To safeguard Lister’s sanity under such impossible circumstances, Holly has given the only hologrammatic light bee aboard the ship to Dave’s former crewmate Arnold Rimmer, a man Lister actively despises. Lister’s other companion is the Cat, an evolution of the pet Lister brought aboard ship following his shore leave, an egotistical creature who focuses entirely on his own pleasures.
Red Dwarf is beloved of a certain demographic of people (elder millennials, students, stoners, sci-fi aficionados). Once again, dear reader, I find myself presenting you with another teenage crush of mine: socialist slacker Lister, the man who pulled off the most amazing pool trick shot in the universe using planets and a black hole; a man who drinks lager and eats curry for breakfast, who doesn’t get out of bed before midday, and who spends eternity longing for the love of a woman he dated briefly 3 million years previously.
I’ve no doubt that my closest friends will collectively sigh and say “of course”, as this will explain a great deal. But this blog post isn’t only a way of justifying why I’ve made such dreadful relationship choices in the past (though it will always be that too, of course). Red Dwarf is also sci-fi and timey-wimey in all my favourite ways, and from a Season 2 episode called Better than Life (an episode expanded upon in a series of books by the show’s creators, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor), there are profoundly moving discussions about AI and augmented reality, and our relationship with it, which started a conversation for me in my early teens that I am still having to this day.
The books and TV show are very different beasts to one another. In the episode of the same name, the ship receives a post pod and within it comes news of Rimmer’s father’s death. Despite the fact everyone in the universe apart from Lister (including Rimmer himself) is already dead, the latter takes the news badly and becomes depressed. To cheer him up, Lister and the Cat invite Rimmer to take part in an immersive virtual reality game called Better Than Life. And at first, everything is blissful – until Rimmer’s insecurities ruin it for the Boys from the Dwarf, and they end up having to flee the game with their lives at risk. The episode is fairly light in tone, and we’re meant to laugh at Rimmer’s raddled ego having an impact on his crewmates.
The books, however, written collaboratively between Grant and Naylor, offer a much darker version of this story. Having seemingly made it back to Earth, Lister marries a direct descendent of his true love, Kochanski, and settles in Bedford Falls, a replica of the town featured in It’s A Wonderful Life.
Rimmer becomes an enormously successful businessman whose company creates a solid hologrammatic body for him – he marries a supermodel, and is the world’s richest man. The Cat retires to Denmark and lives in a castle surrounded by a moat filled with milk, tended to by Amazonian women.
He walked into the parlour. A log fire was burning merrily in the grate. Jim and Bexley were smashing Silent Night out of the complaining piano, while Krissie was standing on a stepladder, putting tinsel on the Christmas tree. She turned and smiled, and blew him a kiss. When the kids were in bed they sat snoozily in the big leather armchair with the springs poking through the back, watching the fire splutter and splurt, and listening to Hoagy Carmichael on the wind-up phonograph.
Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers | Grant Naylor
At first, what is very striking is how different their mutual fantasies are, and how reflective of their personalities. Lister just wants a quiet, domestic life with Kochanski and their two children; Rimmer’s enormous self-loathing means he creates a life of opulence and success, where he is seemingly the most important person in the world and can be feted as such. The Cat’s arrogance manifests as an enormous castle, and adoring women who serve his every whim. By the end of Infinity, Lister has realised that he has to leave Better Than Life, after one more Christmas Eve with Kochanski.
But in Bedford Falls, it’s always Christmas Eve…
Immersive realities are digital environments which enhance, or replace entirely, the real world. Within them you are surrounded entirely by the digital experience. You become subsumed by it. In the case of Lister and his crewmates, Better than Life provides them with all three types of immersive experience as determined by Ernest W. Adams: they are tactically, strategically and narratively immersed within the game, triggering the parts of the brain that enjoy gaming or reading a book.
Björk & Holopainen go one further, believing that there is a fourth category, that of spatial immersion, where the participant believes in the immersive reality to such an extent that they completely believe in the world they’re occupying. In the case of the Dwarfers, their desire to be part of a solar system occupied by humanity leads them to think that they have managed to get back to Earth. And were it not for the fact that their robot companion, Kryten, is carving warnings into their arms for them to read within the game, they have no desire to leave the reality created for them by their own subconsciousness; whilst their physical bodies are atrophying and slowly dying, their subconscious believes that they are living the best versions of their lives.
His arms had been giving him problems for a few weeks now. It was like a burning sensation down both his forearms – excruciatingly painful at times, but Doc MacKenzie couldn’t find anything wrong with them. There were no marks, nothing showed up on the x-ray: it was a complete mystery.
Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers | Grant Naylor
Currently, immersive technology exists for us as VR headsets, 360° videos, and augmented reality. It is the level of the augmented reality in Better than Life which makes it the most addictive game ever created – and it’s easy to see why the last man alive in the universe might wish to be in Bedford Falls with the love of his life, listening to Hoagy Carmichael in front of a crackling fire. We are not quite there yet with that technology, but we are approaching it, especially with the emergence of software like Midjourney and the rapid rise of AI. Want to see Wes Anderson’s version of Star Wars? Or yearn for Barack Obama to tell us what he really thinks of Donald Trump? Then you’ve probably engaged with AI. Imagine that level of (un)reality in an immersive environment which you’re already predisposed to wish was real.
Finding someone who was the exact duplicate of Kristine Kochanski. Exact. Down to the pinball smile. Down to the laugh. Down to the tiny mole on her bottom. Who just happened to be a direct descendant of the Third Console Officer he’d had an affair with aboard Red Dwarf three million years ago. Who just happened to fall in love with him instantly, and give him twin sons.
Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers | Grant Naylor
Isn’t this a kind of heaven, then? The creation of our heart’s desire, using technology to achieve it? It’s what medieval monks were doing when they created manuscripts, after all: the ritualistic process of scraping, whittling, making and creating are all attempts to create a conversation with the divine. Imagine having a technology which does that for you at the click of a button. Imagine obtaining paradise for the cost of a monthly subscription. Henrike Lähnemann, in her inaugural lecture as Professor in German Medieval Literature & Linguistics at the University of Oxford, welcomed a Medingen Psalter to the Bodleian by declaring: ‘It is God himself, ambidextrously writing the world, who is the exemplar for manuscript production. When the nun puts pen to parchment, she emulates the creative act of God.’ [Thomas, 2020]. Technology, the bits and bytes of it, could also emulate Heaven.
The Venerable Bede gave us a beautiful analogy for our lives: life is like a sparrow flying out of the darkness and through a doorway into the brightness of a lit hall. Whilst it is in the hall, the sparrow is safe from the storm that rages outside, but eventually it traverses the hall and passes from winter into winter again. Our lives are the span of the sparrow’s flight through the hall, and we know nothing of what comes before or after.
Þyslic me is gesewen, þu cyning, þis andwearde lif manna on eorðan, to wiðmetenesse þære tide þe us uncuð is, swylc swa þu æt swæsendum sitte mid þinum ealdormannum 7 þegnum on wintertide, 7 sie fyr onælæd 7 þin heall gewyrmed, 7 hit rine 7 sniwe 7 styrme ute; cume an spearwa 7 hrædlice þæt hus þurhfleo, cume þurh oþre duru in, þurh oþre ut gewite.
Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica | A Clerk of Oxford blog post, 2012
Technology is approaching a place where it can feasibly provide us with an answer to the end of it: and that answer is our own personal Elysium. The etymology of the word paradise comes from various sources (French, Greek, Latin, Old Iranian) but it evokes a walled garden; the implication is that paradise is a place of security amidst the darkness of the eternal storm. For Lister, that port was Christmas Eve in a chocolate-box town, a 1940s Ford, and the pinball smile of his one true love. But Lister isn’t dead, and he knows it’s not real. This overriding thought drives him to step beyond the light of the hall, and back out into the darkness.
As Nick Cave once put it, I don’t believe in an interventionist God. But I know that darling, if I did, my personal paradise would be eternity on the beach at Mwnt (a place, like Lister and his Bedford Falls, which I have never actually visited). There would be a very slight breeze, and a calm blue sea. My love would be out in the waters, waving at me from the distance: Small would be next to me, perpetually 5 years old, chatting and digging into the sand. I would feel warm and safe, and content. I would lie back and close my eyes to the sounds of Anaïs Mitchell, and it would always be summer.
And what price would I pay for that endless season in the sun? How much would you pay, for paradise? Potentially more than the cost of a smoked kipper, that’s for sure.
Dr Keri Thomas 