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 … Continue reading FREEZE TAG – Halloween 2026 cont’d
Halloween 2026 – The Valley of the Worm
Episode 151 – The Valley of the Worm by Robert E. Howard 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 … Continue reading Halloween 2026 – The Valley of the Worm
Entropic State Report 8th October 2026
Another fab bit of work for the pod by the mighty Simon Perrins Greetings friends, pards and fellow travellers.October is upon us, the nights are drawing in, the temperature here in the hills of Bradford is cooling, so I'm wearing trousers and, rather astonishingly, Breakfast in the Ruins is seven years old!SEVEN EARTH YEARS!It was … Continue reading Entropic State Report 8th October 2026
Episode 150 – The Magic Faraway Tree
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 … Continue reading Episode 150 – The Magic Faraway Tree
Sorcery by The Belbury Poly – a conversation with Jim Jupp
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. … Continue reading Sorcery by The Belbury Poly – a conversation with Jim Jupp
The Prisoner – Part One
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 … Continue reading The Prisoner – Part One
The Owlbear and the Wizard’s Staff 2026 – Con Reflections
This past weekend we had the pleasure of journeying down to Leamington Spa for our second trip to the long-running RPG con, The Owlbear and the Wizard's Staff. Created and facilitated by Matthew Broome, Owlbear has been going quite a few years now, but has only recently established itself as a must-attend fixture in our … Continue reading The Owlbear and the Wizard’s Staff 2026 – Con Reflections
The Distant Suns
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 … Continue reading The Distant Suns
The Space Guardians
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 … Continue reading The Space Guardians
EVERDOOM (Moorcock & RPGs Part XI)
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 … Continue reading EVERDOOM (Moorcock & RPGs Part XI)
