Co-creator Rob Grant had been working on the idea before his death

Rob Grant had been planning an animated Red Dwarf series at the time of his death in February.

His collaborator Andrew Marshall revealed they had been working on 15-minute episodes following the  further exploits of Rimmer, Lister, Cat and Krypton.

He told the Radio Times they put the plans on hold to write the spin-off novel Red Dwarf: Titan – which will be published on July 15 – but that took longer than expected.

Marshall explained: "We did start work with some great animators in Wales to try and begin work on an animated version.

‘We put this aside briefly because we were going to write the book, and we thought the book would take about six months, and in fact the book took about two years to write, because it was so immensely fiddly, fitting it into the canon, and so forth, and so that was all put aside unfortunately.

‘That would have been quite interesting - we were planning to do 15-minute animated Red Dwarf episodes, but I'm afraid that got postponed, and that was probably one of the things we would have gone back to.’

Asked if the project could be revived after Grant's sudden death at the age of 70, Marshall said: ‘Perhaps [they] could. I don't know. Who knows what the future will hold.’ 

Grant created Red Dwarf with Rob Naylor, which was picked up for broadcast in 1988. 

Grant left in 1995, and  they initially continued to share the rights under their company, Grant Naylor Productions,with Naylor witting the TV shows, including the 2009 revival by the Dave channel.

However in 2020 the creators were involved a High Court dispute ver  the intellectual property rights which took three years to resolve. The agreement permitted them to develop Red Dwarf separately and work with the cast on different ventures.

Red Dwarf was previously animated in a series of ‘mobisodes’ for mobile phones in 2007, which is where the top image comes from:

The new novel Titan is set before the accident that left Lister Stranded 3million years into the future as probably the only human left alive. 

The prequel is the first time Marshall has written for Red Dwarf, having previously worked with Grant on  the Radio 4 series The Quanderhorn Xperimentations and The Nether Regions.

• Red Dwarf: Titan is available from Amazon priced £20.55 in hardback – or from uk.bookshop.org, below, which supports independent bookstores.  

Published: 3 Jun 2026