Umm, can you please get trump's friends out? Anyway, I first got introduced to Red Dwarf through the DECTalk transcriptions, and from listening to both, the actual show is much, much better. Though the audio descriptions in the DECTalk versions helped me understand what was happening a lot more. One of my favorite moments was when Lister gets thrown in to a table by a Skutter in Confidence and Paranoia.

Transcripts generally help with that sort of thing, I did the transcripts for avatar the last air bender and those for bufy, though to be honest with something like red dwarf you just don't get the humour without the acting.

Sadly Chris barry only read the first two books.
Craig charlse read the commercial version of last human, which he did a good job of, albeit his voices aren't as good as Barry's, and there is the problem that they abridged the commercial audio recording.
Rob grant himself read the commercial recording of backwards, which is both a horrible reading (the man just had no audio acting), and a very! bad abridgement, as it misses the entire gunmen of the apocalypse section, and even though backwards is probably my least favourite of the books that is a great shame.

The rnib do have versions read by a guy called David Thorp who does a very good job, though interestingly enough hehis own interpretations of some of the characters, doing cat with a deep, sort of sterriotypically radio dj voice and Cryton like a slightly camp butler without Robert Luellin's American accent.

oddly enough Thorps' voices work fairly well, and I much prefer his reading of backwards (since for a start it's unabridged), his last human isn't bad either though i'd have trouble choosing between that and craig charlse's.

Sadly I don't think the versions read by David Thorp are available anywhere but from the Rnib here in the Uk.

As for the series, I have several favourite episodes and moments which didn't make it into the books.

the triplicator with the evil versionsthe cast is a favourite, though the bit with Lister eating the maggoty strawberry is just plane wrong!

I also don't know if people get criton's reference to "toasty toppers" in that episode as something horrible they find in the bad version of red dwarf.

In Britain in the nineties toasty toppers were a really bad instant spread intended to put ontop of toast, think of a rather nasty mixture of very processed meat and some gloppy sauce, hence why they rank on the groosneess scale along side cinema hotdogs and overdone kebabs with stringy brown lettuce .

I actually thought Barry was making the toaster gruff deliberately, since the point is made in the text just how abrasive talky toaster's personality was, and I thought the grating voice was supposed to be part of that floor.
Actually in the series I didn't think the toaster was that bad .

I don't know if you've got to the point in better than life where rimmer realizes just who his second wife in the virtual reality game is, but barry's reading of that bit was always hilarious!

I also love the way he makes the sounds for cats' favourite sport of creature polo! :d.

One character I was sorry they missed from the series and one plotline generally was where Criton heard he was being replaced by a new android hduson 10, --- -that's the episode with the "lets quit the startrek crap!" line and a brilliant terminator parody in which Hudson's heads up display goes through t various cast members, says why they're not human and therefore valid targets, gets to lister and finishes with "what the hell he's a git anyway!" .

Funny you should mention inquisitor.
Craig Charlse (who played lister), in the late nineties and early 2000's presented a program over here called robot wars, in which people built remote control robots and tried to murder the robots of their opponents, complete angle grinders, circular saws and lots of other nasties.
I remember one team appeared with a robot called "the inquisitor", Charlse asked them where they got the name, and when they said "from a series called red dwarf" he replied

"what? never heard of it!"

Whereupon the audience laughed uproariously .

I actually like the fact that the red dwarf books basically retell the story in a way that would work as a book. As I said in my review of careful drivers, I've generally found that books written about tv series suffer ethe same problems as fan fiction, like an author will write a starwars novel with the emperor's new apprentice who is even eviler than darth vader!

or suddenly you'll find that the emperor was really working for an evil race of evil who are destroying the galaxy in an evil fix and require blowing up of yet a larger death star .

Either that, or when they're straight novelizations with the same events, they simply aren't well written, ---- while I love his original books, Alan dean fosters' novelizations both of the alien films and original starwars were just plane disappointing.

There are exceptions of course, I love Matthew stover's novelization of revenge of the sith, one article on tor.com said it was be3tter than the film.

Either way, I like the fact that in the red dwarf books basically they didn't try to either redo the series bigger and better, or to just novelize with no style, what they did was simply use the same characters, concepts, and a lot of the same events, along with some hilarious writing to create an incredibly good story!

The only sad thing is that the first two are the only co written books and while last human does provide a great ending to the series, it would've been nice to get more.

I did hear that the two of them disagreed about the direction of the series, this shows in their respective third volumes.

Backwards is funnier, but on the hole less coherent while last human is less funny but a better story, though both include some pretty horrible inequities in different ways that I'm sure wouldn't have occurred ifthe two writers were working together, though imho last human is the better book over all though backwards is worth reading nonetheless.

It's a shame your listening to the rob grant version of backwards, since that misses off the entire final section which includes gunmen of the apocalypse and skims straight over things to get to the ending, not to mention missing an entire very dodgy chapter with cat earlier on, then again as I said the unabridged audio versions of both books I know are available from the rnib.