Notable:

INTER ICE AGE 4 by Kobo Abe. 228 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

Creator of a haunting Kafkaesque nightmare, The Woman in the Dunes, and an existential detective story, The Ruined Map, Author Kobo Abe has the traditional Japanese knack of taking familiar literary inputs and converting them into exotically fascinating readouts. His latest effort is a fictional foray into political science fiction.

In Inter Ice Age 4, sophisticated computers concur in predicting that "the future would see a Communist society" throughout the world. At the same time, however, the polar icecaps have begun to thaw, threatening another age of glaciers. How then will an earthbound and capitalistic society survive? Abe sets up a group of underworldly scientists who aim, through biological mutation, to turn men into aquatic animals. These new creatures will live on underwater continents, safe from the looming ice age and the global Communist takeover. Ingenious, but even if it meant nothing less than the survival of capitalism, would you rather have your son a fish?

THE ONLY WAR WE'VE GOT by Derek Maitland. 270 pages. Morrow. $5.95.

After Catch-22's painful revel in World War II, and M-A-S-H's super-sanguine romp in Korea, it was inevitable that someone should take up Viet Nam. This first novel by a British journalist who covered the war is effectively mordant about military decadence, debauchery and destruction.

In Maitland's view there is no humanity in such a war and the book's cast of caricatures exhibits none. They include Wilkinson, a cowardly war correspondent; a general who invents a major enemy offensive to derail the Paris peace talks (rival U.S. Army and Marine Corps units end up bombarding each other); and a CIA agent who, while posing as a beggar, learns of a Tet offensive against the most cherished spot in Saigon, the "Big PX."

The satire is sometimes as obvious as an antitank gun fired at a plate-glass window. At other times the book's Boschian portraits of war are frightening and fascinating.

BELLOC: A BIOGRAPHICAL ANTHOLOGY edited by Herbert Van Thai. 386 pages. Knopf. $8.95.

When I am dead, I hope it may be said:

His sins were scarlet, but his books were read.

Pity poor Hilaire Belloc, to whom the opposite has happened. Most of his 100 or so books are out of print, and he is remembered, if at all, for his failings: as a gruff, belligerent polemicist, who wrote biased history and ceaselessly propagandized for an eccentric mode of intolerant, muscular Catholicism.

This engaging and intelligent collection of snippets from his work, gathered to commemorate the centenary of Belloc's birth, suggests that it is time to revise the reputation of this half French but wholly British Superman of Letters.

The anthology does not hide Belloc's often absurd fixations. But it does reveal a writer of rare genius and rarer virtues, who had a Romanic love of order, ceremony and pietas, a raging contempt for humbug, snobbism and cant, an adult gusto and a childlike faith, an unerring eye for the telling detail of a life or a landscape, and a blunt, stately, crisp and virile style.

DOCTOR COBB'S GAME by R.V. Cassill. 532 pages. Bernard Geis. $7.95.

Cassill fails to seduce because cruel gods have ordained that a novelist shall not deal in occult matters in a realistic novel. Realism requires a two-inch sub-flooring, with studding not more than 18 inches apart. Besides, the author is much more adept with the occult.

The realistic and rather weary stage setting before which Cassill tries his tricks is postwar Britain, and involves a Minister of War and an assortment of more or less ravishing birds more or less for hire. What sets the book apart is the extraordinary skill and imagination that the author lavishes upon the title figure, Dr. Michael Cobb. Cobb is a pander in the form of a society osteopath. Yet Cassill manages to present him sympathetically as a high-souled practitioner of black magic and sexual adept who trains a young whore to take part in a serious, occult effort to persuade the rocket-rattling minister to make love, not war.

DAVID REES AMONG OTHERS by Anthony West. 309 pages. Random House. $6.95.

It might be thought that having created this sometimes fascinating and occasionally excruciating little chronicle about a lonely boy growing up in England just after World War I, Anthony West should not be plagued by any novel reader's knowledge that the author is the natural son of Rebecca West and H. G. Wells. Yet the book, which seems to be a fictional memoir, is profoundly preoccupied with its hero's growing awareness that the woman posing as his aunt is really his mother, and that he himself knows nothing about his father. Born in 1914, West is a semi-public figure in the U.S. For almost 20 years he has been a wide-ranging critic for The New Yorker. He has written seven novels, including one called Heritage about a boy outgrowing his resentment that his celebrated parents never bothered to marry. Reading David Rees Among Others, one inevitably begins to wonder what is, and what is not, literally true. The result is profoundly corrosive to that suspension of literal belief that allows a novel to work upon the imagination.

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