Dave Lister's birthday pub crawl ends, improbably, in a burger bar on one of Saturn's moons, wearing fishing waders and clutching a passport in the wrong name. Joining the Space Corps looks like a fix. Instead it strands him aboard Red Dwarf, a clapped-out mining ship, three million years adrift and alone: the last human alive, sharing the corridors with a dead crewmate turned hologram, a computer gone senile, and a creature evolved from his pet cat. Rob Grant and Doug Naylor spin their television comedy into a proper novel, funnier and stranger the further from Earth it drifts.