There's no kind of atmosphere

[sovay]

I hope Rob Grant would take it in the intended spirit that when I heard the news of his sudden death, all I could think was "All most of us get is 'Mind that bus!' 'What bus?' Splat!" The first six and a half series of original flavor Red Dwarf (1988–99) were a social staple of my sophomore year of college, watched primarily in my case from the top half of a bunk bed occupied by a structurally unwise number of students who would shortly branch out into whatever British television comedy we could get hold of the tapes for. It became an immediate and ineradicable part of our language. Decades later, the number of quotations from especially the first three series that have worked themselves into my present household lingo would be difficult to estimate without a rewatch. In storage with the rest of my library, I still have some of the tie-in novels, including at least one of the separately authored parallel continuations, which unfortunately for this memoriam may have been Doug Naylor's. I cannot find that I ever saw another project of Grant's except for the first series of The 10%ers (1993–96) and I am still stricken to lose yet another artist while Kissinger's heirs don't even seem to be in this machine. Not everybody has to be dead, Dave.

Comments

[sovay]

Oh no! That's so sad. And by total coincidence, when you let me know about those B5 behind-the-scenes books, I found out that the author also had one on Red Dwarf and ordered that too, which I haven't had a chance to read yet.

That's very timely and should totally not have been in memoriam! I would have pounced on a behind-the-scenes Red Dwarf book if I had seen one in college.

I actually came to the show by way of the tie-in books instead of the other way around. I found the first one or two in a used bookstore in the early 90s, and didn't even know it was a TV show until quite a bit later. In college, I found and read some episode transcripts online, but it wasn't until the late 90s that I managed to see the actual show.

I had much the same experience with the original series of Star Trek. We had the short-story-ized volumes of all three seasons in the house and I read almost all of them before I could be exposed to any of the episodes on television. We also had a bunch of tie-in novels of which my far and away favorite was Diane Duane's Spock's World (1988). I have no idea if Jean Lorrah's The Vulcan Academy Murders (1984) was any good, but it was set on Vulcan and I read it. I cannot recommend James Blish's Spock Must Die! (1970).

I can't remember if I had even heard of Red Dwarf before it was pitched by [the college friend whom I would later date for about two years] who brought his tapes with him from Florida, but it became instantly one of those social glues that everyone would pour themselves into the same too-small double to watch.

I still have the first few season on DVD.

Nice.