Abstract

I am grateful to the editor of this journal for the opportunity to respond to Tom Moylan's comments on my Dystopia: A Natural History. There are some serious misapprehensions about my arguments in Moylan's treatment, as well as a failure to engage with some of the central themes of the book. Substantial differences also clearly exist between my approach and Moylan's approach to the subject of dystopia and indeed to scholarly engagement in general. Illuminating these further might well assist students of the subject to further explore the relevant issues.Moylan is chiefly a student of science fiction rather than dystopian fiction as such. His two books are mainly concerned with the period from the 1970s...