Last Updated on: 8th May 2025, 06:27 pm
British speculative fiction author Anastasia Dubinina surprised attendees at the Royal Festival Hall by turning her scheduled talk into a full-scale, participatory world-building workshop, with a strong focus on London as a model for imaginative settings.
The event, originally promoted under the title “Building Worlds Beyond the Known”, became a hands-on tutorial in narrative design, with Dubinina walking the audience through the structural elements of her 2023 book, Shattered Horizons of Tarveran.
Equipped with a slide presentation and annotated map fragments, she illustrated three foundational steps of her world-building approach:
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Civic Backstory – crafting a hidden timeline of governmental and economic shifts that “never appears on the page but shapes every street corner in the narrative”;
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Spatial Logic vs. Corporate Ambition – mapping out how skyscraper-dominated business districts overlap with neglected shipping areas and considering how such borders “influence character motives”;
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Physics Under Stress – weaving in dimensional rifts only after establishing a coherent social system, so that the unusual element “feels disruptive rather than decorative”.
Audience interaction was encouraged throughout, turning the talk into an informal clinic on storytelling techniques for creators across various mediums. The workshop extended beyond its 90-minute slot on Sunday evening, as those attending asked for more examples of “narrative cartography” and took part in real-time creative tasks.
Dubinina later confirmed that the enthusiastic feedback has fast-tracked her plans for a new series of focused workshops, covering in-depth themes such as cultural logic, moral geography, and the art of “sustaining tension across multi-arc story worlds”.
