A 1901 novel concerning the plan to annex Greenland | EUROtoday

Around 1900, two authors teamed as much as write a wierd novel that had beforehand obtained little consideration. The nonetheless little-known Ford Madox Hueffer (later Ford) labored out giant elements, whereas the now well-known Joseph Conrad made it extra exact and pointed. They name the work “The Inheritors” (1901, German as “Die Erben”, 2023). With the subtitle “An Extravagant Story” they sign new territory: a combination of political satire and science fiction. Stylistically, they convey the impressionism of artwork into language, with ellipses, damaged sentences and imprecise hints.

The predominant character is Arthur Granger, a mediocre creator and journalist who’s commissioned to put in writing portraits of distinguished politicians, so-called “atmospheres”. He quickly finds himself caught up in political and media intrigues, and the nearer he seems to be, the much less clear the occasions change into. They revolve round a vacuum, a white spot, and that spot known as: Greenland. Fridtjof Nansen had crossed the island for the primary time a decade earlier. Now, within the novel, British politicians are planning to annex the fallow land fabricated from ice.

Conrad had simply revealed what would change into his best-known work, “Heart of Darkness”; the brand new novel will be learn as a type of sequel. The “Black Continent” is turning into the “White Continent” right here, white greed merely wants this nation, the Empire should proceed to develop. Politicians use newspapers to current the general public with a pretext for the takeover. So it is once more about carrying the “light of civilization” among the many “savages,” who’re even known as “blacks.” A shadowy duke named Duc de Mersch is harking back to the Belgian King Leopold II, who disguised his brutal exploitation of the Congo with philanthropy.

The Duke stands behind the venture as a megalomaniac humanist; he supplies the ethical. For all its philanthropy, it stays imprecise and changeable. If “natives” stand in the best way, then they merely need to be exterminated. This time it isn’t about ivory like within the Congo, however about cod liver oil, mineral assets and gold. A railway urgently must be constructed throughout the island to move the treasures away. The “regeneration of the Arctic areas” will happen by way of expertise and business. (A couple of a long time later, Ernst Bloch would additionally dream of a Greenland made inexperienced by nuclear energy in “The Hope Principle.”) In the interlocking of media, banks and politics, Granger and his “atmospheres” venture quickly grew to become a plaything of powers.

Beneath this clear politics of exploitation, the “extravagance” of the title comes into play, specifically as science fiction. Who are the heirs truly? No, they don’t symbolize the most important empire on earth on the time, the British Empire. Rather, it’s instructed that the seize for Greenland is a transparent signal of the approaching collapse of an empire that can then be inherited. The true heirs come from a totally completely different dimension, the fourth. At the start, Granger meets a girl who he initially thinks is an American. She makes it clear to him that his views on the world have lengthy since fallen out of time. As an indication of fully completely different powers, she causes Canterbury Cathedral to develop into infinity, solely to deliver it again from this imaginative and prescient shortly afterwards. So cosmic energies are at work.

The lady calls herself a dimensionist, a being from the fourth dimension who strikes like a ghost on the planet, comes and disappears. At the identical time, she is a type of superhuman as a result of she sees herself and the opposite dimensionists as being past good and evil. They are chilly egoists who will achieve energy over the earth. Conrad had already settled accounts with supermen like Kurtz within the “Heart of Darkness”. He and Ford now mix the “will to power” of those superbeings with the motif of a fourth dimension as a parallel world, which has been standard because the Nineteen Eighties. A couple of years earlier, HG Wells’ “Time Machine” had popularized this idea.

The sport about Greenland, the deceptions and hypocrisies of politicians and the media, is due to this fact nothing however a theater managed from one other world that the long run heirs permit themselves with the individuals. The Dimensionists have lengthy since begun their invasion and infiltrated society. They at the moment are within the course of of making a brand new previous for the outdated individuals – the prerequisite for each dictatorship, as Orwell teaches us.

Something else makes you sit up and take discover. The Dimensionist finally ends up marrying a monetary tycoon, and when she speaks of her mission, she speaks mechanically, like a phonograph. If we translate this into AI as chilly intelligence, we draw a hyperlink to right now’s techno czars, who see themselves because the true heirs of the earth and let politicians dance. These occasions are coming to gentle in Greenland, each then and now. Conrad thought of the ebook successful: for him it was an publicity of the “materialistic exaggeration of individualism, whose unscrupulous efficiency is adored by today’s zeitgeist.”