Avatar by Maria Wilhelm

Avatar by Maria Wilhelm

A field guide to Pandora--the mesmerizing world of James Cameron's Avatar.

Four years in the making--and 15 years since its conception--Avatar is a live action film with a new generation of special effects, delivering a fully immersive cinematic experience of a new kind, where the revolutionary technology invented to make the film disappears into the emotion of the characters and the sweep of the story.

In Avatar: A Confidential Report on the Biological and Social History of Pandora we are introduced to Pandora--a pristine and beautiful moon in a distant solar system--its exotic ecosystems, and the indigenous race called the Na'vi. By piecing together photographs, scientific field notes, and research data, citizens on Earth have collected the information in this field guide as a way to highlight the lessons Pandora can teach the people of Earth, who have struggled to survive as their planet's critical resources are depleted.

Though Pandora has proven to be an exceedingly profitable source of natural resources, the environment--from its gravity-defying floating mountains to the small but venomous hellfire wasps and the gigantic carnivorous thanator--poses continual dangers to RDA. Catalogued with unparalleled precision and access, this field guide provides highly detailed descriptions of the unique creatures and plants found on Pandora, the culture, language, and physiology of the native population, as well as RDA technology and weapons.

Eager to save the Earth, the activists have culled this information in hopes to expose the corporate greed and disregard for the native inhabitants and their environment that governs RDA's presence on the foreign moon.

This is the evidence in their case to save Pandora--and themselves.

Dirk Mathison is a former West Coast Editor of People magazine and a senior journalist. He currently resides in the Los Angeles region.