This is the common ground of the mystery, science fiction, and ghost-story genres. An unknown monster X in the forest is far more frightening than the familiar lions on view at just about every zoo in the country. There is no question that unknown objects are much more disturbing than those we know they also have a far greater potential energy. …to the effect that long ago, before a lion was called a lion, it was a supernatural being to be feared like a demon but once it had been given the name “lion,” it became just another wild animal that could be overcome by humans. In another Abe essay, “Science Fiction, the Unnameable,” Abe mentions a Thomas Mann passage somewhere (Abe is unsure where): And it would be something like an Abe story. My working model of reality would be seen floating in a void. And in this confrontation a sort of ironic double vision would occur. I would interrogate the intruder from a perspective embedded in contemporary psychology and Lockean property rights.

What do I do? How do I react? How will my dog react? How would I interpret the features and qualities of the unknown creature? Surely something comically banal would take place. Maybe even the term “place” is misleading. Another planet? Another dimension? Neither. He wanted the fantasy of hypotheses to be played out in the petri dish of our communal store of rationality.Ī new life-form approaches me while I’m writing in my office in Mid-Coast Maine, America. Unable to take sides on whether science fiction should be “hard” or “realist” (which is of course just another method for creating a narrative, not stenography of some Ultimate Reality) or consign itself to unadulterated fantasy, Abe demanded a synthesis of both. It becomes activated, objectified, and our consciousness is roughly shaken. When a fresh hypothesis is brought in, the everyday is suddenly destabilized and begins to take on strange new forms. Or rather hypotheses exist, but they cling so stubbornly to phenomenal reality that they have already lost their function.

Maybe what we call the everyday is just thought without hypotheses. In his 1962 essay “The Boom in Science Fiction,” Abe writes:

Kobo Abe defended science fiction, but what he himself wrote is probably more accurately termed “fictional science.” Or Poe-esque Lab Work. I mean the categories of freedom available to an artist to record the realities of his time in the highest spiritual register and with the greatest degree of simple honesty. And I don’t mean simply sociological iron cages or empty deserts of shifting discourse. By “perspective” I don’t mean the identity of the author. The perspective of the narrative (I hesitate to use the phrase “meta-perspective” in case the point I’m making gets obscured by jargon) is something more elusive and foundational. The former is obvious even if complex, instrumental even if an ornament, and it flits over the surface of a written work like pixelated stars on black water. The perspective of a character locked inside of a narrative is one thing, but the perspective positioning of the narrative itself is another. There’s perspective and then there’s perspective.

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