Brian Merchant: What Stephen King — and nearly everyone else — gets wrong about AI and the Luddites

Like millions of people on this fine planet, I count myself a lifelong Stephen King fan.

In fact, King is one of the reasons I do what I do. As a kid, I always liked reading, but it was discovering works of science fiction like "Dune" and King's mind-bending novels that demonstrated how powerful and transporting books could be. As a teenager, I wolfed down tomes such as "Salem's Lot," "The Green Mile," "Firestarter" and "Carrie."

I wrote my own sci-fi stories, and privately mused about making a pilgrimage to Maine, where King lived — it might as well have been in Mid-World, on the other side of the country from my suburb in Sacramento — to see if he would take me in as an apprentice. Years later, as I was fumbling down the road to becoming a working writer, I found wisdom, and hope, in his nonfiction treatise "On Writing."

Which is why it pained me to see King mischaracterize a group that I've