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Douglas_Knight comments on Open Thread April 8 - April 14 2014 - Less Wrong Discussion
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A work doesn't need to inform daily life in order to be didactic. 1984 is about the dynamics of totalitarianism, Animal Farm is a thinly fictionalized Russian Revolution, Down and Out in London and Paris is about class relations in Western Europe, and so forth -- but practically everything Orwell wrote was primarily meant to be instructive in some way.
Maybe I have too precise a definition, but I think "didactic" should mean giving advice, and not just information. Almost all fiction is about psychological insight, but that isn't directly practical. And I don't mean "practical" in a daily life way: the reason I don't count Animal Farm as didactic isn't because I'm not a Bolshevik, but because even if I were, it still wouldn't tell me how to change the course of the revolution.