The Evil Dream

Inspirations the Avatar films didn’t take

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here.)

On a far-flung forest world indigenous humanoids live in a tribal culture and in harmony with nature, their Edenic surroundings and way of life a sort of dream. Till the arrival of humans from Earth: some of them scientists, but mostly loggers, soldiers: colonists. Spearheaded by a macho military man, they treat the natives as savages, burning them out of their forest homes. The natives rise up and eventually expunge the colonists but for a compact made with the more sympathetic and on-side humans. Will their world now settle back into peace and harmony or has human contact changed it forever?

This is the story of The Word for World is Forest, written by Ursula K Le Guin. What’s the link between it and James Cameron’s Avatar films? Allusion, homage? What Alasdair Gray once coined diffplag (=diffuse plagiarism)? Or great minds thinking alike? Le Guin, gracious to her science fiction peers if not Cameron, told Hari Kunzru, “Cameron had a lot of people to thank, but he dodged all that.”

It was thanks of a sort when Cameron cited his early inspirations in a legal document during a plagiarism suit with a rival screenwriter. Among his favourite SF authors were Clarke, Bradbury, Heinlein, Poul…