SCIENCE FICTION

ELVISSEY by Jack Womack (Tor Books: $12.95 paper; 320 pp. ) Jack Womack is another of the heirs of cyberpunk, one of science fiction’s most interesting new writers. “Elvissey,” fourth entry in a projected six-volume series, could well be his breakout book.

Womack’s dark visions derive a great deal of their intensity from being cast in what are essentially comic structures. “Elvissey” (as in Odyssey) may be the darkest yet, and maintains those tensions.

Isabel and husband John, crouched in the spreading ruins of their marriage, are to be sent across time to bring back . . .

But wait: first, a word from our sponsor, Dryco. Which in fact sponsors just about everything. Exhaustion of the world’s few remaining resources and a new program of “regooding” its citizen-subjects, for example. Thirty years before (in “Heathern”), Dryco had sought a messiah to consolidate its position. Now the game’s again afoot.

And because the C of E (that’s Church of Elvis) is a going concern, Isabel and Jack are sent to retrieve E himself from a parallel world so that Dryco’s minions might worship him in the flesh.

But in E’s world things are a little different, you see. For instance, slaves weren’t freed until Teddy Roosevelt’s time, and E is tone deaf. Oh yeah--When they find E, he’s standing over the mother he just shot.

Womack’s world, at once horribly wrong and terribly right, resembles what might result if you compressed our own into two dimensions, stripping away everything that was not surface, image, sensation. His language, too, is a travesty of today’s media buzz. Nouns are contorted into verbs, expression is flat and affectless, rhythms are telegraphic--as if his characters do not express themselves but simply release brief bursts of information.

The highest purpose of any art is to lift you from your commonplace into other lives, to allow you to look momentarily out different eyes, impinge for a while one of all these other worlds. In Womack’s novels, language, narrative and image all fuse to that end. And lowered into that other world, looking out those other eyes, shouting Eureka!, what you encounter finally is yourself, your own world--itself now gone strange and alien--looking back.