Written under his Richard Bachman pseudonym, Stephen King’s novel The Running Man was first published in 1982; it describes the malicious future of 2025.

King imagines that a massive authoritarian media conglomerate has a functional monopoly on all of American culture. To distract from its greed and incompetence, the quasi-governmental entity has replaced the country’s health care system, already strained by vast ecological devastation and income disparity, with a series of obscene game shows.

Corporations have successfully poisoned all natural resources. Basic necessities are unaffordable. Everyone is broken and everything sucks. If you are suffering, the TV (always turned on) reminds you that this is the fault of immigrants, of progressives, of gay people, of women—and actually it's yo

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