"Confront the Cruelty of the Future": Coloniality, Ecology, and Futurity in Abe Kōbō's Inter Ice Age 4

Abstract:It should no longer be controversial to begin with the premise that the formation of the genre of science fiction (SF) is intimately intertwined with the history of colonialism. Narratives of imperial expansion, encounters with alterity, and war continue to permeate much of the genre's megatext, which, in turn, sets the ideological limits to its imagination of different futures. In effect, the historical underpinnings of the genre in colonial rhetoric engenders a colonization of the future as such, rendering it subordinate to the terms of the past and present. This essay explores this dimension of the genre's continuing colonial legacy by way of a re-examination of Abe Kōbō's 1958 novel Inter Ice Age 4. With a story centered on the struggles surrounding the development of a forecasting machine that can predict the future by extrapolating algorithmic data from the present, Abe's novel proves to be ironically prescient in its anticipation of postcolonial and neoliberal regimes of futurity organized around the extraction of value from the speculation and securitization of future ecological crises, despite the author's expressed resistance to the reduction of the future to a mere continuity with the present. I consider the novel's engagement with the ethics of futurity as a metafictive commentary on what Istvan Csicsery-Ronay has discussed as the SF genre's desire to imaginatively transform older forms of imperialism into technoscientific empires, which will serve as a point of departure for articulating the desire for different horizons of possibility, different horizons of futurity whose potentiality may not be already exhausted or rendered inert in the actualization of history.