“Nine Hundred Grandmothers” is a tale about origins, about How It All Began, and as such serves well both as introduction to the anthology of the same name, and to our investigation of Lafferty’s short fiction.
The story is about as straightforwardly science fiction as Ray ever gets. It doesn’t blur genre boundaries. It makes no formal innovations. It doesn’t even have an apocalypse, rather something more like an epiphany in one of Joyce’s Dubliners tales.
And yet it was one of his more daring stories. In “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” Lafferty takes on the colonial SF tale, a subgenre wildly popular in the previous generation, and still with advocates among the editors of the early ’60s. This type of story, the descendant of Victorian adventure fiction, usually takes place on a commercially promising territory; here, Proavitus is “a sphere tinkling with the profit that could be shaken from it.”
