Abe, Kōbō "Inter Ice Age 4"

Abe, Kōbō (安部 公房 Abe Kōbō) "Inter Ice Age 4" (Japanese: 第四間氷期 Dai yon kan pyouki) - 1959

This was our international online book club book for February 2022.

Before I start talking about the book, I must point out that I never liked science fiction. I don't mind dystopian literature, if it is something that could really happen or that would have happened, had a certain even not taken place or succeeded or whatever.

This is none of that. It really is more a fantasy of someone who would love science to do things that aren't possible. Maybe they will be in future. But a lot of times, we wouldn't even want that to happen.

Sometimes, a science fiction novel has interesting characters or a good plot. This one had neither. I couldn't warm to any of the figures, you hardly got to know them at all. And the plot, well, this was a very predictable novel, you could tell what was going to happen and it happened exactly as I thought it might. Strange and weird might be the most positive remarks I might give it.

I doubt that I will ever read a book by this author again.

Comment by another reader:
"For me the read was not very easy right now. It reminded me of the cold war while watching real war on the news ... so I ended up finishing the reading some days too late. The author was all new to me, but what really opened up the book for me was the afterword where he wrote about his intention to make people think."

From the back cover:

"A Novel of the Future

This is yet another of Mr. Abe's ominous configurations (Woman in the Dunes etc.) this time staking out its uncertain ideological imperatives in a grave new world submerged under water. In the beginning, however, Professor Katsumi who has a computer capable of making predictions, has no idea of the work undertaken in a still more dehumanized laboratory. But a double murder, an analysis of one of the bodies & some anonymous phone calls (this is all quite exciting) alert him to a traffic in human fetuses corroborated by his wife's enforced curettage. Witnessing the works in progress - growing rooms for human submarine colonies which will make human survival possible - he is also threatened with his own extinction betrayed by his own machine & he's made to consider various ethical conjectures & priorities: should one deny one's self - should the present be expendable in the interest of the future? While not everybody's book, Abe's conceptual startler has a chilly precision which makes the unthinkable only too threateningly possible. Kirkus"