The greatest pleasures of Rikki Ducornet’s Trafik are linguistic, or, more accurately, they are sonic, tactile — in a word, sensual. Consider this early passage, which not only captures the book’s tone, rhythm, and playful humor but also introduces one of its character’s obsession with the sensual qualities of objects:

For Mic, the Lights are all about cities. City streets, the souks brimming with things of hammered copper and brass in stacks. Boxes of tools, ruined ceiling fans, wine, wrenches, screwdrivers, and brass tacks. Manhattan. Its orange and yellow taxis. Their bright bumpers. Elevators. Hollywood. Above all: Hollywood […] He roams the Chateau Marmont. Lounges poolside. Becomes intimate with coffee makers, the showerheads, and majestic freezers. Mic adores the Chateau Marmont. And Al Pacino. His sprawling pad, its many faucets. Pacino’s faucets! His blender, his juicer!

Billed as “a novel in warp drive,” Trafik is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi picaresque, the tale of a pair of asteroid miners, Quiver and Mic, as they move through a universe from which Earth has blown itself out of existence. Quiver is a genetically-engineered human grown in an envelope on the Moon; Mic is her robot companion. Though they are oddly matched, Quiver and Mic are two versions of the same character: a displaced, isolated individual longing for connection, meaning, and companionship.

Although Quiver and Mic are only able to experience humanness in a virtual fashion, the isolated duo is presented as an undeniably human family, irritating and bolstering one another by turns. When Mic complains about Quiver’s bodily odors, she “confronts Mic with her height, majestic on legs that, to Mic’s dismay, go on forever. ‘You forking self-righteous GIZMO!’ she shrieks. ‘The normal functioning of my body is not an indignity! . . . You are accusing me of being human – you maddening THINGAMABOB!’” After Quiver’s outburst, “Mic is so distraught … he suffers a brief glottological rust rash. For the first time in their history together, he is deprived of speech . . . he stares into the void Quiver has just now revealed to him. Never before has he ‘felt’ so existentially compromised.”

Quiver and Mic reconcile, but this pattern — an interminable cycle of arguments over minor irritations followed by apologies and acts of re-connection — brings about the pair’s downfall. When one of their blowouts leads to the accidental destruction of Quasi, a valuable mineral-laden asteroid, Quiver and Mic “go rogue,” setting a course for the fabled planet known as Trafik.

A series of stops at wildly surreal planets follow. One features virtual floating heads; another is populated by dolls made of clay. Each detour reinforces the novel’s central concern with isolation, longing, and loss: “How often, Quiver thinks, how often have I been without access to safety . . . How often have I been between planets, between worlds, between galaxies – without footing, relentlessly alone, without promise of release, trapped in the web of unknowing, the unending memory of loss.”

Neither Quiver nor Mic experienced Earth before the planet was obliterated. As a result, both are fairly obsessed with things Earthly. While Quiver dreams of the planet’s lost flora and fauna, and secretly harbors a copy of Julio Cortázar’s From the Observatory — a melancholy dream-index of life of earth, the gift of a lover who “had been made to disappear” — Mic uses a database called a Swift Wheel to comb through humanity’s lost cultural artifacts, from music and films to actors, commercials, and divas. The casting of twenty-first-century pop culture icons as antique throwbacks knowable only through the magic of Mic’s Swift Wheel provides another layer of pleasure: “Iggy Pop wearing nothing but a scarlet umbrella, Rihanna in salted almonds at the MET, Cardi B at the Latin Grammys, and ending with RuPaul.” Such cataloguing slyly points to what is perhaps Trafik’s most intriguing supposition: that collecting, exploring, and archiving scraps of a culture may finally be enough to simulate the world for those who are eternally reeling from its loss.

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