Andre Norton's 1963 novel Judgement on Janus has strong similarities to James Cameron's recent blockbuster sci-fi film, Avatar. (Ace Books/Twentieth-century Fox)

As James Cameron’s film Avatar smashes box-office records and picks up Oscar nominations, it is becoming a target for people from across the political spectrum.

If James Cameron could have used a model for a more solid narrative, it would be the Janus novels by the late Andre Norton.

There have been a number of accusations that Avatar is racist — those critics say it’s just another story of a Caucasian saviour coming in to rescue the natives, in a way no different from Kevin Costner in Dances with Wolves or Tom Cruise in The Last Samurai. On the American right, Avatar has been accused of being a tree-hugging, anti-American, anti-capitalist propaganda flick.

If Avatar were another middling sci-fi film that played a couple of weekends before going straight to DVD, none of those critics would care. But money talks, and big box office shouts.

Avatar is space opera — a magnificent 3-D space opera where the audience flies with the Na’vi people among the giant trees of the planet Pandora. But the one weak link in Cameron’s movies has always been the writing. He has a vision that’s a galaxy wide, but he can’t seem to move beyond simple, often predictable storylines. If Cameron could have used a model for a more solid narrative, it would be the Janus novels by the late Andre Norton.

(Ace Books)

The first, Judgment on Janus (1963), bears a remarkable resemblance to Avatar. The novel takes place a few thousand years into the future. Janus, as the humans call the planet, is a beautiful forest world with a complex ecosystem that includes a number of species, including towering trees. The indigenous intelligent species, the Iftin, are at home in that forest world, which they call Iftcan. The Iftin live in settlements inside the tallest trees, called Great Crowns. The largest of the tree-cities, the Citadel, is a sort of gathering place or capital for the Iftin.

The Iftin are green-skinned humanoids who have adapted through evolution to the shadowy shades cast by the trees. They are generally nocturnal, with good night vision and sensitivity to sunlight in the open. (One of the highlights of Avatar is the way Cameron recreates the night vision of the Na’vi.) The Iftin have bonded mentally with large birds called quarrin, who are symbiotic hunting companions. (The Iftin don’t fly on their backs, like the Na’vi in Avatar.) The most sacred spot on the planet for the Iftin is a crater lake that creates a natural mirror.

Iftcan is ripe for exploitation, but in Judgment on Janus, the interstellar corporation that aimed to harvest the forests has gone bankrupt, and sold the rights to a religious society who call themselves The Believers. These folks are a sort of frontier fundamentalist sect, who use whatever means – from axes to giant machines — to tame the forest.

The outsider who becomes the hero is Niall Renfro, a war refugee who is an indentured servant on a Believer settlement. He is tempted by a jewel-like treasure he finds on the edge of the forest and catches the dreaded — and, to the Believers, sinful — disease that Norton dubbed “Green Sick.” Renfro is abandoned in the forest and later awakes transformed into Ayyar, an Iftin warrior. Ayyar soon has a female companion and guide, Illylle.

(Ace Books)

Does any of this sound familiar? Illyle herself was transformed from Ashla, a one-time member of the Believers, whose society seems to have little tolerance for women who wish to use their brains. While the Green Sick is never really explained, for today’s audiences, it would simply be a case of reprogramming Renfro’s DNA and implanting Iftin memories.

At first, it appears that Ayyar and Illyle have joined a forest-dwelling society very much like the Na’vi. They soon discover that everyone is a transformed human. But for each of the characters, their Iftin memories are from a different era — these memories show that thousands of years earlier, a mysterious force wiped out the Iftin. As it turns out, those dying Iftin used their knowledge of the forest ecology to create the treasures as a natural memory bank.

Over the course of Judgment at Janus and Norton’s follow-up, Victory on Janus (1966), the reader discovers that the planetary struggle to survive has been going on not just since human settlement, but for tens of thousands of years.

The real menace, to both the Iftin and the humans, is an old space-opera menace: the mad computer. In the case of Iftcan/Janus, the villain was a colony ship from an alien race that crashed on the planet eons ago, programmed to remake the planet for its own species. The alien computer, damaged in the crash, only succeeded in wiping out the Iftin, but not in remaking the planet. In the final battle, the new Iftin win the war with the alien computer and its human-made machine servants.

The lesson from Judgment on Janus and Victory on Janus is that in the second round of the battle, it is the human-Iftin hybrids who succeed where the original Iftin failed. On Iftcan, victory requires a blending of old and new, indigenous wisdom and off-world expertise. If James Cameron had incorporated some of these themes, Avatar would have had a more solid narrative. Not only that, but the film might have examined the issues raised by critics on the right and left in greater detail, depth and nuance.

Robin Rowland is the photo editor for CBC News.