Cameron: Competing With Trek
2 min readWriter-director James Cameron would like to see the Avatar world of Pandora be ranked up with the Star Trek Federation, Star Wars Empire and Tolkien worlds.
If Cameron had his way, Avatar, the highest-grossing film in history, would remain in the hearts and minds of fans for decades, with the inevitable toys, games and books to appear in due course.
A companion novel to Avatar is already in the works, which will arrive in bookstores in time for the holidays. “It gets into the nuts and bolts of the Na’vi culture, their lore and mythology, and has more about Dr. Grace [Sigourney Weaver] and her time on Pandora, but it doesn’t go beyond the end of the film other than to tease a little bit about what’s going to happen next,” said Cameron. “It will also be the bible for any future publication, a look-up guide for future writers who can come in and work within the world…. Think about all the Star Trek novels and how they contradicted each other for a few years and it made it tricky to be a Trekkie for a while.”
Cameron wants the world and story of Avatar to end up in the same place in the hearts of fans as other worlds of science fiction and fantasy. “You’ve got to compete head on with these other epic works of fantasy and fiction, the Tolkiens and the Star Wars and the Star Treks,” he said. “People want a persistent alternate reality to invest themselves in and they want the detail that makes it rich and worth their time. They want to live somewhere else. Like Pandora.”
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