Unpredictability was the most predictable thing about the first few months of Trump 2.0. Having long understood the political utility of chaos, it’s no surprise that his most coherent strategy was to “flood the zone with shit,” an approach suggested by his sometimes advisor Steve Bannon.
But who could have imagined he would become so obsessed with annexing Greenland? That he would, in a bizarre show of intent, send the vice president and second lady to assert America’s manifest sovereignty? Who could have foreseen that Donald Trump would empower the richest person in the world, Elon Musk, to dismantle the federal government via a piratical anti-department operating under the acronym of a memecoin? This sounds like science fiction. This sounds like conspiracy theory.
This also sounds like the plot of The Inheritors, an obscure novel coauthored by Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford in 1901. The Inheritors envisions a scenario in which the annexation of Greenland triggers the collapse of the world’s established political order. But this incredible premise is not the strangest part of the story: all of this is being manipulated by a group of secret agents from the fourth dimension.
This is not the kind of fare we’d expect from Conrad or Ford, famous authors synonymous with the high-brow styles of modernism and impressionism. When they wrote The Inheritors, though, this canonicity was still to come. Conrad was broke and Ford was relatively unknown, and both craved the commercial success of writers like H. G. Wells. The Inheritors, their first of three collaborations, was an attempt to capitalize on the new popularity of science fiction, a genre to which neither ever returned.
The Inheritors is hardly read now, even by literary scholars. If mentioned, it’s usually described as an unsuccessful experiment, notable perhaps for containing unbaked ingredients reused in Heart of Darkness, The Secret Agent, and The Good Soldier. But this…
Auteur: Aaron Rosenberg
