The Sorcerer's Apprentice.(Children's Review)(Brief Article)

Ted Dewan. Doubleday, $15.95 ISBN 0-385-32537 1

Dewan (Top Secret) uses the tale of a misguided hex to warn modern sorcerers

about their own technology. Inside a dilapidated building in an industrial

wasteland, an inventor known as "the Sorcerer" makes weird contraptions out of

lightbulbs and gears. When the workshop grows untidy, he simply creates a robot

Apprentice to clean up after him. (The Apprentice's head holds a record player,

with Paul Dukas's titular bombastic scherzo as the implied backdrop.) But the

robot reads the blueprint for itself, and builds a second machine to take its

place, the duplicate builds …