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sf/fantasy-links.
Together they wrote much of the material for the tv-series Spitting Image, a satirical show with puppets and humans. When they started working with the show, there weren't that many viewers, but the author duo managed to make the show a success.
Their contribution to science fiction consists of the tv-series Red Dwarf which started in 1988. When they were working with Spitting Image, they both were thinking about doing a sitcom of their own. They had several different ideas, but they decided on some kind of humourous science fiction.
The initial plans was to have just one man and a computer lonely on a spaceship, but since it wouldn't be much of sitcom, so they added more creatures to the plot.
Red Dwarf is a rather abandoned ship drifting along in the outher space. The main character is Lister, an incomptent and lazy human being that after a rather wild night ends up on a foreign planet. Lacking money for a ticket home, he comes up with a cunning plan to work on a space ship back to earth. Things seldom goes as planned, and Lister finds himself awoken from a lethargy three millions into the future, all alone. As it turns out, he is not complete alone, as company he has got Cat, a vain createure that has evolved from cats, Kryten, a rather peculiar robot and a hologram of his dead and rather insufferable room-mate.
The Red Dwarf-series became popular, of the first 36 episodes over 2 million videocassettes have been sold, since then the series 7 and 8 came and Red Dwarf now consists of 52 episodes.. People in the US even tried to make a duplicate of the series, with other actors, but the project was (luckily) abandoned after a couple of pilots.
Together Robert Grant and Doug Naylor wrote the books "Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers" (1989) and "Better Than Life" (1990), that is slighlty different compared to the tv-series.
The books are combined in one volume: "Red Dwarf Omnibus" (1992).
After that they have written books on their own about Red Dwarf, "Last Human" by Naylor, and "Backwards" by Grant.
Many other books about Red Dwarf have been published:
"The Red Dwarf Quiz Book", "A Question of Smeg" (another book with Q&A about the tv-series and the novels), "The Red Dwarf Survival Manual" (how to survive in outer space), "The Official Red Dwarf Companion", "Red Dwarf Programme Guide",
"Scenes from Red Dwarf", "Primordial Soup" (script), "Son of Soup" (more scripts), "The Making of Red Dwarf" and a biography by the man who plays the robot Kryten: Robert Llewellyn's "The Man in the Rubber Mask".
Books at Amazon.co.uk (Europe):
Red Dwarf Omnibus
Better Than Life
Backwards, by Rob Grant
Books at Amazon.com (USA):
Red Dwarf : Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers
Better Than Life
http://hem.passagen.se/gumby/
Calle [emsworth [at] gmx [dot] net]
