Interzone #282 (July-August 2019)

A better than average issue filled with fascinating stories. The best of the good stories are by Storm Humbert, Erica L. Satifka and Gregor Hartmann.

• "Verum" by Storm Humbert: a cracker of a story about a man who can craft entire stories (sights, sounds, feelings) into a serum called verum that, when injected, allows a person to experience a story. But when a girl comes along and crafts even better stories than him and starts taking away his customers, his feels he has no choice but to steal her methods. But in the end, overlooked clues would turn him into helping her out at the end.

• "Can You Tell Me How to Get to Apocalypse?" by Erica L. Satifka: in an apocalyptic future, one woman is in charge of getting the children ready for a broadcast children's show. Only thing is, the children are already dead and animated with implanted computers and the reason for that is that in this future, there are no more children. So these zombie children will have to do.

• "The Frog's Prince; or, Iron Henry" by N.A. Sulway: a variation of the frog prince story, involving a man with a curse that prevents his family from having female children and an interesting biological ability of frogs that carries over when the frog becomes a human.

• "The Princess of Solomon Pond Mall" by Timothy Mudie: a story of a girl isolated in a town until she is given the gift of a robot. As the story unfolds, we are told why the girl was isolated, a reason the robot was provided to her and how she has to overcome her fears of getting emotionally attached to the robot for fear it would vanish, literally.

• "Heaven Looks Down on the Tomb" by Gregor Hartmann: an interesting tale set in a future when a global environmental catastrophe has made humans extinct on Earth, leaving only those on lunar colonies. One of the colony sends an expedition back to Earth to analyse and bring back potential biocompatible bacteria and organisms to the Moon. But it is opposed by other colonies, who fear a plague organism may be introduced. In the end, it may need the group of graduate students (and guinea pigs for testing organic samples) to work together and take matters into their own hands to stop themselves being treated as biohazards.

• "FiGen: A Love Story" by Kristi DeMeester: as a marriage between two university lecturers starts to become dull, the wife starts to suspect her husband may be having an affair. Then a company offers to discover whether a spouse is being unfaithful via a genetic tests, and she jumps on the offer. When the results return, what it shows would turn her world upside down, and lead her on a speculative journey about the supposed mistress. But the tale presents a twist when she actually meets the mistress and starts her own journey of discovery with her.