Bookends

2061: ODYSSEY THREE

by Arthur C. Clarke

Ballantine; 279 pages; $17.95

The space explorers measure distance in light-years, but their creator employs more conventional units for time. The sequel to Arthur C. Clarke's 2001 took place only nine years later, in 2010. The latest adventure of the still ( youthful Heywood Floyd and his cybernetic companion, HAL the computer, occurs 51 years further on. As astronomers know, 2061 is the year Halley's comet is next scheduled to enter the inner solar system, providing a sequel of its own. Despite a soft landing on that astral body, the reappearance of the celebrated black monoliths of superintelligence, and references to voicegrams, audiomail and vocards, Clarke's future bears a marked resemblance to the present. Plowing through the void, crew members of the spaceship Universe sit back to enjoy their in-flight film, Gone With the Wind, and Floyd informs a colleague, "They're relaying a lot of material back to Earth through the big dish on Ganymede . . . The networks are yelling for news."

Hints of yet another space odyssey appear at the finale and should be ignored. 2061 occasionally offers a challenging sci-fi aphorism -- "Only Time is universal; Night and Day are merely quaint local customs found on planets that tidal forces have not yet robbed of their rotation" -- but by now the mix of imagination and anachronism is wearing as thin as the oxygen layer on Mars.

KEEPING SECRETS

by Suzanne Somers

Warner Books; 297 pages; $17.95

If, as Tolstoy says, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, so too each child who sleeps through class and cheats on exams has his or her personal story to tell. Suzanne Somers' is about growing up with an alcoholic father. Somers, who played the voluptuous nit-brain Chrissy on the TV hit Three's Company, describes family meals that ended in a cascade of broken dishes and foul-mouthed rages that left her cowering in the closet. As she got older she ran away in other ways: school problems; an early, unwanted pregnancy and marriage; and a bad-check charge (later dismissed). After her breakthrough film roles in American Graffiti and Magnum Force, her therapist observed that she was ill prepared for good fortune. Somers' sister and two brothers all followed their father in alcoholism. But the real point of this grim but touching account is that parents and siblings, the drinkers and those who stoically enabled others to drink, eventually turned to Alcoholics Anonymous and Al-Anon and were able to rebuild their sense of self and family. "Understanding brought relief and clarification," Somers concludes. "Even if the rest of your family doesn't get better, you can. I did."

MONGOOSE, R.I.P.

by William F. Buckley Jr.

Random House; 322 pages; $17.95

There has always been something of the self-delighted mischiefmaker about William F. Buckley Jr., America's Tory toreador. In his summer-weight spy thrillers about the Ivy League CIA agent Blackford Oakes (The Story of Henri Tod, Saving the Queen), the payoff lies partly in the impudence with which Buckley rewrites cold war incidents to include his hero's exploits. This new pastiche begins in early 1963 with failed and sometimes bizarre CIA efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro. U.S. readers are sufficiently detached from the Cuban strongman to see this as comedy, perhaps. But the plot winds on to include the assassination of President Kennedy, and the novel's cheerful inventions fall flat. The old horror of November 1963 floods across the pages, and the author's paper heroics for the first time seem chattery and idle.

KALEIDOSCOPE

by Danielle Steel

Delacorte; 395 pages; $18.95

A priestess of fertility, this Danielle Steel. After the birth of her ninth child, Zara, and the publication of her 23rd book, both mother and author are doing well. Steel these days enters best-seller lists at the top. Kaleidoscope, one of her better tear-stained efforts, is about a less fortunate lady, Hilary Walker, whose father strangled her mother and then killed himself, who was torn from her two beloved sisters, indentured in foster homes and raped by adolescents of both sexes. But Hilary, with eyes like green ice or emerald fire, is a survivor who goes on to make it as a TV executive. And Steel, too maternal to leave a heroine unfulfilled and unmarried, sends her John Chapman, a man with "perfect teeth, and gentle eyes." It seems worth noting that John Chapman is the real name of Folk Hero Johnny Appleseed: fertility again.