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 sh**’, 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 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 co-authored 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 strange book is coming into its own; it speaks to the present in unsettling ways.

Published in the year of Queen Victoria’s death, The Inheritors shows us an unstable, uncertain world. National powers are fragile — scrambling for control over rare minerals and strategic resources, haunted by the horrors of corporate colonialism. Traditional social systems are being disrupted by technologies that promise a more efficient — perhaps more free, perhaps more violent — future. The novel sits anxiously on a point of historical inflection.

This helps to explain the motives and methods of Conrad and Ford’s time travelers — ‘the Dimensionists’ — a secret cabal sent from the future to destroy the present. Their plan doesn’t involve anything obviously futuristic — no sophisticated weapons or superpowers. Instead, the Dimensionists rely on a different advantage: their own heartless rationalism. Their machinic future society is, we learn, ‘free from any ethical tradition; callous to pain, weakness, suffering and death’ (sound familiar?), traits that equip them to infiltrate circles of power and entrap eminent public figures in noble-sounding schemes that lead to scandalous disasters.

Greenland becomes the staging ground for their conspiracy. We meet the Duc de Mersch, a minor aristocrat and ‘foreign financier’, a ‘philanthropist on megalomaniac lines’, who has been granted control of the territory ‘for some international reason’. The Duc, clearly modeled on King Leopold II of Belgium (Conrad was working on The Inheritors while writing Heart of Darkness), uses Leopold’s virtuous language of ‘progress, improvement, civilisation’ to sell his ‘System for the Regeneration of the Arctic Regions’.

Meanwhile, the British government invests heavily, providing financial backing and security guarantees. Predictably, this gigantic project is exposed as a fraud — a scheme to maximize profits by expunging Greenland’s resources and violently exploiting its indigenous people. The Greenland scandal precipitates a financial crash and political crisis that sweeps the Dimensionists (who were behind it all) into power.

These historical anxieties look a lot like our own. In The Inheritors, it’s easy to read Greenland as a thinly veiled substitute for the Congo. But at the turn of the twentieth century, it too was a frontier of the colonial imagination — routinely described in Western newspaper reports about the race to the North Pole. 

Today, Greenland is being reimagined as a colonial frontier of a different sort, and a people who seem finally to be on the brink of independence are being threatened with re-annexation. On social media and in the press, Trump asserts the existential need to ‘get Greenland’, as he puts it, to ensure US national security, and more broadly, to safeguard ‘the freedom of the world’. One suspects that his motives, as with those of Leopold II and his fictional counterpart de Mersch, might have more to do with rare earth minerals, and estimates that ‘13% of the world’s undiscovered oil reserves and 30% of its undiscovered gas lies under the Arctic’.

Access to those reserves, and to the strategic shipping lanes now opening in the Arctic, depends directly on the melting of Greenland’s immense ice sheet, which currently covers about 75% of the island, but which scientists predict could collapse entirely by 2050. Scientists also believe that this collapse would almost certainly shut down the Gulf Stream, the transatlantic ocean current that has been a keystone in stabilising the planet’s climate for the last 12,000 years — since the beginning of the Holocene. 

In other words, the extraction and burning of Greenland’s fossil fuels, made accessible by global warming, would contribute directly to the breach of a climate tipping point, beyond which it is difficult to model or predict the planetary consequences.

Perhaps The Inheritors, with its time-traveling accelerationists and byzantine Greenlandic plot, reads most like conspiracy theory, a genre we’re all too familiar with today. Questions like, ‘Who’s really behind this?’ and ‘What do they actually want?’ have gone mainstream. Some pundits have speculated that Trump represents a return to a Great Man theory of history and the Great Power geopolitics of the nineteenth century; others say that DOGE’s infiltration of the US government’s federal data systems is the first step in a plot to replace ‘the human workforce with machines’.

It is whispered on Reddit that Trump is a Russian asset. On YouTube you can watch videos about Peter Thiel’s plans to create technofascist sovereign states. You can hear a podcast about billionaires who want to live forever as digitised brains in the cloud, about their plans to hasten the AI singularity, or about the spaceships they are developing for the day when they can escape the uninhabitable earth. Maybe there are Dimensionists among us. But maybe it’s just science fiction.