Breakfast in the Ruins

It's Halloween season again at Breakfast in the Ruins, and we're kicking things off with a journey into the darker, more monstrous corners of Robert E. Howard's imagination!

This time, I'm joined by author and friend of the show Andy Darby to discuss Howard's gloriously gruesome sword and sorcery tale The Valley of the Worm, along with another of his rip-roaring adventures, The Gods of Bal-Sagoth.

Expect prehistoric horrors, ancient evils, mighty-thewed warriors, a bit of literary archaeology and plenty of enthusiasm for the weird fiction of one of Weird Tales' most celebrated contributors.

We also chat about Andy's latest book, Sword Songs: An Anthology of Dark Fantasy – Volume 1, a collection of four bloody tales of dark fantasy, murderous gods, haunted places and grim destinies.

You can pick up a copy through AbeBooks UK or ThriftBooks.

So sharpen your blades, gird your loins and keep an eye out for anything enormous and wriggling in the undergrowth. Halloween has arrived at Derry and Toms!

It's our 150th episode, and we've now been at this for seven Earth years!

So how do we celebrate this milestone? By sitting on the sofa and gassing about one of our earliest reads, a book we read in the 1970s that turned out, on reflection, to be a massive gateway drug in terms of where our interests would head just a couple of years later.

We're looking at Enid Blyton's The Magic Faraway Tree... a tale of the Multiverse?

Jim Jupp drops by Derry & Toms to talk about his love of genre fiction, his path into making music as Belbury Poly, and the beginnings of Ghost Box Records, the label he founded with Julian House back in 2004. Books, electronic noises and the business of building strange worlds… all things that we love.

The occasion is the release of Sorcery, the ninth Belbury Poly album, out now on Belbury Music, streaming in all the usual places and available on Bandcamp. Drawing on Jim’s early eighties enthusiasms, it brings together electronic music and the science fiction and fantasy that occupied his younger self. It also sports a cover by Arik Roper, with Jim’s design tipping its hat to those old Mayflower Moorcock paperbacks.

And the opening track is called Dreamthief. We were hardly going to let that pass.

So join us for a chat about the things we read and watch, the sounds that stick with us, and how those enthusiasms can take on a life of their own.

John returns to Derry & Toms as, following a drunken afternoon in Rochdale, we decided to take a look at Thomas M Disch's The Prisoner, the first of three Ace tie-in novels commissioned in 1969. Disch was a New Worlds ace and a perfect fit for Patrick McGoohan’s world of surveillance, sinister bureaucracy, paranoia, slippery identities, and aggressive leisure.

So what happens when one of science fiction’s sharpest minds takes a holiday in television’s most oppressive seaside resort? Straighten your blazer, slap on your most unconvincing smile and join us to find out.

Be seeing you.

Miles beams back into Derry & Toms from the Casual Trek transporter room so we can talk about Mike and James Cawthorn's (under pseudonym Philip James) 1969 JINO* tale, The Distant Suns.

First serialised in The Illustrated Weekly of India in 1969 and later published by Unicorn SF and NEL in the 70s, it's a rollicking space adventure tale, so, obviously, we talk about The Black Hole, Psycho, the villainous filmic appearances of sub-par The Master actor Anthony Ainley, the perils of The Warp, if Udo Kier had starred in Possession, and more.

Interesting factoid... according to John Davey's excellent Moorcography.org , the first US edition was in 2010 and states that it is 'an Eternal Champion Novel.'

We're not convinced by that, but eh... whatever sells it, I suppose. I didn't get round to checking later publications in collections, for example, the Millennium Sailing To Utopia omnibus (which was also badged as an Eternal Champion volume, to be fair) in 1993. Did Mike change anything to make that more explicit, I wonder? I don't think he did, but I could be wrong.

Answers on a postcard.

You can find more Miles on the Casual Trek Podcast.

The David Britton 1979 interview of James Cawthorn is here, and you can grab James Cawthorn: The Man And His Art and Stormbringer Sessions: Sketches For A Graphic Novel from John Davey’s Jayde Design. We really should do a full episode on these at some point in the future.

 

*Jerry In Name Only