argument was over whoever had the creative rights for solo spin-off Red Dwarf ventures. The dispute was resolved in 2023 with both agreeing that each writer could work on separate iterations of Red Dwarf across various media, working again with the cast and other valued partners, and they wished each other the very best… And this explains the 'one universe to the side' bit.
Having said that, with Rob Grant's passing Doug Naylor is pretty much free to do what he wants. And here, what he wants seems to be another feature-length special episode as was 2020's Red Dwarf: The Promised Land. Naylor has said that if the worst comes to the worst, this new feature would appear as a Red Dwarf novel and so another novel is a distinct possibility irrwespective of whther this feature-length episode is made.
Jonathan Cowie
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