Breakfast in the Ruins

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...

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...

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 pla...

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 choi...

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...

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 fict...

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...

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...

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...

When I’m exposed to a new game like EVERDOOM, whose author, Tremor Pings, states that it is written by Moorcock Fans for Moorcock Fans... then I have to investigate further, because we're always in pursuit of that core question... what makes a game Moorcockian, and it turns out that Tremor has a great angle on it.

And a great game, to boot.

Check out the Gamefound page for EVERDOOM and find Tremor's other games on his itch.io page.

Allister is back in Derry & Toms to take a look at some Lovecraft. My choice, The Silver Key, and his... The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. The latter appears in Michael Moorcock and James Cawthorn's Fantasy: The 100 Best Books, and may be the fifth on that hefty list that we've managed to cover in the past 143 episodes of Breakfast in the Ruins.

We might have to pick up the pace.

Allister's latest release as The Gateless Gate is the album Once Beautiful. Grab it now.

Phil is back in Derry & Toms, and we're looking at another IP Spin-off. On this occasion, though, the Moorcock content is significant. Critical, in fact!

We're talking about Kami Garcia's The X-Files Origins: Agent of Chaos.

But why is Moorcock so integral to an X-Files prequel novel about 17-year-old Fox Mulder and his small gang of crime-busting friends?

LISTEN TO FIND OUT.

We also touch on David Barnett's Scratch Moss, the wonders of Oranjeboom and more.

In June 2026 we hosted a couple of Moorcock-flavoured RPG days a fortnight apart here in Bradford. For more on how that came about, see part one.

A lot of our fellow rollers made a weekend of it and stuck around on the Sunday mornings, allowing, for the first time, a more community-based podcast experience. So join me and Phil at The Ginger Goose as we tackle a lazily assembled quiz, trapped mugs, breakfast stout and a couple of balmy, hungover Sunday mornings with the help of the Last Rollers standing...

After thinking about it for six years, we finally did it. We hosted a couple of days of Moorcock-flavoured gaming here in the heart of Bradford.

And it is done.

Stick a fork in it.

But Phil and I had lots of thoughts about it that we wanted to record and share. Thoughts that would have been locked in a vault, probably, had this all gone down like a shit balloon... Fortunately, though, it went down a treat!

So, join us as we mull it all over and talk about RPGs...

Miles is back for Part Two of The Ice Schooner, in which we find that our hero Konrad Arflane is still a dick, and we beat around several bushes, including the novelisation of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Richard Widmark and flamethrowers, and comparative experiences of angiograms…

JOIN US!!!!

(and listen to the Casual Trek Podcast)

It's Threads Day!

So what better excuse to have Dr Malcom Craig back in Derry & Toms to talk about NUCLEAR WAR, and particularly General Sir John Hackett’s The Third World War: August 1985 (1978) and its sequel The Third World War: The Untold Story (1982).

As we're both gamers, and Malcolm has an academic interest in it too, we also get into it with GDW's Twilight 2000 RPG, arguably the ultimate expression of the speculative World War Three RPG genre. A game that transformed our Cold War fears into the participatory storytelling of the RPG format, and allowed pl...

SYNCHRONIUS NEWS!

We're less than four weeks out from our first Moorcockian gaming weekend, Rolling in the Ruins 2026, and suddenly Elric RPGs are like buses!

What great fortune then, that I had this RPG-related chat lined up with Marcus Bone, the guy behind https://stormbringerrpg.com/ and many other things, like:

https://www.darkconspiracytherpg.com/

https://demonground.org/archives/299-2/

and

https://unboundbook.org/

So much to talk about. Join us!

Dave returns to Derry & Toms to conclude our coverage of the 1973 Karl Edward Wagner anthology Death Angel's Shadow, featuring his anti-hero Kane.

Some great stuff in here, but some rough stuff too, with references to sexual assault, so please beware that we will discuss it in both the original context, as we see it, and that of a modern reader.

Two stories round out our journey with this Kane book, Cold Light and Mirage.

Check out Dave's latest trip with SÖNUS, the single Sisyphus Stomp - the video is on YouTube - a...

In a blasphemous conjunction of the spheres, this year is the 60th anniversary of the publication of the novella Behold the Man in New Worlds issue 166 - and a few weeks ago patron Nick Hopkinson sent me the link to an article by Professor Rowland Wymer in Vol 52 no 2 of the Interdisciplinary Critical Journal Mosaic from June 2019, titled The Imitation of Christ: Michael Moorcock's Behold the Man. The conjunction was completed when the Professor agreed to hop in to Derry & Toms to talk about his article, his journey into SF and how he came to teach it, living and...

Jason Atomic drops by Derry & Toms to talk about his journey from finding Moorcock and metal to creating Satanic Mojo comix, founding the Satanic Flea Market, becoming an avid book collector and illustrating the Alex Sanders Lectures, a brand new reprint of one of the first correspondent courses in witchcraft by the "King of Witches" with a commentary by Maxine Sanders.

Head to Aeon Books to pre-order Occult Pop (get 20% off with the code POP20), and you can pick up back issues of Satanic Mojo here.

Allister Thompson returns to Derry & Toms to talk about his new novel, Birch and Jay: The Knowledge Seekers Part One.

In a typically roving conversation, we get into his influences and intentions in writing about a climate apocalypse and aftermath, as well as other stuff, like bad War of the Worlds adaptations (again).

This episode plays out with Why Did We Do It (The Last Ones) from Allister's tie-in EP and you can grab that along with his entire discography from Bandcamp.

Robert is back in D&Ts to pick up the trail of Oswald Bastable as he navigates the strange world of an alternative 1970s full of airships, anarchists and a nasty little fucker called Regan. We also navigate Mike's occasionally annoying propensity for retrospectively sticking a Von Bek in EVERYTHING.

Get the Colossive Press Croydon Spaceport Fun Pack HERE and check out the details of our Rolling in the Ruins Moorcockian RPG two-dayer in Bradford in June.

JOIN US!!!

Don returns to Derry & Toms to update us on his journey adapting The Dancers at the End of Time stories into a sprawling four-album suite and to talk about his epic musical memoir, One of the Spirits Burning (order from Stairway Press in the US and Jayde Design in the UK to get the limited edition CD included)

You can find the Spirits Burning back catalogue on vinyl and CD all over the place (it's a big back catalogue), and the DatEoT albums at these links:

An Alien Heat

The Hollow Lands

Malcom Craig drops by Derry & Toms to talk about his work in academia, roleplaying games, his authorship of the first ever academic article on Twilight 2000, the "macho men with Uzis" sub-genre of RPGs, the upcoming reboots of his Cold City and Hot War games, and panicking as children about how high priority your neighbourhood was in terms of Soviet megatonnage.

Mostly, though, we're talking about Malcom's reading recommendation - THE ROBOT BRAINS by incredibly prolific but largely unheralded British author Sydney J Bounds.

JOIN US!

Dave is back in Derry & Toms as we finally turn our attention to Karl Edward Wagner and his towering dark fantasy anti-hero... Kane!

We've been talking about doing some KEW for a while now, so what better time than a grim, miserable Yorkshire winter to tackle a chilly werewolf whodunnit. The story, Reflections for the Winter of My Soul, is the first of three in the collection Death Angel's Shadow, and we'll be back at some point in the future to look at the other two.

As KEW also wrote an Elric/Kane crossover story...

We're talking RPGs again, this time in the company of Tanya Floaker (Mum Chums, Lo! Thy Dread Empire, Solstice, Be Seeing You, a|state).

Along the way we'll get into Tanya's history with Moorcock and genre fiction, gaming in Thatcher's Scotland, first steps into game design and the pending launch of their new Kickstarter for The Thunder Perfect Mind, launching 1st February 2026. If you're interested in reading more, and even getting a hold of early drafts, check out Tanya's itch.io page.

We'll also look into what Tanya would do around the gamification of Michael...

Joe Banks braves the radioactive zone to join me on the Ferris Wheel and discuss the 1975 album by Michael Moorcock and The Deep Fix - The New Worlds Fair - the 50th anniversary edition of which is now available via thinklikeakey.com.

Joe's latest book - ROCK and ROLE: The Visionary Songs of Peter Hammill and Van der Graaf Generator - is available now, as is his prior book - Hawkwind: Days of the Underground: Radical Escapism in the Age of Paranoia.

Derek AKA Imrryr joins me in Derry and Toms as we take a look at the Elric tale, The Jade Man's Eyes. Initially published in 1973 in Flashing Swords 2 and as a standalone novella by Unicorn Press, this story would later be heavily revised and repackaged as part of the fix-up novel The Sailor on the Seas of Fate.

So plenty to look at, including unpronounceable names and this story's key place in Elric lore.

Check out Derek's music in their guise as Imrryr over on Ampwall and Bandcamp and pre-order their upcoming release Carver 4 Mission...

We're back... we've crawled out of the ruins of our Christmas and New Year bottles to witness the fantastic world of 1973 through the eyes of Oswald Bastable.

Robert MacMillan is my co-pilot for this journey as we have to look up what things are and marvel over Moorcock's invention of a genre that these days seems largely about gluing cogs to pith helmets, tea duels and "chap-hop".

OR IS IT?

I don't know tbh.

But Bastable's journey from dependable Man of Empire to temporal adventurer starts here.

JOIN US!<...

Another year, another Birthday Special... our sixth!

It's Mike's birthday... it's Phil's birthday... it's the podcast's official state birthday... so what better than a silly, hastily assembled drunken quiz?

No ? required... that was a rhe

A chance for Loz to close the gap on Phil's epic quiz streak as well as to introduce a wild card in the shape of a third contestant!

OK, fine. This wasn't the actual intent, but best laid plans and all that. Also, Simon Perrins drops in to elaborate on his frankly incontestable assertion regarding a...

Andy Darby joins me as we take D and Ts on the road to eons-old Mars to explore mysteries, machinations and mild disappointments.

Check out Andy’s substack to read The Crow Feeder and sign up to his website for updates and to receive a free e-copy of his latest novella.

Miles is back in Derry & Toms as we tackle another 60s Moorcock classic... The Ice Schooner. Lots to talk about here, and some pearls to clutch too, as we visit one of Mike's sweatiest rime-encrusted tales that, one way or another, remind us of our hometowns.

And we talk about Doctor Who and Star Trek a bit too.

Content warning: there is some discussion of SA that occurs in this book. 

JOIN US!

(and listen to the Casual Trek Podcast)

As voted for by our dear patrons, the subject for this year's Halloween Special is SLUGS!

Shaun Hutson's breakthrough best seller has been on the poll list for three or four years, but 2025 was its year. So, join Graham, Phil and me as we evaluate Shaun Hutson's entry into that classic and most pulpy of British horror traditions, the Killer Critter novel. Also, we mull over whether four clefts are just too many, and get disappointed by our initially impressive socialist hero's basic levels of competence.

Image by Simon Perrins!

Author and game designer Tone Milazzo joins me in Derry & Toms as we look at another work by the late, great Robert Sheckley, his first novel Immortality Inc.

Last time we talked about Sheckley with Derek, I had the distinct sense that we would be going back for more… and this turned out to be an apt choice, with this podcast being released during October, because it's a Halloween episode by stealth!

Tone’s website is tonemilazzo.com and you can find out more there about his novels, Picking Up the Ghost and The Faith Mach...

Bryan Talbot returns to Derry and Toms to talk to about Alice in Sunderland, Grandville and his upcoming release, The Case of Stamford Hawkmoor - and we get a special guest appearance from Dr Mary Talbot too!

Also, James Robertson calls in to talk about his two decades and more working on Bryan's website, being green in an increasingly grey world and all sorts of other stuff along the way.

My co-host for this ep was Tom Murphy, and thank goodness for Tom as all of my technology had half a foot in Earth 749.

Simon is back to finish our look at the final instalment in the first Corum trilogy... The King of the Swords... and, as it runs ramraid style into the conclusion of The Vanishing Tower, we roped in Miles too, because he'd only recently read it!

This is another pivotal book in Moorcock's oeuvre, and for this podcast, because it means that the second sequence of eternal champeen books we've managed to complete in the last six years. Yes... This pod has been going for six years.

Crikey!

Miles is one half of the...

THIS EPISODE: I'm joined in Derry & Toms by Powys Media's Mateo Latosa and, via ringer (Phil), Patricia Sokol, to talk about Space 1999 and the 20-plus-year efforts of Powys Media to keep the show alive via novelisations and original stories.

I was very lucky to receive a copy of the incredible (and impressively girthed) Space 1999 Year One Omnibus c/o Mateo. A handful are still available, and you can grab a copy here.

JOIN US!!!

John is back in Derry & Toms to talk about another novelisation, but we're taking a break from Blakes 7 to focus on another early 80s obsession of ours...

Well. Two. They just happen to combine to glorious effect in the classic slice of Daily Mail wet dreamery that is Who Dares Wins. Therefore, we get to watch it again for the 8,000th time and discuss it alongside its novelisation, The Tiptoe Boys, by James Follett.

Some other bits that pop up along the way include:

Nissan Almera ads from the 90s

The...

We're finally back to finish our reportage on Phoenix in Obsidian (AKA The Silver Warriors).

It's an epic tale of anguish and self-pity on an earth where the sun has dimmed, the moon has crashed down to simply be called Moon and the menace known as the Silver Warriors have extreme problems figuring out the point of polearms. How will Count Ulrik Skarsol endure...?

Loz is back alongside Phil for this one and we have a D8 Wandering Beer Table to boot.

Bob Haberfield: The Man and His Art is published by Jayde...