Essa Hansen’s Nophek Gloss returns to a classic speculative-fiction story-type: A young hero escapes to the stars from a rural origin as a fugitive behind the wheel of his own starship. However, this particular journey propels its hero, Caiden, rather than the other way around, as he encounters information, technologies, and characters, all of whom enable him to change location, rather giving the friction that creates a lasting character.

Caiden’s journey from rural backwater to rocketing through the stars has a universal quality to it, then: Something deep in the psyche connects with a kind of mental isolation reaching out beyond its confines. However, living in so well-trodden a story demands a certain lack of imagination from Caiden, outside of normal childhood innocence. Caiden blindly accepts that his mother and father are not his biological relations and that no one in his society has a choice in their lives, that everything has been decided by a caste above their station. Caiden’s frustrating social situation lacks detail, but Caiden has no time to question or gather more information before his village’s own overseers begin a massacre—which he only escapes by stumbling into a derelict starship. This opening to the story sets a pace that barely allows any time to establish emotional connection, impart too much information, or question Caiden’s motives. It ultimately rushes the story along and out of most character insights.

Due to that pace, Caiden does not seem to be really making any of his own decisions. He has limited knowledge and frequently no option but to move one step forward to avoid an attack from a stranger. Always being on the run leaves him no chance to express his own personality. It brooks none of the missteps that build character or leave a unique stamp on a personality. Once Caiden sets off on his voyage, he can only learn about his massive “universe” when he can convince someone to sit down and explain it to him. At one point, he accidentally opens, and briefly crosses through, a door to another place—one that we later learn only he can enter thanks to a genetic superpower—and must be told that he and his spaceship had momentarily entered an alternate universe. Fortunately, a crew of space smugglers swiftly rescue him and provide limited schooling, but Caiden must still frequently turn to a disappointingly blunt form of exposition—databases and research computers—for information.

This inorganic act of continually filling in information lacks a narrative affect, and often simply reinforces Caiden’s already stated objective. The information that he manages to uncover despite the struggle involves aliens, spaceports, and cyborgs, which Caiden accepts without question because he has no time to ask. Only after evading another attack does Caiden learn that his village’s overseers belong to a vast organization that extends far into the universe. He swears a mechanical, instinctual revenge that has little personal touch to it: For us, the overseers murdered Caiden’s village and family far before much more could be done than to establish their names. For Caiden’s part, he now has no other motivation to live besides revenge, and all the details around him become only a hurdle in his way.

The truncation of childhood by means of trauma proves to be the deepest insight and most interesting aspect of Caiden’s quest. In exchange for a session with a device that records his memories of the village massacre as real-time events, Caiden gains credits to spend on a medical procedure that ages him from a child to a years-older adult in a matter of hours. In addition to being the strongest possible metaphor, this also represents the most interesting technology Caiden encounters. The process to age himself from adolescence to his earlier twenties requires destroying his body and rebuilding it again. Finally presented with a substantive decision, Caiden unfortunately goes through with it. He skips his teenage years and all the definitive character-building experiences therein. While this does little to advance Caiden’s character in a traditionally novelistic way, this most substantive decision of his—and the novel—creates much-needed conflict among the smugglers with whom he surrounds himself.

The smugglers who take Caiden in do not normally disagree with him, but further enable his quest for revenge. Caiden owns the ship on which the crew travels, by the technicality of arriving at its wreck minutes before they do, and they fix the ship so that they can blast off in it. They come into Caiden’s life already captained by a gruff elderly individual, and consisting of a pilot, a mechanic, a medic who cooks, and a fighting cyborg. While they have different roles on the ship itself, as a surrogate family they also have a tendency merely to reinforce the revenge quest. The medic alone openly criticizes Caiden, but only for the petty reason of Caiden’s youth, and they make peace once Caiden buys adulthood. Instead of teaching Caiden responsibility aboard the ship, then, the doctor ultimately waits until he can deal with an adult. Similarly, the adults aboard the ship decided they would rather work with an adult than a child.

Still, the decision to buy adulthood brings handwringing because Caiden could die as a result of the process. These physical horrors unnerve the pilot, but he merely removes himself, allowing another to sit by Caiden’s bedside. The small conflict that had opened here therefore resolves itself once Caiden attains physical adulthood, and the pilot has simply avoided the complications of working with a child. Frustratingly, while they can provide some direction about the overseers’ new whereabouts or the way the spaceship works when necessary, the pilot—and the rest of the crew, too—have no opinion on what a child might need beyond what Caiden can think of himself. But, pressured by his singular motivation and the novel’s overly fast pacing, Caiden has no greater need than his revenge—and so all complications are resolved summarily.

For example: Fueled by his need for vengeance, Caiden glosses over his spaceship that can skip between universes, automatic food producers, and cybernetic enhancements to focus on this rather original and horrifying concept. In this way, Caiden’s singular focus on revenge and the experience of his trauma puts unfortunate mufflers on the rest of the universe. This narrow focus takes the wonders of exploring different planets for granted to such an extreme that even whole universes can be merely skimmed over. Without a setting that effectively captures his or our interest, Caiden exists only for his revenge, which in turn—since it is not invested in any meaningful character or relationship—exists only for its own sake. Familiar stories can often be reinvented for renewed emotional impact, but they still require precise handling if they are to examine a compelling character.