Stephen King wrote The running man (published in Spanish as the wantedIn the early seventies (a decade before publishing it under the pseudonym Richard Bachman), he wrote the novel, setting it in the year 2025 in a dystopia where the underprivileged participate in risky television game shows hoping to escape poverty. The most extreme (and lucrative) of these is the one that gives the book its title, turning participants into fugitives who must survive the pursuit of relentless hunters and all the viewers hoping to earn a reward by reporting them. Now that the present has caught up with the chronology of the fiction, the prediction of a society absorbed by a harmful audiovisual culture seems accurate, but not particularly shocking.