Dystopia In Stephen King's The Running Man

Stephen King’s novel, The Running Man, describes a science fiction dystopia where capitalism and game shows have swirled out of control. Stephen King wrote this novel in the early 1980s under the pseudonym, Richard Bachman. King wanted to advance his way of writing and attempt a different style that required him to take a fictitious name. King wanted his new writing style to be in a different voice and wanted to avoid criticism. In the early 1970s, there was a feeling in the publishing business that one book a year was all the public would accept (Wikia, "Richard Bachman"). The pseudonym allowed King to covertly produce several novels a year. In addition, he thought it was necessary to see if the readers would buy Bachman's books after his sudden fame. Many of his novels were successful under his own name, thus King decided that he wanted to see if his books would achieve the same level of success with the pseudonym. Moreover, King wanted to write a novel that would be similar to the society he lived in the 1970s and that would portray the prejudiced world during that era. Therefore, The Running man is a parallel …show more content…
During the 1970s, there was a high percentage of unemployment (Kannan, "Trends in the 1970s"). Confidence in government plummeted in response to the high inflation and unemployment of that era. King describes the society in The Running Man as corrupt and oppressive. People are divided into structures of power, lower class and upper class. In the 1970s, people were also divided into lower and upper classes. The lower class struggled to find jobs to feed their families. King wanted to convey this to the world and show that people lived in depression due to the lack of material resources and the lack of a supporting