Also it is a lot less episodic than the previous two books, so while Grant is making the story flow better, it sort of doesn't work as well.
I guess it had something to do with the episodes not being some of my favourite. I have to admit that I was a little disappointed with this addition to the Red Dwarf series – for some reason it didn't seem to work as well as the previous two books. It's sort of like having an accent – you notice everybody's but your own. Okay, I know, this is a Red Dwarf book, so it isn't meant to be taken seriously, but in reality we really don't know if these people in this backwards universe actually realise that their universe is travelling in the opposite direction to our own, and the funny thing is that Lister, who is living through this backwards universe with a forward looking mindset, sort of knows the future, but is mystified by the past (though of course he could always pick up a history book). However, if we travel backwards it sort of works a little different, we know where we are going, it is just that we progressively forget where we have been. Mind you, the fact that the future is unknown gives way for some very profitable industries, form your average circus fortune teller, to the gambling industry, to investment banks like Goldmen Sachs (and isn't all they are doing is making bets based upon statistical probabilities?). While hindsight is 20/20, our vision of the future is basically non-existent (though we do have a habit of making speculative assumptions, and once again resorting to mathematical models). In the previous book it was suggested that life makes no sense to us because our timeline travels in the wrong direction, which means that we find ourselves travelling into the future, namely from birth to death.
I must admit that that is a pretty interesting way of saving one's life, especially when onehas aged a lot quicker to those around them, thanks to the local black hole (though this is all speculation since nobody has actually tested it out – it's based on some guy's, possibly Einstein's, mathematical modeling). Anyway, in an effort to save his life they take his body to an alternate universe, in which time runs backwards (as I have mentioned), with the intention of picking him up again when he is much younger.
So, at the end of Better Than Life we leave Lister trapped in a universe in which time goes in reverse, namely because he had become so old (due to being caught up in a temporal distortion caused by a black hole) that when they encountered the polymorph he had literally been scared to death (or something like that – I'm not quite sure even though it was about a month ago that I actually read the book).
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