Fold, Spindle & Mutilate

THE 480 by Eugene Burdick. 313 pages. McGraw-Hill. $5.

Science fiction has all but expired, trampled to death by onrushing reality. Its successor is what might be called political-science fiction. Its practitioners aspire to write tomes that seem just like historical novels, but in the future tense. Seven Days in May, Fail-Safe, On the Beach--they have gone from Ugly to worse and from ad hoc to pure hokum. Right along with them has gone Eugene Burdick, co-author (with different partners) of both The Ugly American and Fail-Safe, and he now tries it solo.

Burdick's new gimmick--true to their science-fiction ancestry, these novels usually require a gimmick--is the ominous threat to democracy posed by computers, which, he maintains, can tell politicians exactly how to manipulate the inertness of voters to win national elections for sure.

With the Republicans currently most in need of such help, Burdick imagines the real control of that party falling under the influence of two young behavioral scientists, the male named Madison Curver and the beautiful female known only as Dr. Devlin. These two are so brilliant that they talk only in footnotes:

She: A study by Thorndike and Muscatine indicates that professionals are very limited in their span of knowledge.

He: You mean the other Thorndike.

Updating computer techniques that were tried out on a small scale by the Kennedy forces in 1960, Mad and Dev set out to win the G.O.P. nomination for someone who can beat Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

First they program their IBM 7094 to divvy up the electorate according to 480 different combinations of occupation, income, race, religion, class, and so on. Then the computer can simulate voter reactions to any candidate, issue or appeal, without even the trouble of opinion polling and all those confusing "undecideds." Mad, Dev and the 7094 are on their way to the unbeatable propaganda mix. All they need is a possible candidate. They find him in John Thatch, an unknown American engineer who is completing a bridge across a jungle ravine on the border between India and Pakistan. He is clear-eyed, jut-jawed, sensible, intelligent, brave, independent, a superb exponent of do-it-yourself (or Ugly) diplomacy, and altogether a leader any computer could love. Can Thatch perhaps be persuaded to run? Author Burdick takes 313 pages of whirring, humming, and blowing of tubes to come up with an answer and makes next week's real-life drama at the Cow Palace seem, by comparison, as orderly and rational as a convention of geometry teachers.

But in a book where the rest of the characters are punched out of IBM cardboard, the dialogue is Early Superman and the sex Late Mary Worth ("Someone was patting her hand in this comforting protective way . . . She wanted the patting to go on and on"), Candidate Thatch looks almost real.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.