Inter Ice Age 4

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Kōbō Abe

Knopf, New York, 1970, English; originally published in Japanese

Fiction

ISBN: 9780399505195

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Greg Lynn

On Greg Lynn’s Book List

Peter Eisenman recommended that I read Abe’s The Box Man and The Ruined Map while I was working in his office. I was in fact working on layering maps and shifting boxes so in title they were appropriate manuals in addition to their value as literature. Thanks to Peter, I discovered Inter Ice Age 4 and this, along with Ballard’s The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista, was the inspiration for me to later write the text “A New Style of Life,” imagining a few minutes waking up in one of the Embryological Houses. Growing up watching Ultraman, Johnny Sokko and His Flying Robot, The War of the Gargantuas, and Godzilla, I suppose I still have an appetite for post-nuclear, ecological-disaster, natural-mutation, urban-destruction novels.

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