I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: RHEOSTATICS-Jackson Triggs, St.Catharines, ON (August 12, 2017).

I have been catching up on the last few remaining recent (relatively) shows that the Rheostatics played.  These are all shows since the release of Here Comes the Wolves.

Great soundboard show from the beautiful Jackson Triggs Winery stage with Kevin Hearn on Keys/vocals and Hugh Marsh on violin. Very chatty show with one of the longest stretches of banter I can recall at over 8 minutes of straight comedy.

The show begins with the spoken introduction from Group of 7 “A tall white pine stands between me and the tree I’m trying to see … also a tall white pine.”  Then Martin starts a gentle “Northern Wish.”  It’s followed by “Legal Age Life” which has a wild keyboard solo.  Kevin continues to shine on a lengthy intro for Dave Clark’s fun new song “Supecontroller.”  It’s kind of a dopey song but it’s one of my favorites.

Kevin says to the audience, Say hello to Dave Clark.”  Dave says Jackson Triggs has treated us fine and gave us all kinds of good food.  (and plenty of wine).

[READ: April 21, 2021] Backwards

I’m not sure what got me on my recent Red Dwarf reading kick (finding out that they had just released a new series on DVD was certainly a spark).  I was sure I had read all of these books before and yet none of them were familiar to me at all.

The Grant Naylor team wrote two books and the second one ended on a cliffhanger.

Then for reasons I’m not willing to look into, both Rob Grant and Doug Naylor each wrote a sequel to that book.  But neither book is like the other and they both go in very different directions.  Naylor’s book was really dark and very violent.

Grant’s book is also dark but in very different ways.

The previous book ended with an old Lister being sent to a planet where everything goes backwards so that he can de-age to about the same age he was when he was on the series.  They plan to meet him 36 years later at Niagara Falls.

But this book opens with a prologue about Arnold Rimmer aged 7 and how he continues to fail in school.  His teachers suggest he be held back, but his mother interferes and that lets him move on.

Then the book starts properly with the crew of Red Dwarf: Rimmer, Cat and Kryten landing on Reverse World and trying to locate Lister.  Because everything goes in reverse (which takes some time to wrap your head around) all of your actions are predetermined.  And, essentially, if you do something dangerous, you know that if you’re not already hurt, you won’t get hurt because you would be hurt to start with.  What?  You’ve already jumped off the cliff, now, you’re doing it backwards.  But you already landed, so you’d already be hurt and going backwards would un-hurt you.

It also means that you un-eat food, good to sleep when you are refreshed, wake up when you’re tired.  And you don’t even want to think about going to the bathroom.

The first part of the book is pretty elaborate.  It turns out that Lister has spent the last eight years in jail waiting to find out what he did.  And so we reverse through a chase (it must have been very hard to write this reverse stuff) with the cops until they finally get back to Starbug.  They have a short window to be able to leave (for some sci-fi reason), but they are unable to make it in time.  Which means they are stuck on the backwards planet for another ten years.

There’s some interesting happenings for each other characters.  Kryten learns that he actually killed the person that Lister was arrested for killing.  Except in this world he was trying to take the pickaxe out of the hillbilly, but in reverse it means that he had actually put it into the hillbilly.  This makes Kryten feel terrible–he committee mechanoid sin number one.

Cat meanwhile seduces a woman and has sax for the first time (but since it’s in reverse, Rimmer mocks him that he has actually just become a virgins).

A lot of the humor of this episode comes from the backwards TV episode, but the story expands on it greatly.

Part two turns things on their head by introducing Ace Rimmer (!).  In Ace’s dimension, the space corps has just invented a time machine.  But when it comes back (three days before it left), Ace is dead.  It takes Spanners (Lister) to figure out what went wrong.  I really enjoyed this whole section and thought it was a fun look at the alternate dimension where Ace came from.  There’s even a sweet moment where Ace helps out a cowardly Space Corp cadet who couldn’t get the courage to ask out a bartender who clearly likes him.  It’s told in a good way so you don’t know what’s going on right away.

But the main things is that they make some adjustments and Ace winds up jumping into the dimension where Starbug and the guys are.

Part three returns us to the Backwards world.  Lister and the cat are now obnoxious teenagers.  I’m guessing that Grant had or once had teenagers because his writing about bratty snotty Lister and Cat is hilarious.

Holly is still here, aboard Red Dwarf.  When we last saw Holly he had reduced his life span for an IQ of 12,000.  Sadly he only had two minutes of run time left.  So he has determined that he can extend his life by giving some IQ back.  But each time he does that he gets dumber and thinks it’s a good idea to give back more.  Soon enough, he is no longer smart enough to work out his IQ or his life expectancy.  He also didn’t bother checking radar screens–which is why Red Dwarf was captured.

Part Four is called Nipple Sized Pastry Cutters, Gonad Electrocution Kits and Easy-Listening’ Music.

Starbug has safely left the planet but when they went to where Red Dwarf was supposed to be, they found that it was in tiny parts.  Holly’s CPU had enough power to say one word–Agonoids.

This is where this book gets very dark.  Agonoids were designed to be the perfect practitioners of the favorite human sport: killing.  They were mechanical warriors with no pity, mercy or morality,

Strangely, humans were surprised when the Agonoids turned ton them (they have no morality or pity, duh).  And so all of the Agonoids went on a killing spree with one thing in mind: revenge.  Revenge against the humans who tried to shut them down.  Revenge against the humans who gave them names like M’Aiden Ty-One, Chi’Panastee, Djuhn’Keep and Pizzak’Rapp.

It had been several million years and there weren’t many bots left–they don’t have a lifespan, but they do rust out.  When their parts rust they will fight another for better parts.  Plus, there’s only one human left in existence, they’ve heard.  Their whole reason for existing is killing this human–the one who gets to kill the human will drag out that daeth for as long as possible (with devices like those in the chapter title).

M’Aiden has created a competition aboard their ship (the details are astonishing).  The Agonoid who survives gets to kill the human.  Maiden is the strongest, toughest and most ruthless of the machines.  He figures he has an easy victory.

Back on Starbug, things aren’t going well. They are running out of oxygen, and Starbug has just struck something very large which put a giant whole in the hull. Kryten’s mechanoid behind is plugging it and is the only thing keeping everyone else inside.  Lister and Cat are passed out and only Rimmer is there to help. But Rimmer is a hologram and can’t actually do anything.

However, it was dimension-hopping Ace Rimmer whose ship crashed into them and caused the rupture. But fear not, Ace is on hand to fix the problem (and Arnold is on hand to complain about how phony Ace is).

But just they are about to get everything under control, they are attacked by an Agonoid.

Part Five suddenly jumps to the Old West.  And the story takes a part of the “Gunmen of the Apocalypse” episode.  Although that’s not entirely clear right p front because Kryten is known as Sheriff Will Carton.  And he is about to be killed by the Apocalypse Boys. The book doesn’t have much of the humor of that episode, but it does have most of the other elements, including the dove program, .

The Old West sequence is also horrifically violet but that’s because everyone is a computer generated character so terrible things can happen to them (like breaking both legs and having your head cut off and still surviving) because it’s all a computer simulation.

The book end surprisingly quickly after this with the promise of more stories to come, but none ever did (from Rob Grant anyway).