Editing Red Dwarf (section)

==The Plot==
In a not-too-distant future, humanity has colonized the solar system, and a megacorp called the Jupiter Mining Corporation runs a fleet of massive sub-light ships which flit around the system, snaffling up asteroids and breaking them down into usable minerals to then sell to the ever-resource hungry consumers of humanity. One such mining ship is the ''Red Dwarf'', and amongst its crew of hundreds of miners and support staff, our protagonist is the lowest of the low; Dave Lister, a genial but unambitious bloke from Liverpool, stuck with the rank of 3rd technician whilst dreaming of the day he can return to Earth and buy a plot of land on Fiji, where he will keep a hobby farm and run a hot-dog & donut diner. This despite the fact most of Fiji has been sunken about a meter beneath sea level by volcanic eruption ('That's why the sheep are going to have to be quite tall'). Technician 3rd Class is the lowest rank aboard ship, and just about qualifies him for the most pathetic of maintenance tasks, such as restocking the candy vending machines with fun-sized chocolate-covered honeycomb pieces and cleaning the gunk out of soup dispensing tubes from the various auto-chefs scattered around the ship. In Dave's own words this makes him lower down the ship's pecking order than the Scutters - the simple service mechs that infest the ship like rats and consist of a primitive, three-fingered gripping claw on a little four-wheeled body - and the guys who restock the toilet paper. The only person of equally low rank is his immediate superior; Arnold J. Rimmer, Technician 2nd Class and the ship's resident smeghead.

Aside from a crush on a navigation officer named Kristine Kochanski, whom he pines after from afar, Lister's primary friends are a couple of comparatively low-level roughnecks like himself, and a heavily pregnant pet cat. As our series starts, this illegal pet is discovered by the ship's captain, who demands that Lister give the animal to them to be destroyed, or else he will spend the rest of the Red Dwarf's flight in temporal stasis before being fired once they get back to Earth. Dave chooses the latter... and is greatly confused when time restarts itself and Holly, the ship's controlling AI, greets him with the welcome that the radiation levels are now safe.

See, once Lister went into stasis, for some insane reason, Rimmer was given responsibility for performing maintenance on the shielding surrounding the ship's lethally radioactive core. Rimmer, being an even bigger incompetent than Lister (whose primary fault is a lack of ambition), botched the job and caused a massive radiation leak that killed the entire crew and sent Holly, as per safety regulations, rocketing on an unplotted course into deep space until the background radiation levels reached a safe level. It only took a mere '''3 million years''' for this to happen, and by now the Red Dwarf is hopelessly lost somewhere in deep space.

Rather than give in to despair, Lister assembles a small crew of crazies around himself and sets off to try and find Earth again, determined to see what has become of humanity over the eons. No matter what dangers or batshit crazy things he has to get past to do it.