Red Dwarf co-creator Rob Grant is returning to the franchise he created in 1988 with a new novel. This will mark his first contribution to the Red Dwarf mythos since his 1996 novel Backwards, published three years after his last contributions to the TV series.
Rob Grant created Red Dwarf alongside his writing partner Doug Naylor, expanding on ideas they originally created for the radio comedy sketch Dave Hollins: Space Cadet. Red Dwarf is set three million years in the future, aboard the mining ship Red Dwarf which had to flee out of the Solar system when an onboard radiation leak sterilised the ship. The sole survivor is chicken soup repair technician Dave Lister, sentenced to suspended animation for bringing an unregistered cat on board. The ship's powerful-but-deranged AI, Holly, releases Lister from suspended animation and charts a course back to Earth. To keep Lister sane, Holly resurrects his officious and pedantic superior officer Arnold J. Rimmer (the J stands for Judas) as a hologram. They later discover a humanoid creature who descended and evolved from Lister's cat, and then rescue a sanitation droid named Kryten to round out the crew.
Red Dwarf ran for six seasons on the BBC from 1988 to 1993, with Grant and Naylor also penning two spin-off novels, Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers (1989) and Better Than Life (1990). The series became a massive smash hit success. The show went on hiatus after Season 6 due to creative differences between Grant and Naylor and legal troubles for some of the cast. Grant decided to pursue solo original novel projects, penning Colony (2000), Incompetence (2003), Fat (2006) and The Quanderhorn Xperimentations (2019), the latter based on a radio series for BBC Radio 4.
Meanwhile, Doug Naylor returned to helm six further seasons of Red Dwarf, airing intermittently in 1997, 1999, 2009, 2012, 2016 and 2017, followed by a TV movie in 2020. Grant occasionally contributed interviews to various re-releases on DVD and Blu-Ray, but did not seem interested in returning to write new material.
In 2022, a legal battle erupted between Grant and Naylor for control of the property. The events were disputed, with Grant confirming that Naylor was continuing to develop new TV projects with the existing cast whilst he was in talks to develop a new reboot TV series that would allow the franchise to continue indefinitely (with the existing castmembers now ranging from their late fifties to early seventies), whilst Naylor complained he'd been forced out of the loop. In 2023, the two sides confirmed all legal issues had been resolved, with both Grant and Naylor free to continue developing their respective projects.
Grant's project is Red Dwarf: Titan, originally planned as both a TV series and novel. Titan is a low-key reboot of the Red Dwarf premise, deliberately set in a parallel universe to avoid clashing with the established canon (though Red Dwarf's approach to canon and continuity has always been "relaxed," to say the least). This fresh take is set on Red Dwarf whilst it is still in the Solar system, and before the nuclear accident that wipes out the crew. The story starts with the crew of the ship accepting shore leave on Saturn's moon Titan, where Lister and Rimmer reluctantly have to work together after receiving an ominous message from the distant future.
Plans for a possible TV version of the project remain on the backburner, so Grant has proceeded with the novel, cowritten with his recent writing partner Andrew Marshall (best-known as the creator and writer of the hit 1990s sitcom 2point4 Children).
The novel will be published on 16 July 2026 by Gollancz in the UK.
Doug Naylor's plans for further Red Dwarf adventures with the original crew have apparently hit problems caused by the collapse in funding for a lot of UK shows in the post-pandemic era, with Dave (the UK channel that commissioned Seasons 9 through 12 and the 2020 special) no longer able to fund original programming as it used to.
No comments:
Post a Comment