Askar now on Kindle

My fantasy epic ASKAR is now an Amazon Kindle eBook. This is special because Kindle only became easily available to non-USA writers on 15 January. The Kindle is a small reader machine but it also comes as a free program that can run on your home computer. You can use the free sample of ASKAR to find out what the Kindle is all about! You support me even by only peeking at the freebie because it makes my statistics look good. Go to http://www.amazon.com/Askar-ebook/dp/B00368B6QK

Dances with Na'vi

I read an article about young people getting depressed watching Avatar; they really want to live on Pandora, only there's no such place.
The story of Avatar is very black and white. Blue people good, human people bad. Pandora is a pantheistic paradise - literally a living network like a computer. The movie makes it very clear this is a measurable scientific phenomenon, not metaphysical. It's wish fulfilment spirituality as new age followers imagine it. The bad human people have "killed their mother". (While we might kill ourselves I think Mother Earth is a tougher old bird than that.) The Na'vi (natives) supposedly live at one with this paradise, and yet most of the fauna seems intent on eating them. This at-oneness also seems at odds with the Na'vi's respect for Jake when he says he's a warrior and their legends about the taming of the red dragon "in times of sorrow".
This I have found is typical of the new age world view which venerates pre-industrial societies and is blind to the violent nature of such societies. (I'm aware there are exceptions but most of these eventually succumbed to their more aggressive neighbours.) In fact such humanist creations as Avatar cannot imagine a world without violence, despite their non-violent pretensions. And Avatar's climax is relentlessly violent. Those who get depressed because Pandora doesn't exist are longing for a real paradise, a paradise before the Fall. Pandora is a fallen world, just like ours. The filmmakers are dishonest in labelling all evil human. It would have been a better film if there had been one or two Na'vi traitors, a few greedy ones, a coward, internecine warfare with the neighbouring clan. As it is we have "Dances with Na'vi". By the way, I saw it twice. It looks fabulous. It was the first time I ever truly believed in CGI characters - including Gollum.