Canadian science fiction author Robert J. Sawyer has written over 20 books, including the 1999 novel Flashforward, which was adapted into the ABC series FlashForward. The show ended in 2010, but more Sawyer adaptations are in the works, and the author himself has been tapped to write the screenplay for a feature film version of his 2012 novel Triggers, a near-future conspiracy thriller.

“I’m a member of the Writers Guild of America and the Writers Guild of Canada,” says Sawyer in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “I’ve been doing scriptwriting professionally for 20 years, and those credentials were sufficient to convince them that I had the chops to handle this.”

The project is still in its early stages, but impatient Sawyer fans can tide themselves over with his latest novel, Red Planet Blues, a noir detective story that continues the grand science fiction tradition of imagining adventures on Mars.

“You can’t be a 21st-century science fiction writer writing about Mars,” says Sawyer, “without doing tips of the hat to Edgar Rice Burroughs, to Ray Bradbury, to H.G. Wells, to the guys who first put it in the public imagination that Mars was an exciting place.”

Listen to our complete interview with Robert J. Sawyer in Episode 82 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above), in which he discusses the role of scientists on TV, describes how to combine science fiction and detective fiction, and reveals what it’s like to appear on Naked News. Then stick around after the interview as guest geek Matt London, creator of the web series Space Pirates in Space, joins hosts John Joseph Adams and David Barr Kirtley to discuss the recent controversy over Games Workshop trademarking the term “space marines.”

Robert J. Sawyer on setting a detective story on Mars:

“The single best thing about Mars is the reduced gravity. It’s 38 percent of Earth’s gravity — about one third. Almost never have you seen that portrayed in film or television. Mars is just portrayed as a place that’s got reddish sand but is otherwise pretty much identical to the Mojave Desert, and that’s not the case. It’s fundamentally very different. How that impacts it being a noir detective story, where your characters rough people up, and there’s some fisticuffs, and there’s some face-to-face, personal combat, is you get very, very wild and exciting fight scenes. I like to think that I went to town in writing them in this novel, taking full advantage of the fact that you can really pick somebody up and throw them across the room.”

Robert J. Sawyer on the role of scientists on prime time TV:

“The only shows that Americans watch in big numbers are shows about lawyers, doctors, or cops … People don’t tune in to watch scientists unless they are forensic scientists. Dexter is a scientist, but he’s a forensic scientist, which is close enough to being either a cop or a doctor or a lawyer to be palatable … I wish it wasn’t so. I wish that as more than comedic figures people would rally around the interesting lives of scientists in television drama. But it’s been a very, very hard sell to the public to make that happen.”

David Barr Kirtley on Games Workshop and their fans:

“I think for a lot of science fiction writers like me, who aren’t so much into the tabletop gaming, this lawsuit just comes out of nowhere. You’re like, ‘What the hell? Why would you sue someone over the term space marines?’ But what I’ve read online is a lot of tabletop gamers are saying, ‘Oh yeah, this is just par for the course from Games Workshop. They do this kind of thing all the time.’ One guy talked about how he had a fan club called The Warhammer Veterans Club, or something like that, and they got a cease and desist letter saying they had to stop using the word ‘warhammer’ in the name of their game club … People would even put up things online saying ‘This rule is a little confusing. Let me explain to you how it works,’ and those get pulled down.”

David Barr Kirtley on the folly of the space marines trademark:

“I can’t even tell you how many people I’ve seen saying, ‘I’m boycotting Games Workshop. I’m never buying anything of theirs ever again after this.’ And then even is it good from a purely selfish commercial standpoint to prevent other people from using the term ‘space marine’ in the title of a product? I don’t even see that as an upside for them. Is Hogarth’s Spots the Space Marine hurting Games Workshop’s bottom line? It’s totally preposterous. If anything, someone might read that book and develop a fondness for the idea of space marines, and then come across Games Workshop’s products and say, ‘Oh, I like space marines. Let me give this a try.’ It just seems like a lose, lose, lose, lose for them from every possible angle.”