Ironically, science fiction narratives succeed as a tool of IR pedagogy by shifting the context for the problems and processes that undergraduates often find overwhelming from a global to a galactic scale. In The Final Frontier, Campbell and Gokcek simultaneously connect students' lived experience to two different abstractions: the creative narratives of science fiction and the theories of global politics. Both kinds of texts are sense-making exercises, and studying the connections between the two empowers students to participate in the construction of metaphors that integrate IR theories into their own pre-existing understandings of the world.