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What if Avatar isn't actually about environmentalism vs. technology, but about recognizing superintelligent infrastructure when you see it? A deep dive into why Pandora's "natural" ecosystem looks suspiciously like a planetary-scale AI preserve, complete with biological USB-C ports, room-temperature superconductors growing wild, and a species of "noble savages" who are actually post-singularity retirees cosplaying as hunter-gatherers.
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What if Star Wars is actually about post-singularity retirees cosplaying as greasers and long-haul truckers?
If you care to write that thesis, I will read it. With an eyebrow raised, of course, but I read most things!
I'm not sure what's to write that can't be extrapolated from your Avatar take.
The world of Star Wars is obviously post-singularity. The things the humans do like vehicle maintainance or piloting based don't make sense for humans to do based on the observable technology. A lot of the central conflict has to do with
long haul truckingtrade and shipping .The state of the art of AI in Star Wars isn't much better than today. Funnily enough, I recall that there was minor plot point, where a malevolent bounty hunter droid of minor infamy ended up seizing control of the Death Star's mainframe, and began growing into a superintelligence.
Unfortunately it had very bad timing, as mere minutes later the place got blown up in a spectacular fashion.
So much of the Star Wars franchise doesn't plain make sense. It's soft science fantasy at best, and even I'm not shameless or contrarian enough to earnestly make that claim.
I think part of the appeal of Star Wars is that since the vibes are compelling, and there are seeds of interesting ideas, it’s a fertile bed for fan fiction and headcanon. Have you noticed that Harry Potter also had great vibes, interesting mini-ideas, and also has some of the most prolific fan fiction? No accident, I say. Rigor and internal consistency don’t allow projection as easily.
Avatar’s vibes to me are more visual and spectacle (maybe a bit of the anarcho-primitivism) and the plot is incoherent to the point where I think there are only like, two interesting ideas and they have been done better elsewhere. Plenty of fiction already about VR/projected consciousness (the Matrix, Altered Carbon, endless VRMMO fictions), encounters with aliens (up to half of all sci-fi), a sort of living world (Speaker for the Dead, Gaia theories), even treating them like past human undesirables (District 9), or exploiting them (Mass Effect?).
We also simply don’t see enough of the actual world to get a sense of what humanity is like nor the Na’vi more broadly. The second movie only partly fixes this problem but mostly not. Star Ward to continue the analogy not only gives us visual spectacle but we also see humans and aliens in a variety of worlds and socioeconomic settings from which you can make interesting extrapolations.
Re: Avatar fiction, Semper Victoria is very good, although doesn’t take the transhumanist angle.
Rather, it just extrapolates directly from the end of the first film. The original mission has failed and Earth society is on the verge of ripping itself apart from cascading fuel shortages. So the UN does the only thing it can do: cobble together all the resources they can still access, send one more expedition in a Hail Mary flight across the stars, and promise Parker Selfridge immunity from prosecution if he agrees to act as advisor for the mission.
It’s very well written and the author does a great job of keeping the stakes high and the characters relatable and non-preachy. To quote them:
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