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The most practical reason for a future or faraway setting, however, is authorial protection. If an event is set in the future the inspirational material is disassociated with its negative portrayal. The author has the capacity if questioned to remove all importance from a particular body’s relation to an antagonistic force in the story. For example Gulliver’s Travels makes a critique of the British government at the time, yet only the most observant and those in a similar mind-set as Swift would draw the comparison. Again in Orwell’s two most famous novels, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm , he makes several veiled points against Communism. We can see that for a wide variety of reasons it is often favourable for creators to set their plot in a futuristic setting. For hard Sci-fi writers these include: A credible base for the story, to allow their story to act as a respectable scientific discussion starting point, to indirectly question current scientific views and to springboard would be scientists into writing. For soft Sci-fi writers: To suspend their audience’s disbelief more than other genres, to remove the necessity for complex plot workarounds and to thrill with the potentiality of truth. For dystopias: To act as a social warning, to cause activism against such possibilities and to protect the author from either censorship or disapproval from an external body. Yet all these different explanations for why fiction likes to create worlds set in the future all agree on one point and that is, to quote Kim Stanley Robinson, the fear of ‘ Falling into history’. Conclusion
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