Kobo Abe - Inter Ice Age 4 (Knopf, 1970). 210 pages.

New scan. Searchable pdf (clearscan) with contents in bookmarks, accurate pagination and metadata, etc. Quality is pretty good but not great.


from wikipedia:

Inter Ice Age 4 is an early science fiction novel by Japanese writer Kōbō Abe originally serialized in the journal Sekai from 1958 to 1959 and first translated into English by American scholar E. Dale Saunders in 1970.

Plot elements include submersion of the world caused by melting polar ice, genetic creation of gilled children for the coming underwater age, and a fortune-telling computer predicting the future and advising humans how to deal with it. Because a similar computer in Moscow is being use to make political forecasts, the institute of a Tokyo professor decides to avoid politics and try to foresee the future of an individual. A man is picked, apparently at random, only to be murdered before he can be programmed, but the computer can still read his mind. The resulting involvements are complicated by a climactic shift - Inter Ice Age 4 - which puts Earth underwater.

Christopher Bolton writes, "Abe’s work in the 1950s included short stories about robots, suspended animation, and alien visitation, but it was the 1959 publication of his novel Dai yon kanpyôki (Inter Ice Age 4, 1970) that marked a real turning point for sf in Japan. Incorporating hard-science elements on a scale that no Japanese novelist had attempted, Abe nevertheless pushed the story toward a disturbing, almost surreal conclusion. A number of critics have identified Inter Ice Age 4 as Japan’s first full-length science fiction novel, and a work that helped jump start Japanese interest in the genre."

about the author:

Kobo Abe was a Japanese writer, playwright, photographer and inventor. Abe has been often compared to Franz Kafka and Alberto Moravia for his surreal, often nightmarish explorations of individuals in contemporary society and his modernist sensibilities.