Book Review: Inter Ice Age 4 by Kobo Abe

 

Inter Ice Age 4 

228 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1959

I have a couple of intense interests that collide here. First of all, I love Asian Science Fiction, I love retro science fiction. I understand that Abe has a readership besides this novel, more for surrealism than SF, but he was a new author to me.

Abe became famous for a surrealist novel that he wrote and published five years after this work of genre fiction. It was most fascinating for me to read an SF novel written by an author who was a child in Imperial Japan; he only avoided serving and probably dying in the war by choosing to study medicine in college. This is of course, an influence on this work.

His life story is interesting for sure. He was deeply affected by the death of friends in the war, and after the conflict, joined the communist party. He organized in the poorer neighborhoods of Tokyo while starting his career.  He considered himself a pacifist and helped organize workers. In 1951, he won the Akutagawa Prize, one of the most prestigious awards in Japanese literature. So it is cool that this well-regarded and yet radical dude wrote a super bizarro SF novel.

Yeah, he moved away from Communism, not impressed with the Soviet way of doing things, and that is clear in this text with the Moscow II machine. There are a couple of different plots that blend together. It is science fiction, and I wondered a few times if the translation was influenced by Western SF as much as the author.

The plot on the surface seems simple: a scientist builds a machine, similar to modern AI, that is meant to predict the future. Using this machine leads him to uncover a conspiracy to engineer transhuman animal hybrids. 

The predication machine, as Abe saw it in the late 50s, is not that far off from the large language model programs that we see happening today. The machine in this novel learns and predicts, but Abe views it as a tool of social control. As the superpowers race to control the technology, his strong feelings about the Soviet Union are clear in this passage…

 

“Repercussions from America came the next day. “Prediction and divination are fundamentally different. In the 1st place, only that which has a moral basis can rightfully be called prediction. Putting such power in the hands of a machine can only be denial of humanity. Here in America, the forecasting machine was perfected early, but we followed the voice of our conscience and avoided political application of it. The present course of the Soviet Union is to attempt to threaten the liberty of men and jeopardize international friendship by betraying their own claims for peaceful coexistence. We consider the Moscow II predictions to be a kind of violence against the mind; we advise early abandonment and revocation. In the event our statement should go unheard, we are prepared to petition the United Nations.”

It seems a bit idealistic to think America would respect the freedom of the people with the Prediction. The push and pull of prediction vs freewill in this future is much of the power of the first act.  The idea of predestination of predication operates in a way not that different from PKD’s story, Minority Report. Tanomogi feels compelled to prove his machine correct, but he also truly believes that it cannot be wrong. 

 “Tanomogi lapsed into silence. But he didn't seem all that disturbed. He had been working with me for five years and could read me like a book. I would never give up this pursuit. Whatever, I did not intend to offer excuses for it. If the machine ordered murder, I would doubtless commit murder, however reluctantly. The ordinary middle-aged man walking now before us, who had something just a little mysterious about him, would be stripped clean of his skin, his past and future laid bare. When I thought about it, I experienced a pain as if my own skin were being peeled off. But turning my back on the prediction machine was at this juncture much, much more frightening.”

Where the novel becomes even more Dickian is when the machine begins to take on feelings of life. 

“Not at all. Actually, you're not a human being. You're the personality equation of a man by the name of Tsuchida Susmu, that has been committed to memory by the machine.”

“Don't make me laugh. And stop this ridiculous deceit. Damn! All my sensations seem to be gone but where's Cheeto? Say, what about turning on the lights?”

“You're dead.”

“OK, drop it. I've decided not to be afraid.”

This narrows the cosmos down to this experience of the machine, and it is a powerful moment in the novel. We think of the universe as cosmic and vast, one of the ultimate horrors of finding out you are artificial, is it narrows that cosmos down to your experience, nothing can be trusted.

That is not the end of the weird elements, but the start…

 “Seven thousand yen... Three-week old fetuses… development outside the mother's womb... Mice with gills... Aquatic mammals.

The progression of the novel goes weirder and weirder; the machine seems to think humans need to be partially aquatic, and considering the way climate change is changing the dynamics of life today, this seems like better speculation than many surrealist fictions. Much like PKD Abe can be seen to be predicting better than some authors who actually try.

Inter-Ice Age 4 is fantastic SF. The cultural context and view into time and era it comes from make it even more fascinating.  I ordered a used copy, and while it wasn’t expensive, there were not many copies. The one I got was ancient, stained, and smelling of deep storage. It also added a certain otherworldly feeling to it.