The Prisoner - Part One

We're back with MM with guest co-host Simon Perrins, joining us again as we embark on the first of two episodes exploring Michael Moorcock's The Sleeping Sorceress, later retitled The Vanishing Tower. First up - The Torment of the Last Lord, which finds Elric and Moonglum pursuing dastardly sorcerer Theleb K'Aarna and encountering the mysterious Myshella, Empress of the Dawn. Along the way, we rummage through the novel's tangled publishing history, admire some fabulous cover art, rank the companions and ponder the usual Moorcockian business of fate, sorcery and flesh nooses. Simon is one of the minds behind the splendid Can I Pod With Madness, a podcast devoted to vintage issues of rock and metal mag Kerrang! (amongst other things). Get it in yer lugs!

Phil, Miles, and Graham (by late Marconi T1154 Transmission) join me in Derry & Toms for an uncomfortable encounter with Guy N. Smith’s Bamboo Guerillas, a book whose notoriety among paperback collectors we've been egging each other on to explore for a few years. Commissioned to push wartime sex and violence to extremes, it leaves us wondering what all that unpleasantness actually achieved, and what its existence tells us about the market that produced it. Along the way, we get into Tenko, Darkie’s Mob, and the brilliantly cynical jungle war films Too Late the Hero (featuring our old friend Percy Herbert) and The Long and the Short and the Tall (featuring no Percy Herbert at all... sad face emoji). Content warning for discussions around sexual violence and torture, of which there is a lot in this book. Also boners. So many boners. I mention Jeff Popple's excellent blog post about sleazy pulp war novels and Horwitz Press (which I repeatedly referred to as Horowtiz Press). You can read that here.

  Graham and Phil are back as we round off this year’s Halloween run with Breeding Ground, Shaun Hutson’s sequel to Slugs. Having apparently learnt nothing from our previous encounter, we’re heading into London’s sewers for another helping of slimy, metal-infused, mucusy death. Can a second dose deliver the same revolting pleasures? Join us as we get stuck into Hutson’s particular brand of paperback nastiness and consider the wisdom of returning to a book series (soon to be three) whose principal attraction is people being eaten by things you normally find under a plant pot. Pull on your wellies. Wash your salad leaves thoroughly. Bring salt.

Our Halloween run continues as our mate Gemma joins us to revisit her horrifying history with the Point Horror series, courtesy of Caroline B. Cooney’s Freeze Tag. We’re heading back to a world of ominous paperback covers, American teenage envy and playground games with potentially fatal consequences. Along the way, we discuss childhood cruelty, teenage obsession, sympathy for the outsider, questionable behaviour from the beautiful people, and the discovery that supernatural powers are unlikely to improve your love life. Because no excursion into adolescent horror would be complete without adolescent drinking choices, our accompanying ghoulish booze pays tribute to the crap we drank as teenagers. Come for the paperback nostalgia. Stay for the poor decisions.

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

Mateo Latosa returns to Derry & Toms to follow up on our episode on The Powysverse of Space 1999 by digging into one of the original 1970s novelisations, The Space Guardians by prolific British SF author (and early New Worlds contributor) Brian Ball. We take a look at the episodes it adapted, and the work Mateo and his colleagues undertook alongside Brian to revise it and bring it into line with their rationalised Space 1999 continuity. Existential horror! Moral conundrums!! Alan's hairy chest!!! LOVEJOY!!!! If you fancy testing your wrist power, you can still grab a copy of the Space 1999 Year One omnibus here.