This feels like you're starting in the wrong place. It almost feels like a prologue. To get me hooked in to read the rest of the story, I need some sense of a character and hopefully an idea of what the conflict is going to be. If it's speculative fiction (fantasy/scifi/horror), some glimpse of a speculative element is good, too.

My first impression with this opening is that you do not trust the reader to get the milieu/set-up, so instead you’re giving it to us by way of a frame. The problem with this is that the story hasn’t started at this point; there’s no hook for me. You can create a hook in the opening if the grandmother’s dialogue was stellar or she telling us something really unusual about the world, but the setting is pretty stock-standard for SF. Unless the grandmother is the protagonist of the story and you’re using the 1st person narrator as a passive observer, I’d suggest moving the start of the story to the point where something changes in the protagonist’s life.

There’s also a lack of conflict in the dialogue because the grandmother is not challenged or queried by the protagonist. She’s telling us stuff and it doesn’t matter whether it’s in dialogue or in first person narration, too much telling in a block can get boring.

Regards,

Nick

Minor typos and queries below:

quote:

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In the ancient days there were two factions, which, although they didn’t resort to violence, bickered…

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I believe the personal pronoun they is needed in this sentence.

quote:

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recounting one of her stories of the past, a past so far distant that some called her stories fables.

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I think this entire sentence is redundant because the grandmother has already said “in the ancient days”.

quote:

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. I could see the boils on her face

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In first person, this is creating more distance than I think it needed. How about simply saying, “the boils on her face…”? It is implied that the narrator can see them moving.

quote:

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...move in synchronicity with her expressions

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Redundant: If they’re on her face, they have to move.

quote:

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and the inflection of her voice, as she spoke

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I don’t get this…the structure of the sentence implies the boils move in time with the inflection of her voice. Is her face becoming more animated as she speaks? If so, I’d state it directly rather than implying it by talking about her boils moving.

quote:

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Despite her appearance, grandma was a great story teller.

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Is it a plausible stereotype that ugly people can’t tell good stories? The other problem with this phrase is that you’re forcing the reader to accept that grandmother is a great storyteller when the evidence isn’t there yet.

quote:

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Now, from what I hear from my ancestors, technology wasn’t evil, but it was the excessive use of it that blackened the sky.”

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While you don't have to explicitly answer each of these questions, it sure would help in getting the reader hooked.

Additionally, you have, just, like, way too many commas. I'm terrible with specifics on when you should use them, as I use too many myself, but a general suggestion is to re-read your work out loud and see if the commas help with pacing. Remove the ones that don't, and then go back and try to simplify some sentences so that you don't need a comma. For instance, I could have rewritten that last sentence as two:
Remove the ones that don't. Then go back and try to simplify some sentences so that you don't need a comma.

See what I mean?

Some ideas for where you could go to get the reader hooked better:

Grandma stood up to her full five foot frame and poked a crooked boil-covered finger at me. "You and your sister bicker just like the Ancients, and you know what a good mess that got us all in." She gestured around the tiny steel cottage we lived in, piled floor to ceiling with jars of pickled dates. I *hate* pickled dates.

I stood ramrod straight. You don't mess with Grandma when she's on one of her tirades, even if my sister had just stuck gum in the opening of my favorite whirlagig, ruining it. I really didn't want to stand here and listen to Grandma tell us all about the gray mist again, and the Days of Darkness that followed, but she saw me cuff Sandra and now we were both stuck to the spot, forced to endure another Grandma lecture.

<Insert some sort of conflict here, beyond just the fight between siblings>

...

Setting, description, some sense of forward motion or conflict, a character with some kind of distinctive voice, something for people to sink their teeth into, someone to relate to.