Cameron’s Avatar prequel novel might actually be good

There’s been a lot of Avatar sequel talk across the internet, and considering the film’s success, such a sequel certainly seems imminent. Well, another hint about what that sequel might look like comes from the news that Cameron is working on a prequel novel which he hopes to get out by the end of 2010.

Producer Jon Landau told MTV that the story would go into detail about Sigourney Weaver’s character’s adventures on Pandora, as well as the death of Jake’s brother, and life for for Jake on Earth.

Apparently, Cameron’s original script for Avatar involved a lot more detail when it came to Jake Sully’s life on Earth, and what things were like there. The treatment described “overpopulation, over- development, nuclear terrorism, environmental warfare tactics, radiation leakage from power plants and waste dumps, toxic waste, air pollution, deforestation, pollution and overfishing of the oceans, global warming, ozone depletion, [and] loss of biodiversity through extinction” as having pretty much wrecked Earth. I’m hoping the novel will cover this dystopian future in-depth.

Wow. If they had explored that more in the film, I think I would have appreciated it a lot more. Contrasting a scummy Earth with the happy-glowy Pandora would have made Jake’s switching of sides significantly more believable.

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