James Cameron's Avatar: An Activist Survival Guide by Maria Wilhelm and Dirk Mathison HarperCollins, HK$144
James Cameron's Avatar lived up to the hype but the magic does not extend to this companion book, subtitled An Activist Survival Guide. Written by Maria Wilhelm and journalist Dirk Mathison, the volume includes a chapter on Pandora, detailing its discovery as an earth-like world in the star system nearest our own, with animals, plants and onobtanium, a superconductor vital to earth's economy, and at the end a Na'vi-English dictionary (in case you ever meet Pandora's inhabitants). Preceding this is a section titled Warning! This explains that the goal of the book is to dismantle the RDA (for Avatar ignoramuses that stands for Resources Development Administration, the corporation that wants the onobtanium) to save Pandora and earth. The book is supposedly cobbled from RDA data and includes details of its weapons systems and technology. Even if you suspend disbelief and read the book (written in the first person by an anonymous do-gooder), it's a tough slog: without the 3D visuals making you part of the make-believe world, it's hard to sustain interest for more than a few minutes.
