It is challenging to respond to such a positive and generous review, and we appreciate Stephen Benedict Dyson’s close engagement with our book. We share with him a firm belief in the power of fiction as both a tool to engage students’ interest and as the subject of analysis of serious political science thought. Where we diverge a bit is in how we approach the effects of fiction on people’s views about politics. Whereas Dyson rightfully asserts that (some) political fiction reinforces negative perceptions of the political realm, our focus on dystopian fiction stems from our belief that these stories promote people’s belief in their ability to influence the future. By warning us about the destructive potential of societal trends, dystopian fiction gives us all hope that we can avoid a dystopian future. Of course, unlike Dyson’s book, our project uses fiction more as a lens to illustrate key concepts like the panopticon or levels of authoritarianism rather than to make empirical claims.

Dyson suggests that we consider the role of authoritarian leaders themselves, particularly the narratives they weave—and promote as truth—about themselves, their rule, and their success. This is a great point in a lot of ways. Such narratives become a large part of their appeal; they have the power to spin a convincing yarn about past glory and invoke voters’ nostalgia for a “return” to a mythologized better time. (Erdoğan’s rose-colored rhetoric on Turkey’s former greatness, for example, should give us all pause.) After all, as we frequently note in our work, democracy’s greatest weakness is voters’ susceptibility to embracing would-be tyrants who can tell a good story. But the mythmaking that authoritarian leaders do is different from the works we leverage, which contain purposeful sets of warnings framed by their authors as art. Both types of fiction are political, but their purposes and strategies differ mightily. We think it would be great fun to explore the personas and performativity of dictators, but that was not our project here.

Dyson’s closing paragraph in the review brings up some interesting points. Much of what he references is beyond our scope, but his point about methodological limitations in political science mirrors a challenge we had with the political economy chapter that he highlights in his review. It was one of the last things we wrote, and we had a bit of trouble situating it in the book. Most classic dystopian fiction takes an overbearing state as the enemy—but we thought it important to explain that, as the world changes, so do our fears about the future and bad government; rising inequality and environmental degradation linked to capitalism both play a large role in contemporary dystopian fiction. This is where the methodological limitations of a discipline focused on statistical modeling can restrict our understanding of troubling global trends, such as the effects of the expanding power of multinational corporations not just on small/poor states, but also on individuals the world over (a key fear highlighted in current dystopian fiction).