Fox and just about everyone else, is more than eager for James Cameron to get working on an Avatar sequel. Cameron on the other hand, hasn’t seemed to be in much of a rush. In fact he’s so not in a rush, that he’s decided to write an Avatar novel instead.

Avatar producer Jon Landau tells MTV that Cameron’s working on a prequel novel which will fill in some of the gaps left by the film. He says, “It would be something that would lead up to telling the story of the movie, but it would go into much more depth about all the stories that we didn't have time to deal with — like the schoolhouse and Sigourney [Weaver's character] teaching at the schoolhouse; Jake on Earth and his backstory and how he came here; [the death of] Tommy, Jake's brother; and Colonel Quaritch, how he ended up there and all that.”

It doesn’t sound like the novel is anything that will be used for Avatar 2, whenever he finally gets around to it. So I guess that rules out prequel as a possible direction for the theatrical follow-up.

I guess it’s also safe to assume that Cameron somehow avoided reading literally any of Avatar’s reviews since, writing is the one thing that people almost universally agreed sucked about it. So instead of giving us a sequel full of new visuals, the thing Cameron is really good at, he’s distilling Avatar down to its absolute weakest element: his writing. Not that it matters. As long as they put naked, blue cat people on the cover I’m sure it’ll sell a billion copies.