Compare and Contrast: Stephen King and Arthur C. Clarke

by Brandon Engel

Meet Arthur Charles Clarke and Stephen Edwin King, Jupiter and Venus of the science fiction solar system. In 2005, the government of Sri Lanka designated Clarke Sri Lanka Abhimanyu, meaning “The Pride of Sri Lanka,” the highest civil honor in the country. The year before, the World Fantasy Convention bestowed upon King the Award for Life Achievement. No satellite explored further than the reaches of blackness that Clarke and King dived into with science fiction and fantasy literature.

But, the two had different notions of where the future of humankind led.

Stephen King: Scribe of Horror

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes famously claimed that the state of nature of man was “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Stephen King took Hobbes at his word. In King’s 2009 book, Under the Dome, an invisible dome barrier envelopes the small Maine town of Chester’s Mill. Thus isolated, the townsfolk pull a page from Lord of the Flies, with the climax of the story ending in asphyxiation and incineration. “I saw it as a chance to write about the serious ecological problems that we face in the world today,” said King. “The fact is we all live under the dome.”

Like many contemporary authors, King worried that short-term politics would upset the teeter-totter of technological equality. He extrapolated that concept in his 1982 work, The Running Man, the story of a desperate man, living in a state-sanctioned media-saturated dystopia, who wages his life in hopes of a $1 billion grand prize. Yet just as in Orwell’s 1984, the omniscience of technology thwarts Richards’ plans. What can Richards do against the Hunters, who draw from endless resources?

Or what if, suggested King in his 1986 horror film, Maximum Overdrive, machines were themselves malicious? In the movie, King’s only directorial effort and winner of a 1987 Golden Raspberry Award for Worst Director, machines come to life and launch a lethal vendetta against homo sapiens. King described his film as a “moron movie,” but nowhere else does he so blatantly suggest that one day, for reasons inexplicable, mankind may regret its first electrical transistor.

Arthur Clarke: Science Fiction Storyteller

Statistically speaking, King is in the minority. According to a Pew and Smithsonian research poll, some 59 percent of Americans believe coming technological changes will improve the future, while 30 percent hold the glass half empty. Those within the 59 percent are in good company with Arthur Clarke. A lifelong proponent and enthusiast of space travel, terraforming and computer networking, Clarke believed in a fundamental goodness of technology that would improve the human condition. “It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive,” he believed, “when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.”

Clarke was a pop prophet extraordinaire. He predicted satellite internet coverage that could be accessed from virtually anywhere, cloud computing, and in his seminal film, 2001: A Space Odyssey, he even predicted the iPad – or “newspad.” Most famously, Clarke popularized the concept of geostationary satellites for telecommunication purposes. Some of his more fantastic notions have yet to manifest, though, such as slave chimpanzees, bioengineered whales, suspended animation, and an earth-to-moon space elevator.

But some of Clarke’s most important words, which hint at the same fears King discussed, are rarely quoted. “As our own species is in the process of proving, one cannot have superior science and inferior morals.” In his 1972 essay, for example, “Profiles of the Future,” he was quick to give wasteful transportation a thorough tongue-lashing. “In one lifetime they [automobiles] have consumed more irreplaceable fuel than has been used in the whole previous history of mankind. The roads to support them … cost as much as a small war; the analogy is a good one, for the casualties are on the same scale.”

Perhaps the truth lies between the two authors. The future is without form and void, and it is humans who will author its genesis, for where humans lead, technology follows.

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"Brandon Engel is a Chicago-based blogger whose favorite Stephen King book is either Hearts in Atlantis or The Shining. Follow him on Twitter: @BrandonEngel2"