THE STRATEGIES OF ZEUS <i> by Gary Hart (Worldwide Library: $4.50) </i>

While other presidential candidates have been at work on their autobiographies and political testaments (see pp. 8-9), Gary Hart’s publishers have released instead a paperback edition of his second novel, “The Strategies of Zeus.”

While fictional disarmament talks stall in Geneva, 1987, political hawks in Moscow and Washington, with secret plans to test their most advanced missile systems (the Red Star and the Cyclops, respectively), want to see an end to “two decades of detente idiocy.” Convinced that the arms race is out of hand, a representative of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, Frank Connaughton, begins his own unofficial disarmament overtures toward a beautiful Soviet interpreter, Ekaterina Davydova. The two meet secretly, trade information in the hope of making the world a safer place for their children, and even manage to refrain from physical intimacy until nearly the end of the novel.

Will the two spies be tried for treason in the end? Or will they be recognized as patriots who “love and defend” their respective countries? Hart’s political message rings loud and true: “Peace does not lie in perfecting a political system--it lies in changing the attitudes and beliefs of those who live in it.”

A reader will wish him better luck with his political campaign.

A COMPANION TO CALIFORNIA

by James D. Hart (University of California Press: $15.95) This comprehensive reference book and history of California (1510-1987) has now been reissued. Information is assembled alphabetically, from ABAG (the acronym for Assn. of Bay Area Governments) to Zinfandel and Zukor, Adolph. One learns, for example, that more park sites in the state have been named for naturalist and preservationist John Muir than for anyone else, that the port of San Pedro was founded by Phineas Banning in 1851, and that Edward G. Robinson was of Romanian ancestry. The volume includes maps and illustrations and a chronological index.

CHEKHOV

by Henri Troyat translated from the French

by Michael Henry Heim (Fawcett Columbine/Ballantine: $10.95) Henri Troyat’s intimate biography of the great Russian short story writer and playwright. Based on letters and the stories and plays themselves, Troyat links biographical data to works of fiction they inspired: Summer visits to his paternal grandfather reappear in the “images, scents and sounds of his future masterpiece ‘The Steppe.’ ”

The biography is studded with remarks such as, “ ‘Moscow! Moscow! Moscow!’--a cry of hope. How often he had uttered it in his native Taganrog before putting it in the mouths of his heroines in ‘Three Sisters’!” Or, “The Kiselyovs seemed intent on squandering what was left of their fortune. Chekhov would remember them when he described the decline of a family estate in ‘The Cherry Orchard.’ ”

Chekhov’s life is vividly presented: his tyrannical, fanatically religious father, his medical studies, his early anonymous writings for humor magazines to support his impoverished parents, his short stories, the failures and successes of his plays, the tuberculosis that would kill him at age 44 in 1904.

Troyat himself professes a “profound harmony with (the) writer’s conception of art and of life”; indeed, the book conveys no critical analysis of Chekhov’s work. But, in these pages, Jascha Kessler felt that such a critique would have been burdensome; Chekhov’s exemplary work, he said, “will go on speaking to us by itself.”

HERE LIES

An Autobiography

by Eric Ambler (The Mysterious Press: $8.95) The autobiography of the award-winning writer, from his childhood in South London, his early career as an engineer, advertising copywriter and, ultimately, his writing--his fiction and screenplays. As Times reviewer Charles Champlin wrote, “We learn . . . when Ambler’s now classic thrillers were written, the slim advances the early ones fetched him, how they sold and how his sales and reputation grew. But there is relatively little on the making of the books. It is as if Ambler had led a thorough tour of the house, but tiptoes past the closed door of his study.”