Inter Ice Age 4

4 ideas

1. Forecasting machine exposes a gilled-children programme

   Professor Katsumi builds a forecasting computer, but it is barred from political prediction, so he tests it on a murdered man by reconstructing the dead man's personality and interrogating it. The trail leads to his own assistants, who are running a secret state-backed programme that buys aborted fetuses, including his wife's, and raises them as gill-breathing 'aquans' for a coming world drowned by melting polar ice. The machine, reasoning ahead of him, concludes that he cannot accept this future and must be removed.

2. The future is discontinuous and judges the present

   A real future does not extend present values; it breaks from them, so people who picture tomorrow as today improved will see it as monstrous. The novel holds that the present has no standing to veto the future. Its moral categories are what the future will make obsolete, and resisting on those grounds is a failure to imagine rupture rather than a moral stand.

3. Second-order prediction folds the forecaster in

   A first-order forecast predicts events. A second-order forecast also predicts how people will react once they know that forecast, including the forecaster's own reaction. Once a prediction covers its own publication, it becomes an intervention. A simulation of the forecaster can then outrun and overrule him, as when Katsumi's simulated double decides his fate before he does.

4. Adaptation leaves a residue of loss

   The aquans are built to thrive in the drowned world. Yet at the end an aquan youth feels a longing for land, wind, and air that he has never known. Seen this way, engineering beings to fit a future environment does not remove grief. It moves the grief into the adapted beings, who inherit a longing for the world that was given up.

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