Ty Franck and Daniel Abraham write the popular Expanse series of space adventure novels under the pen name James S. A. Corey. Franck originally dreamed up the setting as part of a failed videogame project, and later adapted it for use in a pen and paper role-playing game. Abraham was one of his players, as was superstar author George R. R. Martin. Franck went on to work for several years as Martin’s personal assistant, helping him manage his finances. People often assume that Martin had a major influence on Franck’s work, but in fact Franck never even tried to emulate Martin’s writing method, which involves a great deal of improvisation, false starts, and rewrites.

“I could not do that. I have to know where I’m going. I have to know what the next chapters are about,” Franck says in Episode 113 of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. “We just have very different brains for doing this work.”

Franck and Abraham recently released the fourth book in their Expanse series, Cibola Burn, which involves several factions fighting to control a deadly alien planet rich in natural resources. The series is also being adapted for television by Syfy, with Iron Man scribes Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby attached to the project. And while Martin played a limited role in shaping Franck as a writer, his advice was critical when it came to publishing contracts and film deals.

“The ways in which George was a really great mentor was on the business side,” says Franck. “He has enormous stores of experience on that stuff, so on that side he really was a good mentor.”

Listen to our complete interview with Franck in Episode 113 of Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy (above). Then stick around after the interview as guest geeks John Joseph Adams, Doug Cohen, and Theresa DeLucci join host David Barr Kirtley to review Season 4 of Game of Thrones and discuss the prospect of the show spoiling future books in the series.

Ty Franck on book titles:

“Daniel says our titles are designed to let our readers know that we’re pretentious, and there is an element of that in there. They’re all sort of mythological ideas that loosely tie in to what we’re doing. So with the first one, waking up the great monster that’s been sleeping, is Leviathan Wakes. For the second one, Caliban is the half-human, half-monster that lives on the same island as Prospero in The Tempest who resists being controlled, who Prospero attempts to control, and Caliban fights back against being controlled by the wizard. In Hebrew mythology, Abaddon is the angel who guards the gates to hell. And the Cibola is one of the cities of gold, the great treasure that you are willing to commit murder to find that doesn’t actually exist. … The tentative title for [the next book] is Nemesis Games. … [Our publisher] really likes ‘a mythological thing has or does something.’ … Nemesis is a Greek mythological character, so they should like that.”

Ty Franck on alien worlds:

“The thing that always drove both of us crazy is you get to the alien world and you catch an alien disease, like the Martians catching our diseases in The War of the Worlds. And of course H.G. Wells had a much more limited understanding than we do today, but even the idea that aliens would have DNA is totally unfounded. I mean, yeah, our version of life stumbled across RNA and DNA as a way to create stable replicators, but those are by no means the only possible version of that. … A scientist recently did an experiment where instead of potassium you can use—I believe it was cyanide as the basis for some of the protein building blocks. So you could have a lifeform where one of its primary building blocks is a deadly poison to us. And that should go the other way too. The things that are essential proteins to our biology could easily be deadly poisons to another biosphere, so you have things like the stinging insects that land on you, sting you, drink your blood, and then fall over dead.”

Game of Thrones Season 4 Panel

Doug Cohen on avoiding spoilers:

“Starting next year, when there’s a new episode each week, I’m not going to watch the episode. I’ll wait until the episode is over, at which point I’ll ask on my Facebook account, ‘Hey guys. Can I watch this episode?’ At which point people will tell me yea or nay. If it’s safe, great, I’m all in. If not, then I’m out, and then we start taking some precautions going forward for however many years necessary to avoid spoilers. … The first thing I’m going to do is Sunday night until Monday night, that’s social media blackout time, because that’s when people are going to be tweeting, Facebooking, linking about Game of Thrones more than any other time. … The second I can’t follow the show anymore, that means I immediately stop following Game of Thrones on Facebook and Twitter. You just pull back, you hold the line, and it’s just basically those ten weeks each season. My radar will have to be up every time I’m online, every time I’m at a convention. And thankfully my friends all know how fanatical I am about not getting spoiled about Game of Thrones.”

Theresa DeLucci on handsome men:

“As a heteronormative female, I feel like they keep killing off all the really hot men. Every year the cast of hot men on the show gets smaller and smaller. It started with Khal Drogo, and then Robb. I liked the original Daario. He was fine. He looked appropriately smug and douchey enough, like how I pictured him in the book. He didn’t need the blue beard and all that. The guy they have now just looks like—I see guys who look like that in Bushwick all the time. That is not Daario. That is just some lame, generic hipster knight. He looks like he comes from Westeros. He doesn’t look like a Second Son. He doesn’t have any swagger, he doesn’t have the costume right, so Oberyn was it for me. Unless they cast Viggo Mortensen as Damphair or something, there is nothing left for me. I was so sad to see Oberyn go, because he was absolutely perfect. I watched the season premiere at the Barclay Center—4,000 seats—to watch the premiere early on a big screen for a charity event. When Pedro Pascal came on screen, you just heard 2,500 women gasp all at the same time, because he was just so perfect, and just knowing what was going to happen to him, man, that made Season 4 really hard.”