Last Human by Doug Naylor

Dear Doug Naylor,

Hi, we’ve not met before, although I’ve given you some money over the years. Not a lot. I won’t have funded any house moves or helped you build an extension to your office, but you might’ve bought the occasional takeaway thanks to me enjoying some your licensed merchandise. The reason I’m writing to you is that I’ve recently realised I owe you an apology.

For a long time, I was a fan of a show you co-wrote with Rob Grant called Red Dwarf. I liked the shows, the novels, the smeg up tapes. I collected the magazine. I had a few t shirts, including one or two my mum didn’t entirely approve of. When you took over running the show, it might’ve looked like I decided that I wasn’t going to like it anymore.

In my defence, I didn’t entirely know I’d done this at the time. It wasn’t like I woke up one morning, made myself a cup of coffee and announced to the world ‘that’s enough Red Dwarf for me’. It’s a bit embarrassing to admit this, but I know now I was changing my tastes to try and fit in with some people who I wanted to like me. People who now feature in my life about as regularly as daytrips out on my tame Triceratops, Rodney.

Thanks to my desire to blend in with them, I stopped liking a lot of things I’d grown up enjoying. Most of it being sci fi and fantasy. For some reason, I wanted to impress those people. I wanted to show them that I was a proper grown up and, don’t ask me why, I’d decided that it all hinged on me agreeing with everything they liked – which, let’s be honest, turned out to be a long way from anything even remotely grown up.

Gradually, awkwardly, I turned my back on the show over the last three BBC series. Series you were no doubt working hard to create. Series which you hoped would allow you to keep the show fresh, and maybe one day make a Red Dwarf movie.

At a certain point during all of this late teen hormone infused idiocy, I picked up a copy of your solo Red Dwarf novel, Last Human. Now, I knew the deal with the books. I’d loved the first two when I was younger. They were remixes of the TV show. Some recognisable moments, some classic scenes, some big surprises. Some emotional depth behind the jokes. Some small jokes from the scripts being allowed to become larger moments in growing character arcs. Or a plot point resolved in under thirty minutes on my TV could now run to far more epic conclusions.

I don’t know entirely what I was hoping for the first time I read Last Human. I knew it would be a little bit different with only yourself behind the keyboard. I knew it would probably have a closer feel to series VI, which I’d not kept quite so close to my geeky heart. I was also starting to drift away from the fun fantasy novels I’ve loved to read before. Your work, Pratchett’s Discworld, and Douglas Adams’ various creations to name but a few. I’d decided books had to challenge me. I’d decided they needed to echo some of my views about the state of the world or be found on a list of books I HAD to read. Normally before I died, for some reason. I’m still trying to find the list of 100 books I simply must read after the eulogy has finished.

So, with all this in mind, I guess it wasn’t a surprise that Last Human skipped past me. There were a couple of moments I didn’t see coming, but it all fell a bit flat apart from that.

Recently, after rediscovering my love for the TV show and being blown away by episodes like ‘Fathers and Suns’ in the newer series on Dave, I decided it was time to go back to the novels. After all, it stood to reason that, if I could enjoy the later shows more, then I might find something to love in the last two novels as well.

I did read the novels you wrote with Rob Grant first, which I immediately fell back in love with and then worried I’d made a mistake. Well, Mr Naylor, I’m here to say I was wrong. I was very, very wrong. Last Human is so much better than I remembered. The scope and pace of the story kept me hooked from its surprising start, which has jumped ahead some time from the sweeter ending of Better Than Life and leaves you wanting answers, through to that fantastic (and slightly overwhelming for fans) ending.

Whenever you’d talked about trying to find a way to get Red Dwarf onto the big screen, I’m amazed you didn’t hold this book up as your blueprint. It’s the characters we know, with a few story beats we might recognise, but the scale of Last Human is so much larger. Something as simple as Lister encountering a darker version of himself goes from being a classic Red Dwarf joke about alternate versions of the crew to becoming a huge, driving force in the story. In a way, it makes perfect sense that the ultimate villainous presence for any of the Red Dwarf crew is themselves.

Then there’s the return of Kristine Kochanksi. She works so well within the expanded world of the novels. It’s a shame we didn’t get more of her through the earlier novels, not that she would’ve fit so easily into their plots. She keeps the rest of the crew moving, she’s a motivator for the laziest man in space, and she also feels like she’s in a believable relationship with him. Like each of the characters from the show, however, she never loses the personality which works so well on TV. You’ve just turned up the volume on the world around them, throwing them into wilder and more fantastical set pieces, and they hold up incredibly well through it all.

One of the biggest problems someone like Douglas Adams has with his characters is just how much they really just want to stop and have a drink - whether that’s a pan galactic gargle blaster or a nice cup of tea. A character like Ford Prefect, as great as he is, always feels like he’s one crisis away from finding a comfortable chair at a noisy bar and attempting to melt his company credit card buying round after round.

Lister, however, comes through the novels as someone who evolves. You take that survival instinct which made for such great reading in the trials on the garbage planet in Better Than Life and push it further at times in Last Human. He becomes, if not exactly heroic, then a more believable character who’s trying to stay alive in a crazy and dangerous world (or series of worlds). A man who wants to stop being the last human for the rest of his life. A man who has aims and goals that he needs to fight for whilst facing someone he can’t easily outrun – himself.

I don’t want to say too much about the plot, for obvious reasons, but Last Human was an absolutely brilliant read. Pure mind bending, sci fi fun. Thrilling, hilarious, and packing an emotional punch. Thank you writing it. Thank you for keeping a show I grew up in awe of alive and kicking. Thank you for never listening to idiots like me when we announce that change is a bad thing. We’re idiots. We don’t know what we’re talking about.

You were right. I was wrong. Your book was fantastic.

Yours sincerely,

Christopher Long

(Geeky again and proud of it)