I was hooked from start to finish. If you loved the show then you will enjoy this book. Meet all your characters anew and see them in a different light while at the same time seeing them from the first season of the show in places. An enlightening look into how Lister came into the job of tech on the Red Dwarf, you will not help but hear the characters speaking to you as you read it, seeing the world anew.

A must for any Red Dwarf fan. And do yourselves a favour and get the audio version read by Chris Barrie. I have both paper and audio, and Barrie elevates it from being merely hilarious to absolutely hysterical. I may or may not have been walking to the bank today with my headphones on, grinning like a loon with tears of laughter running down my face. People stared. I am rapidly getting a reputation in my neighbourhood for being somewhat unhinged, I'm sure...

Barrie's impersonations are exceptional. His Kryten in particular is so good, and after a while it becomes hard to remember you're listening to one guy read a book, rather than an actual episode of the show.

Smegging brilliant!

I'm a big fan of the Red Dwarf TV show but I'd never bothered to read any of the 4 books that came out of the show. I guess I just don't really get the need to adapt this kind of show into a novel. Comedy doesn't always translate well into books and a science-fiction sitcom made by the BBC in the late 80s/early 90s definitely wouldn't have been my first choice for a literary adaptation. Especially because so much of what made the show great were the actors themselves. That's not to criticise the writing of the show but the chemistry of the main group of actors is really what made this show stand out.

I listened to the audiobook version of the novel, so was treated to Chris Barrie's narration. His impersonations of his co-stars are to be commended, obviously, but it just wasn't the same. I guess it's always going to be difficult when you're so familiar with the source material. Speaking of which, I was majorly disappointed with just how familiar this book was. The majority of the book is made up of stuff lifted straight from the show with a few odd changes and additions here and there. I can't say that putting the show into a novel form really did anything to elevate the story or the characters. Maybe there's a tiny bit more backstory there and I guess you do get a bit more history of the Cat's people. Still, I spent a lot of time just feeling as though my time would be better spent watching the show again.

The writing itself wasn't terrible but it did feel kind of more like a pastiche than anything else. All of the science-fiction elements were all very tongue-in-cheek and it all felt a bit sarcastic. If I hadn't already seen the show, I don't think I'd have been impressed. Which really makes me wonder who this was written for? Fans of the show will just be subjected to a slightly worse version of the first 2 series but newbies won't get the point of it. I guess this is what it always was; a desperate and weak cash grab.

What a fun ride! Classic british humour, replicas and space travel. Really strange. Really, really strange, but strange in a good way. The audiobook narrator was perfect!

Not bad if you're a Red Dwarf fan, but it mostly served to remind me how much I enjoyed the actual series. It seems that for me, at least, RD works far better as a silly show full of pleasantly goofy low-budget special effects than as a written work. Many of the jokes that I remember laughing at in the show, while still amusing, fall a little flat in the book -- it ended up feeling like the authors were trying to out-Douglas Adams Douglas Adams -- and the desire to "upgrade the special effects" through prose descriptions of vast, impossible-to-film vistas just didn't quite work. Still, it got a few laughs here and there, and thanks to Netflix, there will be more (and better) Red Dwarf in my future.

If you've seen the TV series, this book (written by those same writers as the show) starts off with all the events leading up to what we know and love as Red Dwarf and takes us through much familiar territory without feeling like mere repetition of what we know, from the day a drunken Lister stumbles into the recruitment offices of the Jupiter Mining Corporation to the day he meets lovable android Kryten.

If you haven't seen the TV series, this is a wonderful sci-fi comedy about the last man in the universe, the metrosexual that evolved from his cat, and his dead bunkmate as they try to figure out what to do while stuck in the middle of nowhere.

Ah! The great seeking of 'Hitchhiker's' light! I actually do love this book, and it has such a wonderful media relationship which has allowed me to connect my enjoyment of it with other, less geekier than myself. Still wish the sequels hadn't been so... err... different in tone.