The Inheritors (1901) was the first fruit of a collaboration between Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford. It has suffered the fate of more or less complete neglect in histories of science fiction and of the novel in general. Even when it is mentioned within the context of either writer's career it is described as a curiosity difficult to classify and largely of historical interest. One reason for the neglect and critical suspicion of the novel lies in its use of nonrealistic characters from the fourth dimension. The narrative describes the experiences of a would-be novelist Arthur Granger who meets a visitor from a future era. She instructs him in the lessons of social change but decides to give evolution a helping hand by engineering a public revelation of the atrocities which are being committed in the name of philanthropy in a scheme to open up darkest Greenland—a thinly disguised version of the Belgian Congo. The exposure compromises British government plans to invest in the scheme; a crisis follows and the minister representing the past (Churchill) is sacrificed to the new man Gurnard. This public action is shadowed by Granger's prospering career as a writer of literary journalism which brings him into contact with the main actors on the political scene and one of the main purposes of the novel, as we shall see, is to explore anxieties about change, particularly turn-of-the-century anxieties about the ending of an era. The figures from the fourth dimension signal this theme startlingly to Granger and the reader alike. They are a unique device in Conrad's career since he was never again to use anything outside realism, and they are virtually unique in Ford's oeuvre. The only other excursion he made into fantasy was his 1908 novel Mr. Apollo, an account of a visit to Earth by a divinity inspired by H. G. Wells's The Sea Lady.

Conrad and Ford first met in 1898. The elder of the two was already established as a successful novelist while Ford had to date only produced one novel, a biography of the painter Ford Madox Brown, and a number of poems and essays on the Pre-Raphaelites.