Kōbō Abe’s Inter Ice Age 4

Kōbō Abe wrote Inter Ice Age 4 in 1958–59. It has a computer predicting human behaviour, melting polar ice, genetic engineering and people being redesigned for life in a flooded world. In other words, a remarkably contemporary set of anxieties imagined almost seventy years ago. That temporal collision became the starting point for the cover. I used a period photograph of Ethel C. Marden and Robert D. Elbourn operating SEAC, one of the earliest electronic computers. The machine looks enormous, physical and hopelessly obsolete, while what Abe imagined with it feels anything but obsolete.

I wanted the cover to sit precisely in that gap: a future imagined in the 1950s that somehow managed to arrive.