Brief Outline of
Quilandria: A Novel about Minds, Ideas, and Other Worlds
(no major spoilers)
Liane Gabora, July 10, 2026
Stella, who is completing her PhD in quantum photonics in Montreal, learns that one of her housemates, an artist named Alyzia, claims to visit a realm called Quilandria where people’s inner worlds appear as hyperspherical vessels of light known as Quiliands. If someone bends the truth, Alyzia sees light bend (refract); if someone has a flash of insight and reflects on an idea, she sees a flash of light reflect within their Quiliand. Stella is skeptical, yet intrigued that Alyzia’s realm has a self-consistent logic that accords with the laws of optics.
Stella’s housemates convince her to co-star in a show called The Glory of Groove, in which they develop scientific interpretations of Alyzia’s ‘inner light visions,’ using familiar expressions that replace the word ‘God’ with Groove’ (e.g., In Groove We Trust). Bruno, a friend of the household, moves in, igniting a love triangle between him and the two women. The show goes viral, and they’re stalked by opportunists keen to exploit Alyzia’s ability to visualize people’s inner lives. Stella falls behind in her work, and her professors see deep-fakes parodies of the show that convince them Stella is a crackpot, and attempt to expel her.
When tragedy strikes, Stella channels her emotions into a project that combines insights into human nature from Quilandria with the goal of finding a scientific framework for how culture evolves (analogous to Darwin’s theory of natural selection). She has visions of Quilandria, where she encounters Glisothul, who reveals that Earth is in peril because its inhabitants’ inner light is dwindling. Stella learns that when humans distort the truth, disown undesirable aspects of themselves, or repress painful memories, they vacate parts of their Quiliand, making them vulnerable to the inner-light-devouring Uthren. Glisothul has a plan to stop the Uthren, but though Stella has learned almost everything there is to know about physical light, nothing has prepared her for a potentially lethal battle for inner light.
Like Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions by Edwin A. Abbott, this work of speculative fiction reveals a hidden world and uses diagrams to illuminate its logic. As with Will Eaves’ Murmur or All That We See or Seem by Ken Liu it is idea-driven, and incorporates AI and technology, while its humor has echoes of the sharp banter of The Likeness by Tana French.
The novel explores themes of legacy, friendship, belonging, and truth versus dishonesty. It has been workshopped at Cascades and Futurescapes Speculative Fiction Workshops, and the Novel Architectures Summer Writing Workshop. It was inspired by visions I had when I was young, and the science and technology elements are extrapolated from my research at The University of British Columbia. These factors make me uniquely positioned to write the book.
The visions that inspired the novel have also inspired an AI-powered interactive platform, the Indra's Net Project, developed with Unreal Engine. The project subsequently became the subject of one of the author's former graduate students' master's thesis, and was the subject of an article in Leonardo (Rakshit, A., & Gabora, L. 2025. An AI-powered interactive platform for visualizing psychological states and processes.
(For any editors who might happen to be lurking out there, my literary agent, Bill Hanna of Acacia House, would be happy to provide a lengthier synopsis (with spoilers) and/or the entire manuscript.)
