Stephen King Ready Player One Analysis

In the Stephen King novel, The Running Man and the Ernest Cline novel, Ready Player One, both authors depict the crumbling society set in the future. In both novels written from the viewpoints of the 1980’s the authors show a crumbling future due to the advances in technology. The 1980’s brought personal computers, cell phones, camcorders, and game consoles. Through technological advances, our society has become blind to the fake news brought forth in propaganda along with allowing people to escape the real problems in the world. Stephen King shows in many ways that society is blind to fake news, much like in today's society. King portrays this by telling of the free-vee, which is a twenty-four hour broadcast of reality tv. Through this broadcast, the viewers' heads are filled with reasons to hate the people of the shows, instead of filling the people with knowledge of how terrible the air pollution is. It free-vee host are putting on a show to keep the people from causing problems when it comes to the concern of their health or the fiscal stance. The same was shown in Ready Player One, when the people of society would get on their computers and log into the OASIS, their virtual life, blocking out the real world

Society has crumbled and it was shown in both novels that the advances make it easy to hide from what is going on. In Ready Player One, they would just log onto OASIS, which was where they would go to school and do their jobs. In The Running Man, they would just turn on their free-vee and watch the reality TV about how someone else was on the run or voluntarily killing themselves to try and find a way to make money. In these reality shows, there would be people playing “games” to make money just to survive. One example is Ben Richards, who was on the run trying to survive for thirty days to make enough money to take his sick daughter to the