Wired.com presents The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy.

And here are your hosts.

John Joseph Adams and David Barr-Kirtley.

Hi, this is Dave, and this is John and welcome to episode 82 of Geek's Guide to the

Galaxy. Our guest today is Canadian science fiction author Robert J Sawyer. His recent books include Rollback, Triggers, and the

W-W trilogy about the internet becoming self-aware. His most recent book, Red Planet Blues,

is a futuristic noir detective story set on Mars.

Then stick around after the interview as guest geek Matt London joins us to talk about

Games Workshop trademarking the term Space Marines.

All right, so let's get to our interview.

All right, so we're here with Robert J. Sawyer.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

I'm delighted to be here.

Okay, so first of all, your new novel, Red Point of Blues, started life as a

Novella called identity theft. So just how did that story first come about?

Yeah, very interesting. The meta story is that Amazon.com was kicking the crap out of book clubs in general. It used to be, it was only through book clubs, you know, mail-order book clubs that people in rural areas could get a decent selection and so the

science fiction book club was always a reprint publisher. When Amazon started

really eating into their business, they got the brainstorm that they would try some

original only available through the

science fiction book club publications. They commissioned the great Mike Resnick to edit an

original anthology for them called Down These Dark Spaceways,

...