The third issue of Clarkesworld Magazine this year brings us two well-crafted and thought-provoking stories, as well as a couple of diverting, though slightly underwhelming, non-fiction entries.

Ekaterina Sedia is in fine form in “Herding Vegetable Sheep,” a first-person account by 68-year-old cloud-herder Anita about her strained relationship with her daughter, Petra, and the disappearance of her granddaughter, Ilona. Sedia’s prose is well-suited to the purposes of her story; soft and almost lilting in the more lyrical, descriptive passages, harder and leaner in the character interactions. The near-future setting mostly works well, but I had a little trouble accepting the severity of Ilona’s purported crime, and therefore its implied thematic weight. The gravity of copyright violation seems at odds with the rest of the story’s worldbuilding, though to be fair, Sedia does include an “AOL logo” in her second sentence, so maybe my reader response isn’t well-grounded. In the end, this is an absorbing future tale, familial but not familiar. Sedia has not only given us vegetable sheep, but she’s shown us how to cultivate them through artful storytelling.

“The Loyalty of Birds” by Rachel Sobel is a character-driven fantasy tale, perhaps one of the more “purely” fantastic I’ve seen in Clarkesworld of late. Fortunately for me, the fantasy is in the world’s backdrop and as such occurs off-stage or is inferred. The story’s central preoccupation is psychological: the female protagonist, together with her steward, Harra, tend to a “broken wizard.” “It will be worse before it gets better,” the wizard declares early on, and the story doesn’t flinch from examining this decline and delivering on its promise. Sobel’s prose provides the requisite meditative, poetic quality (including an actual poem) to build pathos. The connection between birds and magic is made as explicit as it needs to be. This has been my first exposure to Sobel’s fiction, and I’m looking forward to more.

Kate Baker provides my favorite podcast from Clarkesworld this year, reading “Herding Vegetable Sheep.” I really enjoyed her interpretations of the rhythms in Sedia’s prose, and the subtle voice characterization. My only wish is that she’d read Sobel’s story instead, which I feel might have made, overall, for a more affecting listening experience.

I didn’t get as much out of “An Interview with Tobias Buckell” by Jeremy L. C. Jones as I’d hoped for. The questions are interesting, and the answers appropriate, but as a reader only familiar with Buckell’s short fiction, I found myself unfamiliar with many of the details that would have enriched my understanding of the novel-centric discussion. Buckell admits to preferring the long form in the interview, so I suppose it’s a reasonable balance. On this front, though, I found it a little surprising that there wasn’t any mention of Buckell’s Halo tie-in, The Code Protocol.

The release of the recent remake of The Day The Earth Stood Still inspires Daniel M. Kimmel to tackle the subject of movie remakes in “Remake Love, Not War.” To this end, he discusses several fun examples, and quite reasonably concludes that “we shouldn’t give up on the potential for a remake to be as good as or better than the original film.” Fair enough. But if the requirement for a high-quality remake is a visionary, renowned director (as in the cases he cites), then the odds are that we’ll continue to be disappointed far more often than not.

The “2008 Reader’s Poll Results” by Neil Clarke places, perhaps unsurprisingly, “A Buyer’s Guide to Maps of Antartica” by Catherynne M. Valente in the first spot. A worthy winner.