The Future Is Ours: The Collected Science Fiction of Edward D. Hoch

Edward D. Hoch was and is the undisputed master of the mystery short story. His total output of published short fiction hovers just under 1,000 stories (estimates are in the neighborhood of 960 stories). Hoch (pronounced "Hoke") is best remembered for his fair-play and impossible crime short stories, particularly the series featuring Dr. Sam Hawthorne, a small-town physician who unraveled seemingly impossible "problems" in 1920s New England. His other popular series characters included British Intelligence codebreaker Jeffrey Rand and thief-for-hire Nick Velvet.

While a vast majority of Ed Hoch's stories were mysteries, he enjoyed horror and science fiction. Of his nine-hundred-plus output, he wrote several handfuls of horror and science fiction stories that appeared in various magazines and anthologies. It could be argued that his first published story, "Village of the Dead" (which appeared in the December 1955 issue of the pulp magazine Famous Detective Stories), is as much horror as it is a mystery. In that story, the mass suicide of an entire village is investigated by Simon Ark, a mysterious-possibly two-thousand year old-Coptic Priest.

Here, then, are 29 tales of the future, the fantastic, and the improbable by a master of the craft: Edward D. Hoch, writer extraordinaire!

Billed as 29 tales of the fantastic, this eclectic collection will surprise readers who know Hoch (1930–2008) only from his hundreds of short mysteries. Hoch holds the record of appearing in every issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine for an astonishing span of 34 years. Steinbock, with the cooperation of Hoch's widow, pored through Hoch's personal archive to ferret out stories from such often overlooked sources as Fantastic Universe, Weird Worlds, Original Science Fiction Stories, The Magazine of Horror, and even Real Western Stories. The selections range in tone from the playful "Zoo" to the dark and suspenseful "Dracula 1944." The latter story examines the work of a vampire in a Nazi concentration camp during WWII. Not every story is a winner, but the percentage is high, and any fan or collector of Hoch material will find a treasure trove in this welcome compilation. (Dec.)\n