SOME OF THE KINDER PLANETS

Nine original premises elaborated—sometimes cleverly, sometimes awkwardly—into short stories. Their protagonists, 8 to 14, are little Wunderkinds, and the people they come in conflict with are described as stupid. The narrator is firmly—a little too firmly—on the side of his clever heroes, who do not benefit from his admiration—they often look a little obnoxious. In ``Tashkent,'' a boy tapes pieces of paper with names of faraway places all over his body and waits for them to fall off—the last one left will be the first place he visits when he grows up; Cluny, in ``Strangers on the Shore,'' decides to publish a magazine for people with exotic names; and ``Tweedledum and Tweedledee'' limns the fate of a boy who shocks his teacher with his story about a ``commando raid on Wonderland.'' The contrived plots, along with the presence of laser printers and fax machines, give real-life drama to the mysterious overtones of science fiction, but the narration is uneven: sometimes painterly and lyrical, sometimes bordering on sentimental. (Fiction. 8-12)