Inheritors (Version 2)

In a England grown fat on rationalism and commerce, Ernest Grey, a hard-headed man of science, finds himself unsettlingly drawn to a woman named Malkiel and her circle, a group whose ideas seem to emanate from somewhere far beyond the Victorian worldview. They speak of the Fourth Dimension, of inheriting an Earth grown corrupt and exhausted. At first Grey dismisses them as cranks. But as rationalist society begins to fray, as faith in progress curdles into something darker, their whispers begin to sound like prophecy. Conrad's least-known novel is a fever dream of early modernism: a satire of the materialist establishment that refuses to settle into comfortable cynicism. Its true subject is the terror of uncertainty, not knowing whether what rises to replace the old order is transcendence or catastrophe. For readers who prefer their science fiction philosophical and their metaphysics unsettling.