Based on the Gene Wolfe thread, I picked up R.A. Lafferty’s Nine Hundred Grandmothers short story collection and I’m totally digging it.
But one story, (the magnificently titled) “ginny wrapped in the sun,” has me a bit confused. I’m going to spoiler box stuff because it’s kind of a twisty story and I’d hate to ruin it for any first-time readers. Please do the same, if you will.
Basically, the point of the story is that a scientist’s little girl is very animalistic and wild, and as the conversation between he and his peer progresses over the story, it’s revealed that humankind was merely a side-evolution of a species of “three-foot-tall big-headed apes” that matured at four years of age and died off by 14 or 15. He’s realized that Ginny is the first person to de-evolve back into one of these apes, and that this means that it’s the end of humanity and that they’ll all eventually revert to these apes. The story concludes with referring to her as the little monkey.
But the major hints that we’re given to this over the course of the story is that Ginny is smarter than everyone else; even though she’s four, she orders them around and they obey her, and seems far more intelligent than any given four-year-old. She also seems to have some sort of mind control at one point.
So with that in mind, what’s the deal with the idea that she’s de-evolving? Shouldn’t she be simian and seem retarded to them? Shouldn’t she not be able to talk, or at the very least barely be able to communicate? I don’t understand how she’s supposed to be de-evolving and reverting to monkeydom if she’s so advanced compared to them, more intelligent and able to control them?
So she’s something similar to a Pak Protector? To answer your question, basically we are the devolved species, and she’s merely the first to be back on the “right path”
I must say I don’t agree with the way genetics/heredity is portrayed in this story at all. Things can’t really ever “devolve”, and I blame stuff like *Star Trek *and Altered States for popularising the notion.
Well, I doubt either of those had any influence on this particular story (I’m pretty sure it predates Altered States). Besides, Lafferty’s universe is so gleefully absurd that you can’t really expect it to follow any logic but its own. Genetics, space travel, time, and even human behavior are all distorted when seen through the lens of a Lafferty tale. But I agree that the point of the story is that we humans are an inferior branch and Ginny’s species is the “advanced” one. Lafferty wrote several stories featuring super-intelligent (and usually very dangerous) children who represent a threat to the rest of humanity.
To the OP, I was one of those who recommended **Nine-Hundred Grandmothers ** in the previous thread, so I’m glad to hear you’re enjoying it. That collection contains some of my personal favorite stories: “Through Other Eyes,” “Slow Tuesday Night” and “Land of the Great Horses” (originally published in Dangerous Visions). It also has “All the People,” which is the very first Lafferty story I ever read. I still remember being bewildered, delighted, and most of all thinking, “Who IS this guy?”
That’s pretty much been my experience, and I’m an avid reader of this stuff! I don’t know how I had missed Lafferty…he reminds me much of Roger Zelazny and James Tiptree, Jr. “Land of the Wild Horses” was AMAZING - the first three pages, I was all “Yawn…where IS this going?” and by the end I had decided it was one of the best SF short stories I’d ever read.
Ginny is smart because she is an adult of her species at 4. However, she isn’t that smart. Note that she plans hundreds of peanutbutter and jelly sandwiches but doesn’t realize that they’ll go bad. The two teenagers obey her because they are also throwbacks. They are the big drones of the old species. They don’t obey her because she is smart, but because it is their genetic imperative to obey.
I dislike Slow Tuesday Night. It is a tour-of-wonders rather than a story.
I only vaguely remember reading Nine Hundred Grandmothers, but I did enjoy R. A. Lafferty when I was fortunate enough to find him. My first exposure to him was Eurema’s Dam. One of my favorite aphorisms is “Never invent something that you can’t uninvent later.”
And the presence of the name Willy McGilly in a story always means I’m in for a treat.