Number Two:
Red Dwarf:
Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers
By Grant Naylor


Grant Naylor is a gestalt entity with two bodies: Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, the co-creators of the British comedy Red Dwarf. It's a re-read, but I was reading it before I began this challenge, so it totally counts. Here's a brief excerpt, from part 1: “Your own death, and how to cope with it”—

Lister had beentrying to get off Mimas for nearly six months now. How he'd got there was still something of a mystery.

The last thing he really remembered with any decent clarity was celebrating his birthday back on Earth. He, and six of his very closest friends, decided to usher in his twenty-fifth year by going on a Monopoly board pub-crawl around London. A drink at each of the squares. In Whitechapel they had pina coladas. King's Cross station, double vodka. In Euston Road, pints of Guinness. The Angel Islington, mezcals. Pentonville Road, bitter laced with rum and blackcurrant. And they continued around the board. By the time they'd got to Oxford Street, only four of them remained. And only two of the four still had the power of speech.

His last real memory was of telling the others he was going to buy a Monopoly board, because no one could remember what the next square was, and stepping out into the cold night air clutching two-thirds of a bottle of sake.

He'd woken up slumped across a table in a McDonald's burger bar on Mimas, wearing a lady's pink crimplene hat and a pair of yellow fishing waders, with no money and a passport in the name of ‘Emily Berkenstein.’ What was more, he had a worrying rash.

He was broke, diseased and 793 million miles from Liverpool.

By part 2, “Alone in a Godless universe, and out of Shake‘n’Vac,” Lister is the last human being alive and 3 million years from Earth. By part 3, he lives in Bedford Falls, the from the movie It's a Wonderful Life.

Now I'm on the second book in the series—Better Than Life—and it's getting a bit odd.

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