Review of Backward by Rob Grant

Kythe42's Astral Library

I've been a book worm for pretty much my whole life. I've read many types of books over the course of my life, but currently the sorts of books I enjoy the most are fantasy and science-fiction. I particularly like it if these genre's are mixed with comedy like the style of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. I definitely can enjoy more serious fantasy and science-fiction though. I also enjoy vampire books, but not quite as much as I did when I was younger.

I'm not going to add any books to my shelves that I read before 2012 just because I've read so many books in my life and it's difficult to remember when I read them and how well I liked them, and I'm sure there are a great many books that I've read in my life that I've completely forgotten about.

The editions that I have displayed on my shelves do not necessarily correspond to editions that I actually own. I generally just use whatever edition has my favorite cover which may or may not match the covers of the books I actually own. If I own more than one copy of a book, in most cases I won't have multiple editions displayed on my shelves. An exception to this would be collective books/omnibuses in which the individual stories are all available separately. In this case I will probably use the individual books for tracking my reading, but will display the omnibus or anthology just as a book that I own.

Because BookLikes does not have any suitable way to track re-reading books, I have created a shelf called "all books read" in which I will permanently place every book that I have read. Books that I am re-reading will get transferred back and forth between the official "read" shelf and the "planning to read" and "currently reading" shelves.

5:34 pm 31 August 2014

Backwards by Rob Grant is the forth book based on the British science fiction comedy show Red Dwarf. The crew of Red Dwarf gets stranded in an alternate dimension on an alternate version of Earth where time runs in the opposite direction. Many years pass before they are able to escape this dimension and when they finally do, Red Dwarf isn't where they left it. With the limited supplies aboard their transport vessel, they must search for Red Dwarf in order to survive. This book was a fun quick read and left me wanting more. Unfortunately as of right now there are no more Red Dwarf books.

This book is an alternate sequel to Better Than Life so it picks up where that book left off and takes place parallel to Last Human. You'll definitely want to read Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers and Better Than Life before reading this book, but it doesn't matter if you read it before or after reading Last Human. I think this book resembles the events of the show more closely than Last Human does. It was also the funnier of the two books so I enjoyed it more. I'd say that Last Human is still worth reading though even if it wasn't quite as good as this book. To anyone looking to both watch the show and read the books, I recommend watching the entire show before starting on the books because the differences between the two will be less confusing that way.