Kage Baker’s contribution to Best American Fantasy 2008 takes the form as an homage to the classic fairy tale in a story that, in a mildly humorous and slightly didactic tone, recounts the adventures of a willful and inquisitive young woman while simultaneously playing around with some of the most well-worn tropes of fantasy fiction.
The heroine Svnae is the daughter of the Master of the Mountain (a professional dark lord) and the Saint of the World (a living goddess who can heal the sick and raise the dead). She desires power from an early age and after being told by her father that power comes from knowledge, her life takes on the form of a restless search for all the secrets of the world. She desires mastery over the material world and in the process of achieving her goal she rejects her mother’s feminine wisdom of nurture and healing. Svnae has many adventures, driven by her unending thirst for knowledge, mastery and power – yet only when she marries and starts a family does she begin to understand her mother’s perspective on life.
Baker’s story is structured over a series of oppositions that continually are reinforced by a symbolism that is grounded in an age-old tradition of binary thinking and patriarchal value-systems. Throughout the narrative we thus encounter the traditional distinction between light and dark, feminine and masculine, passive and active, nurture and adventure, and so on. Within this conceptual framework, and supported by fairy tale style of narration, “The Ruby Incomparable” comes across as a didactic allegory of a young woman’s realization of her own essential femininity, which is equated with motherhood. The reader is constantly being told that Svnae is searching to find what she really wants – and that is apparently to understand her mother and have her mother understand her.
I have to admit that I didn’t particularly care for this story, which I found to be rather bland and quite heavy-handed in its symbolism. It is certainly well-crafted, in a technical sense, and I did enjoy the humorous and slightly ironic tone, but there’s not really any meat on the bones of the story and it’s take on gender is unsophisticated and hopelessly outmoded. The didacticism is too heavy-handed and unappealing – and this type of unsubtle story-telling is frankly not my cup of tea. There is of course a slight possibility that the ironic tone is intended as a critique of this kind of binary and essentialist thinking, but that seems highly unlikely.
This is part of the BookSpot Central Short Fiction Round Table spotlight on stories that will be included in Best American Fantasy 2008 edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer and forthcoming from Prime Books. Please see the intro to the spotlight.
