Punch-Card Novel

HURRY SUNDOWN by K. B. Gilden. 1046 pages. Doubleday. $7.95.

The decisive breakthrough came with the test run of Doubleday's giant FIBS (Fiction Imitating Bestseller Simulator). On that historic day, the white-smocked experts loaded the memory banks with the full texts of Uncle Tom's Cabin, Gone With the Wind, selected Faulkner, and the collected works of Erskine Caldwell. They programmed the machine with biographies of key characters. They set it for 1947 in rural Georgia, turned the sex dial to "low," and punched the button marked "1,000 pages." The highspeed printer began to chatter . . .

That day may be closer than anyone thinks. If Hurry Sundown is not the first example of computer fiction, it is a triumphant imitation. The characters are as inevitable as those in great myths or TV wrestling matches. Villain Henry Warren is a pallidly ambitious Flem Snopes type who manages a mammoth truck-farming plantation. His wife Julie-Ann is a neurotic Southern aristocrat. They have (what else?) an idiot child. Hero Reeve Scott is a young Negro just returned from the Army, determined to fight for his rights and not let Henry Warren steal his patch of land away from him. Reeve's mother is (what else?) the heroic matriarch who long ago was Miss Julie-Ann's black mammy. There are elegant dinners and a dynamiting, a courtroom scene and a prefrontal lobotomy. Doom impends.

Yet in a triumph of sentimentality, doom never really happens. Only the right dragons are finally slain. There is little dirt, little passion. Even the style is a mechanical stringing together of cliches. But the computerized formula seems to work. Author "K. B. Gilden" is actually the husband and wife team named Katya and Bert Gilden. They sold the movie rights for this first novel to Hollywood in a sliding-scale deal that could bring them more than $250,000.

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