Howdy—apologies for just one edition last week, and this week. Once again I require time to catch up on some other commitments and prepare more juicy literary content for SF.
Yes, the Conradathon has returned after the Solenoid month. The Fourth Dimension was a popular idea in Europe at the turn of the century, everyone was riffing on it, from Oscar Wilde to, yes, Conrad, who dabbled in science fiction, as we’ll see.
But there are still more installments of the Solenoid notebooks to come, just on a less frequent cadence.
At the turn of the century, Joseph Conrad was at the end of his rope. His publications so far weren’t making any money, and apparently he was considering giving up and returning to sailing. And this in the middle of composing his two masterpieces, Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness.
Such desperate times called for writing a pot-boiler for quick cash, and he enlisted the help of then-still-obscure Ford M. Hueffer—soon to be known as Ford Maddox Ford—to collaborate on one of those newfangled SF novels that have come so trendy, like those written by Mr. H. G. Wells over the last couple decades. The result was a romantic thriller called The Inheritors.
But H. G. Wells this ain’t. The co-authors don’t share the former’s interest in the details of scientific knowledge and its application to technology and production. Conrad’s and Ford’s forte is and would be—respectively—individual psychologies in disturbed states, and the novel at hand contains some rote narrative arcs of love-sickness.
The start was promising. The first line is from a woman talking about “ideas.” She is hanging out with the narrator, Arthur Granger, outside at some fancy party. She looks like she’s not from England, she’s beautiful but also looks kind of sinister. She says she’s from the Fourth Dimension.
“If you expect me to believe that you inhabit a mathematical monstrosity, you are mistaken,” Granger says to her. In the narration, he reflects that “She had something—not only quickness of wit, not only ruthless determination, but something quite different and quite indefinably more impressive. Perhaps it was only the confidence of the superseder…”
That is, she looks down on him with the same chauvinistic condescension that he holds when looking upon “Occidentals,” “Negroes,” and “Hindoos.”
But the Fourth Dimension is real, and this lady is not the only trespasser. A low-key invasion is underway. When he asks her where she’s from, she answers: “Oh, we are to inherit the earth.”
And that is their plan. These time travelers have come to muck up Granger’s present in order to engineer their future existence.
The plot of the Dimensionists is, through some political and financial chicanery, to trigger a financial crisis through a rug-pull scam involving unsecured loans issued by a French railroad baron named de Mersch, who was trying to develop Greenland. Granger’s part comes from working as a journalist at the Hour, which is essentially de Mersch’s personal organ to promote said loans.
The lady who had so fortuitously ran into Granger starts ingratiating herself into his circle, even passing herself off as his sister, which is pretty weird.
But the whole conspiracy is fuzzily conveyed for two reasons. One, our narrator barely knows what’s going on in any detail (“I…despise politics generally”), and two, he’s thirsty for mysterious “Sister” Granger.
Granger is observant when it comes to dinner parties and other meeting places of society’s high rollers, but he certainly possesses that certain blinkered perspective on economic existence that we have been observing through the Conradathon.
Being in the metropoles of the colonial powers doesn’t seem to help. When Granger goes to Paris to interview de Mersch, he looks out the window of his garret apartment:
Great clouds began to loom into view over the house-tops, rounded, toppling masses of grey, lit up with sullen orange against the pale limpid blue of the sky. I stood and looked at all these objects. I had come out here to think—thoughts had deserted me. I could only look.
Later on, back in London, he talks about how he wants to be “stupefied” by getting lost in the urban crowds. This man needs deliverance from himself, and unfortunately he thinks this Dimensionist quasi-femme fatale has the keys.
He’s not even interested in learning more about Mr. Gurnard, with whom “Miss Granger” ends up rolling, other than that he’s “only the dark horse of the ministry.”
This guy could be the least inquisitive journalist in all of fiction. But he certainly takes after the very 20th-century trope of the flâneur writer.
Two other important pieces in the game are the founding members of the Hour, Callan and Fox (Conrad and Ford?), the former is given to flowery exposes, and the latter is a covert Dimensionist himself. Callan is supposed to write about the Greenland project, and what he sees will blow up not only the financial scheme but the credibility of governmental, financial, industrial, and journalistic institutions.
The most annoying quality of the text is “Miss Granger’s” tendency to speak in vague metaphors and linguistic ambiguity. She says things like
“Oh, you know,” she said, with a fine affectation of aloofness, “we shall have to be rather hard upon you; we shall crumple you up like—”
and
I am too young and too, too discreet—have a little salon where we hatch plots against half the régimes in Europe. You have no idea how Legitimate we are.
After several reiterations of this discourse, finally she tells Arthur:
“Don’t you see? Don’t you understand? We are the inevitable ... and you can’t keep us back. We have to come and you, you will only hurt yourself, by resisting.” A sense that this was the truth, the only truth, beset me. It was for the moment impossible to think of anything else—of anything else in the world. “You must accept us and all that we mean, you must stand back; sooner or later. Look even all round you, and you will understand better. You are in the house of a type—a type that became impossible. Oh, centuries ago. And that type too, tried very hard to keep back the inevitable; not only because itself went under, but because everything that it stood for went under. And it had to suffer—heartache ... that sort of suffering. Isn’t it so?”
Make way for tomorrow, indeed. Arthur’s camp belongs in the trash bin of history. He has an affection for the minister Edward Churchill—another dupe in the plot—and the history of Cromwell he’s helping him with, but the truth is both men are struggling to catch up with the spirit of the times.
Granted, this is a kind of heavy theme that one wouldn’t find in War of the Worlds, even though both books actually have a common essential idea—how would the colonial powers feel if a “superior” race with superior technology came through, using our resources and labor-power, turning our homeland into an alien plantation?
My main objection is: why create a vaguely antisemitic conspiracy to explain a process that the capitalist economic system is perfectly capable of doing itself. We’re basically dealing with the “smashes,” as Marlow had called them, that marked the transition from liberal to monopoly capitalism and modern imperialism.
Perhaps the allegory gets readers to confront the true coldness and hard rationality of our administrated, informatized society. The Dimensionists are “a race clear-sighted, eminently practical, incredible; with no ideals, prejudices, or remorse; with no feeling for art and no reverence for life; free from any ethical tradition; callous to pain, weakness, suffering and death, as if they had been invulnerable and immortal.”
They are an extreme utilitarian people, then, who have evolved beyond the need for imagination.
They’re the kind of people that would build the cylindrical starship in Rendezvous with Rama.
One final thought about language. Like everything else, it’s evolving over time. The senses of words, the words themselves, and entire linguistic families come into being and disappear. Because of this process, even modern English less than a couple hundred years old can read very differently to us in particular moments.
An example that has stuck with me is the line by the poet Mark Akinside: “The great creator raised his plastic arm.”
A passage from The Inheritors leapt out for a similar reason:
I was at the Hôtel de Luynes—or Granger—early on the following morning. The mists were still hanging about the dismal upper windows of the inscrutable Faubourg; the toilet of the city was being completed; the little hoses on wheels were clattering about the quiet larger streets.