And the word in question this morning is "retirement". And it's hard to believe of a man who has written so many books, but apparently Stephen King just doesn't know the meaning of the word. And here's more proof. And more (though he might be forgiven for that one, since it's a non-fiction book about a once-in-a-lifetime event that he as a fan must have savored). I can think of a lot of authors who would love to be so "retired".

The man really just can't help himself. He will write, and no resolution is going to stop him.

Unfortunately, his latest work (Cell) demonstrates why he went into "retirement" in the first place. It's not a bad book at all. Mr. King has a natural talent that makes bad writing all but impossible for him, so the book reads well.

But one thing that led to his "retirement" was his feeling that he was repeating himself, that he had somehow mined all his ideas. This feeling came to him when he wrote From a Buick 8, which bore a superficial but unmistakable similarity to Christine. While the books are very different in almost every way, both are at the core stories about myserious cars which control and possess the lives of the people that encounter them. As Mr. King said in an interview on the Mitch Albom show (paraphrased), "Wait a minute. Haven't I been here before?"

And that's the problem with Cell: it has superficial but strong echoes of The Stand. That book told the story of a sudden release of an engineered virus that wipes out most of the world's population. A few of the survivors then go on a road trip toward some looming confrontation between Good and Evil.

And Cell? It tells the story of a mysterious signal that goes out over cell phones, transforming most of the civilized world's population into drooling zombies that slowly evolve into a group mind. A few of the survivors then go on a road trip toward some looming confrontation with the group mind.

Does that make Cell a rehash of The Stand? No. For one thing, it's only one-third the length. For another thing, it's much smaller in scope, both thematically and geographically.

But if Mr. King wanted to avoid repeating himself, this book was not the way to do it. That's not a criticism of the book itself — I'm quite enjoying it, actually — but I think it points out a flaw in his reasoning when he "retired" in the first place. When you write as many books as he has, you can't help revisiting old themes and motifs. He has largely covered the field already, so there's little room for truly new works. And honestly, I think all great artists revisit and build on their earlier works. For that matter, other artists build upon their ideas. So why shouldn't they?

Professor Reynolds links to this very lengthy essay on cultural contamination, and how that may not be as bad as some people want you to believe, by Kwame Anthony Appiah. There's far too much good content here for me to summarize, so I'll just pull out what I think is the most critical point:

So liberty and diversity may well be at odds, and the tensions between them aren't always easily resolved. But the rhetoric of cultural preservation isn't any help. Again, the contradictions are near to hand. Take another look at that Unesco Convention. It affirms the "principle of equal dignity of and respect for all cultures." (What, all cultures - including those of the K.K.K. and the Taliban?) It also affirms "the importance of culture for social cohesion in general, and in particular its potential for the enhancement of the status and role of women in society." (But doesn't "cohesion" argue for uniformity? And wouldn't enhancing the status and role of women involve changing, rather than preserving, cultures?) In Saudi Arabia, people can watch "Will and Grace" on satellite TV - officially proscribed, but available all the same - knowing that, under Saudi law, Will could be beheaded in a public square. In northern Nigeria, mullahs inveigh against polio vaccination while sentencing adulteresses to death by stoning. In India, thousands of wives are burned to death each year for failing to make their dowry payments. Vive la difference? Please.

I'm currently reading Jack McDevitt's Omega, which involves a sorta Prime Directive situation like in Star Trek: a catastrophe looms for a primitive culture, and the cultural preservationists would rather let the natives die than save them and thus expose them to a more advanced culture. The older I get, the more arrogant the Prime Directive sounds to me: sacrificing people's lives for some supercilious view of "culture" that sounds on awful lot like "keeping the primitives in their place". Kwame Anthony Appiah skewers this notion quite adeptly. His essay is long, but it's well worth your attention.

UPDATE: I just read the credits at the end of the essay. It turns out to be an extract from the author's book, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, coming later this month. Gee, just what I needed: an excuse to shop for books...