Like most people who don’t live in their parents’ basement, I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about James Cameron’s Avatar. I know it’s a bunch of 3D computer-animated nonsense and stars Blue Man Group but beyond that I had no idea what it was about until today because a) I like girls and b) sometimes these girls let me touch their no-no place which means that c) I have no time for such bullshit. Life is too short to devote mental energy to some 800 zillion dollar, two-hour-long videogame cut-scene that you can’t skip through no matter how hard you mash the X button. How many achievement points will I get for sitting through this shit? Zero? Thanks, but no thanks.

But apparently, whatever this film’s about, it wasn’t James Cameron’s idea, but rather that of Nebula-winning sci-fi author Poul Anderson, care of his short story Call Me Joe. Per this website:

Call Me Joe centers on a paraplegic — Ed Anglesey — who telepathically connects with an artificially created life form in order to explore a harsh planet (in this case, Jupiter). Anglesey, like Avatar’s Jake Sully, revels in the freedom and strength of his artificial created body, battles predators on the surface of Jupiter, and gradually goes native as he spends more time connected to his artificial body.

Could be a coincidence, right? Perhaps, except recall that James Cameron’s Terminator was lifted from the works of another award-winning master of speculative fiction, that curmudgeonly lovable rapscallion Harlan Ellison. Ellison swiftly sued Orion Pictures (the studio that made Terminator) and was awarded an undisclosed sum plus an acknowledgement in the film’s end credits. Is Cameron really dumb (or ballsy) enough to make the same “mistake” twice? Who knows, but I do know that researching this article (i.e. reading Wikipedia) led me to this awesome Harlan Ellison quote re the sanctity of his intellectual property:

“If you put your hand in my pocket, you’ll drag back six inches of bloody stump.”

Unfortunately for Poul Anderson, he’s dead, so he can’t really do much about it except come back as a ghost to haunt James Cameron. And even if he did James Cameron would only use the experience as fodder for a film about a family that moves into a house and discovers it was built on an Indian burial ground, and there’s a portal to another dimension hiding in the closet, and by the way it’s haunted by poltergeists. Which is basically the same plot as Titanic.

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