Entropic State Report 7th January 2025

Welcome friends… to 2025!

The festive period here at Derry & Toms (Bradford branch) has been a funny one, punctuated by hospital visits to the awd fella, lifted in the middle by a boozy visit from Loz (see Episode 101), and then run down to a gooey conclusion by a heroic dose of lurgy that Phil and I are still trying to shake off. But that has given us ample opportunities to sit in a heap and catch up on some movies, not least of which was The Keep. I first came across this oddity in the mid-80s as a video rental and was instantly captivated by its unique style and atmosphere. I read the novel a few years later and was largely disappointed by it, but have come to appreciate it on its own terms on subsequent re-reads over the years (in fact I’m just in the middle of it once again).

The film has remained a staple part of my top 10 all time loves though, so imagine how delighted I was that, despite never even having had a blu ray release and not even adecent DVD release outside of Australia, it got released in a gorgeous 4k UHD format by Vinegar Syndrome last month.

Bonzer!

It’s probably inevitable now that we will cover it at some point in 2025 because it fits right into that 80s sweet spot where the core of my love of genre fiction was formed.

I’ve also had the chance to take a look at some of the groovy presents I got and in terms of podcast fodder, this brace sits atop the pile:

My old bud Yarky knows what makes me tick, and both of these items tie nicely into a conversation I had a while back with Dave about potentially looking at a bit more Conan but, rather than covering more RE Howard, taking a look at some of the inferior but still of value L Sprague de Camp stories including the novelisation of the John Milius film. That Sphere edition of Conan the Freebooter is a nice replacement for the one I got from Pops back in the day, now long lost to time and incident.

And the Subotai figure is fucking cool too.

These are ideas for the coming year, but what do we have in store in terms of firm itinerary?

First up for 2025 will be the conclusion of some 2024 activity as we conclude our Doctor Who reportage with The Coming of the Terraphiles Part Three.

We’ll be headed back to the Tragic Millennium to pick up the efforts of Hawkmoon and D’Averc to finally defeat the evil empire of Granbretan…

After a couple of years mulling it over, we’re going Moorcock adjacent with the adventures of Luther Arkwright…

And then we’re going back to the 60s MM SF well with The Shores of Death…

And that’s just for starters.

So stay safe, keep warm and continue to tune in pards!

Hither Came Conan!

Dave is back in Derry & Toms to talk about some stories that were as formative for him as they were for me back in our teens… The Robert E Howard Conan stories, The Phoenix on the Sword and The Scarlet Citadel.

Dave also gives us an update on the latest SÖNUS news and we delve into some of the murkier aspects of the pulp of the time. But mostly we enjoy the head smashing and the surprisingly textured and erudite version of the Cimmerian in those first two stories.

Although this is our first Conan focused episode, Phil and I did look at The Tower of the Elephant way back in the early days in our first Happy Birthday Michael Moorcock episode back in December 2019.

How time flies…

Entropic State Report 14th July 2023

It’s a week since we returned from our latest trip to our by now practically second home Morecambe, that curious blend of urban decay and mellow repose.

As usual, we returned home burdened with bellies full of booze and tucker and several bags of second-hand books from The Old Pier Book Shop, the market book stall and the Carnforth Book Shop up the road in… well… in Carnforth.

And what a haul we bagged!

From the Old Pier we came away with another Graham Masterton, a potential one-shit book and a whole raft of Edgar Rice Burroughs…

..including these three Frank Frazetta illustrated hardcover doubles…

…ugh… marvellous. Black and white Frazetta art inside too.

There is, of course, a consequence to this. Now I have to find the other three volumes to complete the set.

Meanwhile, over at the market, I plugged a few gaps in the Survivalist series I started collecting a year or two ago.

I finally started reading the first of these a few days ago. It’s entertaining. Pulp trash for sure but I can’t stop reading. For a series so fixated on WW3 it’s also pretty ill-informed about a few things, but the author Jerry Ahern certainly does love his guns. In fact, he’s an out-and-out gun nerd, which just makes them all the funnier when, after describing in intricate detail the hero’s handguns right down to the grip, he shows amazing ignorance of other details (best example so far is a couple of nuclear submarines under an ice cap torpedoing each other and causing a 72 (SEVENTY-TWO) megaton explosion. It’s refreshingly short on racist tropes so far and, as it reads like the creative writing of a 13-year-old growing up in the 80s, it’s all very charming so far.

Over at Carnforth we picked up a lovely little trio of Sphere Conans. The Sphere editions were my introduction to Two-Gun Bob’s creation so I have a soft spot for them even though they are the de Camp and Carter adulterated texts or, in these cases, entirely new stories. Inferr yes, but nevertheless part of my Conan head-canon thanks to Pops.

As well as the Conans, a trio of M John Harrisons (which reminds me we need to cover The Pastel City at some point)…

Just look at that Centauri Device cover. So dynamic.

The Carnforth Book Shop, whilst perhaps not quite as extensive with SF and fantasy as The Old Pier, is an absolute trove thanks largely to its being much better organised.

I could have come away with a lot more but with the steely resolve of Conan himself (or being too lazy to carry any more as we were on the bus) I limited myself to just another four, including a John Brunner, a Thomas M Disch, a bloody lovely Dunsany and a tatty old British UFO exposé.

Just need time to read them all now. Which I’ll never get. But fuck it, finding these beauties is all part of the fun and I’ll retire one day…

one day…

…

Anyway. I’m on with editing the latest episode after finishing this report – The Sword of the Dawn Book Two with Dave -and it’s a tricky bugger thanks to some bizarre audio issues where we went out of sync during recording and ended up like an old trans-Atlantic interview complete with time delays in hearing each other. I’ll conquer it though.

And last night Graham and I jumped into D&Ts to discuss our latest Uncosy Catastrophe with The Fungus so that will be emerging in a couple of weeks too.

That’s it for now though, I’d better drink coffee and crack on wrestling with audio files.

Take care, stay safe and we will of course bump into each other again soon… on the moonbeam roads.