by Kobo Abe
Illustrated by Machi Abe
English translation by E. Dale Saunders. Published in 1970 by Alfred A. Knopf.
Original Japanese language version serialized in Sekai magazine in 1958 and 1959. Novel published in 1959 by Hayakawa Publishing.
Publication information sourced from the Internet Speculative Fiction Database, the Wikipedia article for Inter Ice Age 4, and the 1970 Alfred A. Knopf edition of the novel.
. . .
“This dog, can it catch fish?”
. . .
“The most fearful of monsters is the well-known friend slightly altered.”
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
One discovery leads to another.
A mystery is interwoven into other mysteries.
The more data you collect the more nuanced your overall picture of life becomes, until, inevitably, there’s no more mystery to it . . . right?
Hmmm.
Or is it more like you ask questions that just lead to more questions with no end in sight?
You’re asking me?!
Katsumi is a government computer engineer who works with a powerful forecasting machine in a near future Japan. This adorably retro predictive engine utilizes punch cards, presumably by the truckload, although the ability to reduce human nature to patterns of holes on paper could be a sly commentary on the vaulting ambitions of those who dream of totally reductionist quantification schemes . . . and/or the arrogance of novelists presuming to capture a convincing portrait of existence via language marks on pages. Science and literature make for quirky, dysfunctional comrades in Inter Ice Age 4.
The Russians and the Americans also have predictive engines. Japan-a nation that’s already been nuked at Hiroshima and Nagasaki-is sandwiched between the atom bomb armed factions. Protracted Cold War Nuclear Jitters has everyone wondering about what’s around the corner. Is Communism the future? Capitalism? Can technology solve the problems created by technology? What about other horizonal crises? Resource depletion? Petroleum shocks? Carbon pollution? Global warming? Rising water lines? Can a future predicting machine be sustained by hard, unyielding quantitative facts and logic alone, or does it also require soft, squishy qualia? Also, if a machine tells us what’s going to happen next . . . is that the machine ordering us around or an infallible prognostication? What’s the difference? How do we know we’re not feeding prejudicial parameters into the system? Is it possible to counteract unconscious bias? Do the experts running these miraculous machines care about anything other than locking down their own domain of hyper-analytic power so governments and corporations have to come calling politely with hat in hand? Could this all be a pseudoscientific scam?
Meanwhile, parallel to the computer shit there’s a bunch of bio-shenanigans going down. Human and animal fetuses are being secretly harvested/kidnapped to be used as fodder for sinister genetic experiments. Two murders have seemingly been committed to keep the lid on this next level Frankenfuckery.
Katsumi stumbles across the fetusnappings while running an experiment with the forecasting machine. At first, Katsumi dismisses the bio-shenanigans as delusional ravings but then his pregnant wife is coerced into what at first seems a forced abortion by mysterious people who managed to impersonate him. Katsumi receives threatening phone calls from someone able to perfectly impersonate his voice. In a world where everything can be totally quantified it may end up being a purely procedural endeavor to output copies of human beings.
Narratively, Katsumi functions as a detective who grapples with mysteries outside and inside himself. His interactions with the forecasting machine resonate with our contemporary dilemmas of generative AI and its attendant hype and hallucinations. Katsumi begins as the technician maintaining the machine intelligence, but ends up facing his own obsolescence within its oracular insights.
Of course, Katsumi could be cracking up under work stress. Inter Ice Age 4 has a peculiar narrative hiccup wherein we find out sorta late about Katsumi’s personal life outside his job. Katsumi-who narrates much of the tale-describes his marriage and home life almost as though he were recounting a hypnotically repressed alter ego. I choose to interpret this as a satirical commentary on the notoriously grinding demands of Japanese work culture, but it may also be a consequence of an already complex narrative being imperfectly translated into English.
The forecasting machine develops some wild talents. It’s artificially intelligent. It can talk in convincingly human tones. If used in conjunction with specialized probes it can scan brains-even dead ones-to formulate semi-self-aware simulations of people that can communicate. That’s right: a computer as a medium in both the technical sense and the spooky sense. Technology even encroaches upon the realms of the occult in the world of Inter Ice Age 4, as it would seem supernatural/spiritual phenomena also submit to radical quantification.
There’s a big twist, of course. Everything’s connected. Inter Ice Age 4 seems to suggest that humans operating under high tech nation states will have extreme difficulties adjusting to global crises that demand massive changes in how we all live. This is due mostly to rigid hierarchies and overspecialization. Each of us has our job, our role. We go to work secure in the knowledge that we have our chosen/imposed thing that we do. But if a big enough crisis threatens to overturn this order, how do we get everyone on board to make necessary changes to prevent disaster? Inter Ice Age 4 assumes that the powers that be would act coercively-that, in fact, a new power base would secretly emerge from within the established order to make otherwise impossible decisions for all of us. The reality disrupting crisis is just too severe to realistically expect squabbling atomized individuals to make effective democratic decisions. Even totalitarian Communism is too rigid, too stratified by the dictates of its cumbersome party elites to react in time. Inter Ice Age 4 is a provocation, in this sense, asking us to look beyond our current limits and roles to consider what lies beyond our specializations, our professionalisms, our nationalisms, our bigotries.
Inter Ice Age 4 also takes perverse joy in describing an aquatic mad science facility and what all it is doing to those human and animal fetuses. These passages are grotesquely comical in the way one expects from the cynically deranged Kobo Abe-a writer famously disillusioned with Japanese Imperialism, Soviet Communism, all forms of nationalism, and capitalism. I’m sure these passages describe impossible things . . . and yet there's so much detail that it’s weirdly convincing. Inter Ice Age 4 functions well as a pitch black science fictional comedy of errors. It even has a happy ending. Sorta.
