The Philosophical Journal of Conflict and Violence Vol. II, Issue 2/2018 © The Authors 2018 Available online at http://trivent-publishing.eu/ The Long Walk: Stephen King’s Near-Future Critique of Sport and Contemporary Society Fred Mason Faculty of Kinesiology (University of New Brunswick), Canada,
[email protected] Abstract: Stephen King’s novel The Long Walk, written under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman, offers a vision of sport in a near-future society, where death-sports serve as a major spectacle. This was designed as a critique of trends and problems in sport in the 1960s and 1970s, with over-commercialization and increased violence. Some of this has been mitigated by recent rule changes in the world of sport, but King’s writing prefigured the rise of reality television, where people are practically willing to risk it all for personal gain. Keywords: Richard Bachman; Stephen King; Sport literature; science fiction; violence. The PJCV Journal is published by Trivent Publishing. This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0) license, which permits others to copy or share the article, provided original work is properly cited and that this is not done for commercial purposes. Users may not remix, transform, or build upon the material and may not distribute the modified material (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) The Long Walk: Stephen King’s Near-Future Critique of Sport and Contemporary Society Fred Mason Faculty of Kinesiology (University of New Brunswick) Canada,
[email protected] Abstract: Stephen King’s novel The Long Walk, written under the pseudonym of Richard Bachman, offers a vision of sport in a near-future society, where death-sports serve as a major spectacle.