Stephen King has had a very ambivalent relationship with technology. This is something that may apply just as much to his real life as it does to anything that happens in his works of fiction. This sense of inherent ambiguity about the Machine is something worth stressing, because a lot of times it can seem that this is anything but the case. In his study of some of the author's most famous works, Bev Vincent establishes what might be considered an opposite, more or less positive take on the Maine writer's relationship with the Gadget. "Over the years", Vincent points out, "King has experimented with nontraditional forms of publication (158)". From there, Vincent goes on to provide the reader with a catalogue of all the times the Bangor Scribe has been willing to utilize the digital space to advance the publication of his stories. He makes these little experiments in digital publishing sound like fun for the most part. At the same time, the one thing none of this changes is the way the author treats machines within the confines of the product that matters most in King's career. That would be the writer's books in and of themselves, and also the way that the theme of the Gadget keeps getting handled in them, even past the point where King owed his life to modern medical science. Caution is still mixed with gratitude.
By and large, it seems that King's thoughts about modern machinery (or at the very least, the mindset that exists in back of most pieces of our current tech) was summed up long ago by scholar Tony Magistrale in his book, Landscapes of Fear. It's in that study that Magistrale lays out the best academic summation of King's thinking about machines. "The more pessimistic side of science fiction..."stresses the danger of the machine age and how reliance upon science and technology weakens the basic human body and spirits" (7). This awareness of the darker aspects of technology and the moral sacrifices that accompany its proliferation is an issue that often appears in Kings fiction (50)". That's an accurate enough assessment so far as Magistrale is concerned. Yet even here, it seems like just scratching the surface of things. He notes the negative portrayals of technology within King's fiction. However, I'm not sure he gets us any closer to the mindset underlying it all. In order to get that, it seems like you have to get the information direct from the artist's own personal testimony. It seems that the best explanation King ever offered for his technical themes is in the pages of Danse Macabre.
In the introduction to this sprawling non-fiction study, King talks a bit about how his upbringing in the Post-War America of the 1950s had an enormous effect on the way he's looked at the Machine more or less ever since. "We were fertile ground for the seeds of terror, we war
babies; we had been raised in a strange circus atmosphere of
paranoia, patriotism, and national hubris. We were told that
we were the greatest nation on earth...but we were also told exactly what to keep in
our fallout shelters and how long we would have to stay in
there after we won the war. We had more to eat than any nation
in the history of the world, but there were traces of Strontium 90 in our milk from nuclear testing. We were the children of the men and women who won what
Duke Wayne used to call “the big one,” and when the dust
cleared, America was on top. Further, we had a great history to draw upon (all short
histories are great histories), particularly in matters of invention
and innovation.
"Every grade-school teacher produced the same
two words for the delectation of his/her students; two magic
words glittering and glowing like a beautiful neon sign; two
words of almost incredible power and grace; and these two
words were: pioneer spirit. I and my fellow kids grew up
secure in this knowledge of America’s pioneer spirit—a
knowledge that could be summed up in a litany of names
learned by rote in the classroom. Eli Whitney. Samuel Morse.
Alexander Graham Bell. Henry Ford. Robert Goddard. Wilbur
and Orville Wright. Robert Oppenheimer. These men, ladies
and gentlemen, all had one great thing in common. They were
all Americans simply bursting with pioneer spirit. We were
and always had been, in that pungent American phrase, fustest
and bestest with the mostest (9-10)". Consider this aspect of his life as the first part of those "terror seedlings" that King and his peers got sprinkled with as young, impressionable minds back in the day. The second ingredient in the recipe the artist is describing for us came about through the gradual arrival of an inevitable understanding about the so-called adults in the room who are ostensibly "responsible" for modern technological life.
King sums this up through a neat and precise quotation from Sci-Fi author Jack Finney's novel Time and Again. From the way the quotation is framed, it's clear that while Finney might have been writing about imaginary people in make-believe circumstances, it's pretty damned obvious that King see it all as a reflection of his own personal experience. "I was... an ordinary person who long after he was
grown retained the childhood assumption that the people
who largely control our lives are somehow better in¬
formed than, and have judgment superior to, the rest of
us; that they are more intelligent. Not until Vietnam did
I finally realize that some of the most important decisions
of all time can be made by men knowing really no more
than most of the rest of us (333)". In other words, it was the slow dawning recognition that often the people who create and are in charge of machinery often wind up not knowing as much about the consequences their creations will either create or unleash. In other words, even with a lot of know-how under the hood, it's still no guarantee of an entirely one-hundred-percent optimum outcome. This paints a picture less of someone who is any kind of thoroughgoing luddite, and more an artist with a healthy recognition of the balanced benefits and hazards of modern machinery.
When it can be demonstrated to work well, then it's enough to consider it good. If any number of downsides begin to multiply in near perfect compliment to all the benefits, then at this point I'd have to say we're all aware in one form or another of being stuck in a land of perpetual mixed blessings, at best. The fact of modern technology at its worst is when the design is made with the express purpose to harm or disrupt daily life. It seems to be this negative mindset that can infuse the making of the Gadget, and the consequences that can sometimes stem from it, that fascinates King, more than anything to do with the Machine, in and of itself. This train of thought might be expressed in a series of questions. Is there such a thing as a bad machine? If so, what kind of
mind would be capable of constructing such a man-made monstrosity? How much damage can such technology inflict upon the world? Even worse than this is a very troubling corollary. How much would it take to turn an ostensibly good machine into a bad one? In many cases, the answer is as frightening as it is simple. All you have to do there is to find the right way to abuse its otherwise correct use, and then, you have turned a help into something more horrible than a hindrance. It's thoughts such as these that appear to be at the back of King's treatment of machines. It's also at work in a short story simply called
Ur.
