Losing Lanterns: A Qalidar Novella

by Christina Lea

Zira, a roguish explorer and treasure-hunter from a medieval world, is drawn into the multiverse-spanning machinations of a charming, amoral mystic. She finds herself exploring the between-space known as Qalidar and strange echoes of her own home world. While dealing with a terrible loss, she discovers disturbing things about the forces that shaped her universe and the inhuman intelligences that are trying to warp it even further.

82 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2015

About the author

After slipping out the back door of the local university with a degree in psychology, Christina Lea worked in laboratories, charted ground water movement, started fires, ran a comic book store, did web stuff for a fat-cat corporation, purged everything associated with that job from her brain, and wrote all kinds of stuff, including games, technical specifications, proposals, news articles, revolutionary leaflets, stories, and really long sentences. Some of these things she did for herself and some she did for people who paid her — or were supposed to pay her. You might also remember her as Tanith E. Howard of the Dunwich Herald, although the odds of this are low and constantly dropping. She lives in the Ozarks with a dude and a bunch of cats.

Reviews

[Bernard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Huh? What just happened?

Well the end is here. That is, I finished the book. But that's also an apt summary of the story itself. But getting there was hard, mind-warping work. I think the key takeaway for me is the clever science fiction idea that spells out what happens to a time traveler when other time travelers alter the timeline.

I admit the early parts of this story are confusing. Fantasy? Science fiction? Betrayal and drama and fast action combine to form a story centered around the quest of Zira, our heroine that sometimes seemed just as confused as the reader! And what will she do at the end once the plot machinations of the antagonists become clear? How about something drastic and at the same time potentially catastrophic!

Kudos from me to the author for spinning a tale that doesn't require knowing the source material to work, but at the same time likely would be of considerable aid to the reader. The writing itself demonstrated literary cleverness, as more than a few times I paused in the reading, impressed with the word choice and sentence construction.

If you are looking for a science fiction story that leaves you wondering what is going on in the world until literally the last pages, then throws out an even more unexpected conclusion, then this is the story for you.