RED FLAG 4: Backwards
Audiobook
RED FLAG 4: Backwards
They say it's good everywhere, best at home... Best? Really the best?
Welcome to the latest alternate world that the survivors of the mining ship Red Dwarf have been given by their renegade co-author. After death, duplication, and the other kisses he has already faced, David Lister has a master test in space-time. At home, where it's supposedly best - ha ha ha! Rimmer, Kryten and Puss do meet him at a kiosk near Niagara Falls, but on this version of planet Earth, everything goes backwards and they arrive at an accelerated pace, whereupon they can't stop staring. Not only does the Berlin Wall fall back into bricks before their eyes and Poland is liberated by Hitler, but the police chase Lister, arrested for murder, to the farm where the crime was committed and where some rednecks dismantled, hid and then accidentally sniffed out the Kosmik module. The pitfalls resulting from the inverted reality increase, and our hero grows younger and younger until puberty, as the author takes up the philosophical maxim that man is just cosmic dust drifting with the sum of his own decisions. Who made an astrophysical boondoggle in such a neat idea? Let's not blame it on the dementia of Holly's computer, for Rimmer's better self has also risen from the dead. That's gonna be a blast, folks!
Yes, the Dwarf boys have reached the end. So the bell? Do you really think so, when in this sci-fi cowboy movie every effect is followed by a cause?
They wrote about the book:
Of the two jagged ends of the dwarf space opera, this one is the sharper. Divorced far beyond the limits of the absurd, if there are any.
- thestorygraph.com
The main reason why the [TV] sketch-based series works almost perfectly in novel form is probably related to the fact that they are not scripts rewritten into book form. (...) The screenwriters, in their role as novelists, have succeeded in creating works that can appeal to both fans of the series and those who are meeting its characters for the first time.
- iliteratura.cz
Rob Grant
(* 1950) The creative inclinations of a Salford-next-Manchester funnyman who defected from his psychology degree to try to make it on local ITV as a writer for Spitting Image were accelerated at lightning speed by a meeting with colleague Doug Naylor. Under the joint pseudonym of Grant Naylor, they created the intergalactic sitcom Red Dwarf (1988-1996) and almost simultaneously translated the themes of the Emmy Award-winning space odyssey, which was broadcast by the BBC in 73 episodes and one feature-length special, into the literary tetralogy from which our audiobooks are based. When they parted ways in 1993, however, each still tried to reach the conclusion of the prose version of the saga in his own way. With his novel Backwards (1996, no. 2005), Grant thus fulfilled his lifelong desire "to write the first space western with a retrograde plot, exaggerating the horrors of post-destination". He later demonstrated his prophetic intuition as a humorist in his book Colonies (2000, no. 2004), where he flees the effects of climate change on another spaceship into the unknown. In the dystopia Incompetence (2003, no. 2005) predicted the bureaucratic toothlessness of the EU and in a scathing satire by Špeka (2006, no. 2008) depicts social engineering in the field of obesity treatment, although he himself secretly eats mango chutney enthusiastically.
