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.

摘要：

以科幻小说（SF）流派的形成与殖民主义历史密切相关的前提开始，应该不再有争议。帝国扩张、与他异性遭遇和战争的叙事继续渗透到这一流派的大文本中，这反过来又为它对不同未来的想象设定了意识形态的限制。实际上，殖民修辞中流派的历史基础导致了对未来的殖民化，使其从属于过去和现在的条件。本文通过重新审视安倍工房 1958 年的小说《Inter Ice Age 4》，探讨了这一流派持续的殖民遗产的这一维度. 安倍的小说以围绕开发预测机器的斗争为中心，该机器可以通过从现在推断算法数据来预测未来，具有讽刺意味的是，安倍的小说对围绕价值提取组织的后殖民和新自由主义未来政权的预期具有讽刺意味的先见之明。来自对未来生态危机的推测和证券化，尽管作者表达了反对将未来缩减为与现在的连续性。我认为这部小说对未来伦理的参与是对 Istvan Csicsery-Ronay 所讨论的科幻小说类型渴望将旧形式的帝国主义富有想象力地转变为技术科学帝国的一种元虚构评论，