Everybody's Dead, Dave Trivia Quiz

'Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers' is set in a future where humankind have colonised space, as the Earth is too crowded and dirty, and is eventually turned into a giant dumping ground. Dave Lister had gone on a pub crawl in London to celebrate his 25th birthday, themed around the 'Monopoly' board. At some point, he had travelled to Saturn after seeing an advert in a taxi for Virgin's new batch of light zippers, which also mentioned businesses moving to Saturn and Saturn only being two hours away. When he regained consciousness, he found himself on Mimas, one of Saturn's moons.

Lister has been spending six months trying to get off Mimas by stealing a hopper and working as a taxi driver. Unfortunately, life on Mimas is so depressing that Lister repeatedly spends all his wages on alcohol, and is forced to sleep in a locker as he has nowhere to live. One of his fares is a man visiting an android brothel; the man is wearing a fake moustache and claims to be an officer called Christopher Todhunter, but his real name is Arnold Rimmer. Lister later picks him up and blackmails him into paying a tip.

At the beginning of the book, we meet Frank Saunders, an engineer on the mining ship Red Dwarf, who has been brought back as a hologram. Everyone on board the ship has their personalities stored on disc, and all holograms must have an H on their head to show that they are not living people. A device known as a light bee, which receives data from the Hologram Simulation Suite, projects a hologramatic version of the person. The ship can only afford to have one hologram at a time because of the amount of energy they need.

George McIntyre is a flight coordinator who gets into trouble with the Ganymede Mafia after running up astronomical gambling debts playing Toot, a game involving Venusian fighting snails. Some thugs from the mafia meet him in a hotel and cut his nose off as a warning, and McIntyre kills himself before the mafia can get him. Because he outranks Saunders, he is brought back as a hologram and Saunders, much to his relief, is turned off and effectively dies for a second time.

After meeting Rimmer, Lister decides to join the Space Corps with the aim of returning to Earth and goes for an interview. Caldicott, a recruiter for the Jupiter Mining Corporation, is dismayed at both Lister's scruffy appearance and his lack of qualifications, and warns him that the only job he is qualified for is Third Technician, a job which involves checking chicken soup vending machines and other menial tasks. Two women from the Shore Patrol are sent to Mimas Central Shuttle Station to pick Lister up, as he gives the locker as his address.

On the shuttle to Red Dwarf, Lister meets Olaf Petersen, a Danish alcoholic who later becomes Lister's drinking buddy. Petersen explains that Red Dwarf is due to go to Triton to collect ore, which it will then transport to Earth. On board the ship, Lister meets Holly, the ship's computer, who impresses Lister with his ability to answer any question. Rogerson, a member of the induction staff, introduces Lister to his new shift leader and bunkmate: Arnold Rimmer, the man he took to the brothel.

Lister has been on Red Dwarf for five months and spends his spare time drinking in the ship's bar, the Copacabana Hawaiian Cocktail Bar, with Petersen and two other technicians, Chen and Selby. While queueing at the bar, Lister notices a woman with a beautiful smile and falls in love with her at first sight, especially when she makes a joke about learning Japanese ('Pretentious? Watashi?') Lister keeps going up to the bar and she eventually introduces herself as Kristine Kochanski, a Third Console Officer. She asks him out, and what later becomes a lifelong obsession begins.

Lister spends his nights with Kochanski watching 'It's a Wonderful Life', their favourite film, but the relationship only lasts a month when Kochanski goes back to her ex, a Navigation Officer, after he dumps his girlfriend. Lister realises that he was a rebound boyfriend and gets depressed. To make matters worse, he can't even go drinking with Petersen anymore, as Petersen quits drinking after Red Dwarf stops on Miranda, a dry moon, and he discovers he likes being sober. Rimmer does not want to go drinking with Lister, as his social life involves spending time in a stasis booth to slow his ageing down.

Lister and Rimmer are on shift when Petrovitch, a First Technician and leader of A Shift, informs them that the ship's captain wants to see Lister. Rimmer dislikes Petrovitch intensely as Petrovitch is actually successful, having passed the Astronavigation exam that Rimmer has failed repeatedly. He is pleased to see Lister in trouble, but it is short-lived; Petrovitch asks him why he isn't at his Astronavigation exam. Rimmer assumes the exam date is wrong, but Petrovitch tells him that his bunkmate Hollerbach is taking it, and Rimmer checks his timetable and realises, to his horror, that he accidentally put September in twice and has got the date wrong.

Rimmer is obsessed with becoming an officer and gaining his parents' respect. However, he has a bad habit of spending far more time on drawing elaborate revision tables than actually revising, and in one exam, he wrote 'I am a fish' multiple times. On this occasion, he decides to cheat and write the answers on his body. One of the answers does come up on the exam, but when Rimmer looks at his arm - where he wrote the answer - the ink has dissolved into a black mess, due to Rimmer's incessant sweating. Rimmer leaves a handprint on the exam paper, stands up and faints, and is taken to the medical bay.

Meanwhile, the captain is angry with Lister because he has brought Frankenstein, a pregnant black cat he bought on Miranda, on board and sent a photo of him with the cat to the ship's photo lab to be developed. Lister deliberately brought the cat on board, after reading the regulations and discovering that breaking quarantine is an offence punishable by being placed in a stasis booth for three years. After incriminating himself, he puts Frankenstein in the ventilation system, knowing she will be safe there and have access to food supplies. The captain gives him an ultimatum: he must hand Frankenstein over, or be put into stasis for the rest of the mining jag. Lister chooses stasis and an incredulous Petrovitch accompanies him to the booths. This later saves Lister's life.

After Rimmer wakes up in the sick bay, he is discharged and told to take 24 hours' sick leave. Elsewhere in the ship, a disaster begins to unfold. A red warning light fails to go on in the Drive Room. A navigation officer sees red lights on his computer screen, but assumes they were the result of him spilling his coffee. The cadmium II coolant system stops functioning and goes into critical mass, releasing the power of a neutron bomb; while the ship is not damaged, the crew are killed within seconds and reduced to piles of dust. Holly seals off the cargo decks.

Rimmer is on his way to the stasis booths and almost survives the disaster, but instead decides to comb his hair, and then throw a paper towel into a waste paper basket, as he is superstitious and thinks that if he hits the target, he will pass his exam. He is just about to enter a stasis booth when a nuclear wind rushing down the corridor kills him, and the last thing he thinks about is gazpacho soup.

Lister, being in stasis and therefore temporarily not existing when the disaster happens, is the only crew member to survive. When he comes out of stasis, Holly has to break the news to him: everyone on the ship is dead, and he has been in stasis for three million years, as Holly had to wait for the radiation levels to die down. Lister is so overwhelmed by the news that he spends several days drinking heavily. When he wakes up, he finds out that Rimmer has been brought back as a hologram. Lister is not happy and asks Holly why he didn't bring Petersen or Kochanski back, but Holly argues that Petersen was hardly rational and wouldn't have kept Lister sane, and Kochanski dumped him.

Holly informs Lister and Rimmer that he has discovered another lifeform on board, in the cargo decks, but that it isn't human. Lister and Rimmer take the lift down to the cargo decks and discover firstly that whole floor loads of supplies are missing, and secondly, someone has built a city full of igloo-like buildings. While they investigate the city, Lister is attacked by a humanoid in a pink suit, who apologises for mistaking him for food. The humanoid has some feline features, like fangs and a slightly flatter face, and as he has no name, they call him the Cat.

Frankenstein had given birth to her kittens and the kittens had mated with each other, producing multiple litters; as more and more cats mated with each other and were born, they began to slowly evolve, walking upright and growing fingers. When they had run out of supplies, they started dying out, but the survivors found a supply of tins and lived off tinned food. The cats also discovered religion and had a religious war over whether their creator god was called Clister or Cloister, and after a truce was called, most of them flew away on shuttles to find the mystical planet of Bearth, leaving behind the sick, disabled, old and dying. The remaining cats died off and the last two gave birth to the humanoid Lister and Rimmer meet.

The Nova 5 is an American spaceship that has been commissioned by Coca-Cola to create a giant 'Coke Adds Life' slogan in space, made from stars. The crew have been searching for a blue supergiant, which they have to push into supernova by firing a missile at it; a whole constellation of stars have to simultaneously go into supernova in order to spell the message, which will be visible for five weeks. Unfortunately, Kryten causes the ship to crash when he cleans the computer and the flight console with soap and water, causing them to malfunction. Several crew members in stasis are jettisoned into space, and only three survivors are left.

Red Dwarf receives a distress call from Kryten. He gives details of the crew, who are all women, and Rimmer, Lister and the Cat are all excited at meeting potential mates. However, what Kryten has neglected to inform them is that the women have been dead for three million years and are nothing but skeletons, and the Red Dwarf crew get a shock when they enter the ship. Rimmer forces Kryten to accept that the crew are dead and the mechanoid shuts himself down, having been programmed to serve them. The crew take him on board Red Dwarf, along with the wrecked Nova 5, and Lister fixes him.

Rimmer has been looking for a companion and tries to bring back the crew of the Nova 5 as holograms, but their personality discs have all been damaged in the crash; although he finds one survivor in a stasis booth, the crew member's legs have been forced through the glass and have rotted away. When Rimmer opens the door, the man dies of shock. Rimmer copies his personality disc and puts the copy in the Nova 5 hologram simulation suite, creating a copy of himself.

The two Rimmers share a room and oversee the repair of the Nova 5, but they work the skutters - claw-headed work droids - so hard that several of them are worn out and explode, and they cause the Nova 5 to be split in half by giving the skutters conflicting orders. They also force each other to exercise relentlessly and barely sleep. Lister, Kryten and the Cat come back from a mining expedition and hear the two Rimmers arguing, and the copy insults the original by calling him 'Mr Gazpacho', an insult the first one takes very badly. The original apologises for arguing with the copy, who mocks him and says that Lister has changed him.

Lister announces that the Nova 5 can only sustain one hologram and one of the Rimmers will have to be switched off. The original assumes it will be him, gets drunk and when Lister asks him why he has a fixation on gazpacho soup, he tells Lister about how he embarrassed himself at a meal at the captain's table by asking his gazpacho soup to be warmed up, not realising it was meant to be served cold. Lister then reveals he erased the copy, but didn't tell Rimmer because he wanted to know the gazpacho soup story.

Red Dwarf returns to Earth after fixing the Nova 5 and the crew become rich and famous, but Lister tires of celebrity, changes his name to George Bailey and moves to Bedford Falls, where he lives with a descendent of Kristine Kochanski and has twin sons, Jim and Bexley. The town is almost an exact copy of the town from 'It's a Wonderful Life' and it is always Christmas Eve. Lister makes enough to live on and owns a kebab shop. He is disturbed by a rash on his arms, which refuses to go away and spells 'U = BTL' on one arm and 'DYING' on the other.

Lister goes to France, where Rimmer - now one of the world's richest men - lives with his temperamental wife, and reveals to Rimmer that they're in 'Better than Life' and that everything they see is an illusion. 'U = BTL' means 'you are in "Better than Life"'. Rimmer is sceptical at first, but agrees to go to Denmark with Lister to find the Cat. The Cat lives in a castle surrounded by a moat of milk, waited on by giant scantily-clad Valkyries and hunting dogs for fun. Kryten arrives and explains what happened: the four of them are playing 'Better than Life'.

'Better than Life' is a banned addictive game and works by giving people their deepest fantasies. It consists of a headband with needles that plug into the brain, and removing them will kill the player; the player can only quit if they want to leave the game, but nobody ever does. While the crew are celebrating fixing the Nova 5, the Cat finds a load of headsets stashed in Petrovitch's locker - Petrovitch having been smuggling them to rich customers - and enters the game. Lister goes in after him, as does Rimmer. Kryten does his best to keep Lister and the Cat fed and nurtured, but the game is slowly killing them and Holly has to talk him into lasering messages onto their arms to get them out. He finally enters the game himself, as mechanoids have no desires. Lister prepares to leave Bedford Falls, but decides to stay for one more Christmas Eve.

In the sequel, 'Better than Life', it is revealed that the crew are still in the game, including Kryten. However, Rimmer's messed-up psyche ruins not only his fantasy, but the crew's fantasies as well: he loses his wife, business and money, has his body repossessed and is forced into the body of a prostitute by a pair of criminals; he drives a juggernaut into Bedford Falls, destroying several houses and causing Kochanski to leave Lister; the Cat's slaves go on strike and his castle is destroyed by a volcano; and Kryten's mop breaks. Lister finds himself on Red Dwarf, but realises he is still in the game when everything is too perfect, and the crew finally escape, with Lister and the Cat being severely emaciated and needing months to recover.