Editing Red Dwarf (section)

==A Bleak, Hostile Universe==
Stranded 3 million years in the depths of space, it is made clear from the start that Lister's mission of rediscovering the fate of humanity is probably hopeless. The series creators even pitched it to the BBC by claiming that they wouldn't be featuring any (expensive) aliens, unlike [[Star Trek]] or [[Doctor Who]]. This lasted for... maybe a season or two before they realized that "stock British sitcom of some assholes being assholes to each other, but in space" could only go so far, and they decided they needed to start bringing in some proper sciencey weirdness to play their oddball heroes off of. So, they decided to break the spirit of their promise whilst keeping to the letter of it.

During the 3 million years that Red Dwarf was careening wildly into the depths of space, humanity advanced to incredible measures in technology. Artificial intelligence, cybernetics, genetics, time travel, faster-than-light travel, psionics, dimension travel, and other impossible technologies were all born during that time period... and promptly left scattered around the universe like a garbage heap full of landmines. Which, depending on how you look at it, is a nice meta-reflection of British pessimism about space travel and their own space program's history of ineptitude (in the time span in which America sent several manned ships to the moon and back, Britain sent a glorified remote-control car to Mars... and crashed it). Lister and his buddies constantly stumble across these remnants of humanity's achievements, and it usually goes terribly wrong for them.

It also means that the universe isn't entirely uninhabited. But there's no alien civilizations. Instead, the nascent spacefaring races, little more than glorified techno-barbarian tribes on the galactic scale, are humanity's long-abandoned, half-mad bastard children; Mechanoids, Synths, and GELFs.

Mechanoids are the Red Dwarf version of [[robot]]s - specifically, [[android]]s. Distant descendants of the Skutters, they're humanoid machines created to serve humanity, and then left to fend for themselves when humanity up and vanished. Since crewmember Kryten is a Mechanoid, they rarely show up.

Synths (short for "Synthetics"), on the other hand, ''do'' show up a fair amount... much to everyone's regret. Synths were combat mechanoids humanity created for a war that ultimately never happened; when they tried to scrap their creations, the Synths fought back and managed to flee into the depths of space, from which they have brooded with seething hatred for their creators ever since.

GELFs (Genetically Engineered Life Forms) are any of a myriad of weird alien-like bio-engineered or mutated creatures that humanity produced. The primary ones to show up of relevance are the Kinatawowi, a savage, tribal, [[Sasquatch]]-like race of hairy humanoid things who seem to exist mostly to be a parody of Wookies.