Editing Red Dwarf (section)

==TV vs. Novels==
Unlike many other universes that started as books and were turned into TV shows, Red Dwarf started as a TV show and was turned into a book series. The show's creators wrote two books, roughly adapting plots from the first couple of seasons of the show; "Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers" and "Better Than Life", but they eventually got into a creative dispute and split up, resulting in two different books that each portray their own spin on the "third book in the series" position - "Backwards" by Rob Grant and "Last Human" by Doug Naylor.

Because the books can go into details that the TV show couldn't, they showcase a more serious and [[grimdark]] depiction of the Red Dwarf multiverse. For example of the serious: in the show, Lister getting caught out over his cat seemed like a mixture of bad luck and stupidity; in the novels, it's a deliberate plan on Lister's behalf due to his expanded backstory - he got stranded on Mimas (one of Saturn's moons) after getting '''incredibly''' fucking drunk on a birthday pubcrawl in Liverpool and he only joined up with the Red Dwarf to try and get back to Earth for free; then he learned that it would take years before the ship would get there again, and he'd be required to work with Rimmer all that time, so he came up with a plan to get put into stasis so he could skip all that and just finally get home. For an example of the grimdark: Lister's first encounter with Rimmer's hologram recreation isn't until ''after'' the experience of being stuck all alone aboard ship with nobody to talk to or interact with causes him to fall into a deep drunken depression.

Of note is the fact in the novels that Lister finally gets back to Earth... [[Grimdark|Only to discover that mankind turned the entire planet into a colossal garbage dump inhabited by giant cockroaches, and its implied the planet itself has developed a sentience that hates humanity for ruining it]].