Introducing the people and premises which are the basis for this story.
New people
At the Alpha Centauri territorial capital
Andrew Stranger -- governor-appointed troubleshooter
Joshua Tyler -- governor of the Alpha Centauri sector, which has Pandora in it
Murray Rothschild -- new avatar technician
Technicians left behind at the Pandora orbiting base (also new)
Jason Langham -- surveyor
Larry Devine -- remote imaging and remote sensing technician
Mary Worthington -- administrative assistant to Dr. Augustine
Kim Parker – Na’vi school nurse, ecologist
Joe Washington -- database manager for the science research teams
From the movie
Humans
Jake Sully – disabled marine and avatar user, now dead
Dr. Grace Augustine – head scientist and avatar user, now dead
Colonel Miles Quaritch – head of security, now dead
Parker Selfridge – chief administrator for RDA (the company), now at the sector capital, close to arrest, and perhaps some broken kneecaps provided by representatives of unhappy investors
Two scientists are left at main base -- these are avatar technicians
Na’vi
Eywa – The chief spirit of Pandora
Neytiri – tribal princess of the Omaticaya, now clan leader
Jake Sully – now as permanent avatar inhabitant, and Omaticaya clan leader
Mo'at – Neytiri’s mother, tribal shaman and clan leader
Kon'ga - New clan leader
Shee'la - New teacher for Andrew
Year: 2154
Star system: Alpha Centauri, Pandora is a moon there orbiting a gas giant
Company: RDA
Alpha Centauri system consists of three stars -- two close together and sun-like, one quite distant and small -- and a currently unknown number of smaller planets. It doesn’t seem to have any close-orbiting gas giants because they would have been discovered. It may still have distant ones -- current detection systems can’t find those.
The journey time to Alpha Centauri using 1G constant acceleration starships would be four years ship time and five years planetary time. (movie states 5 years, 9 months, and passengers are in cryosleep during the journey) Constant acceleration ships are the fastest ships that humans can make without using faster-than-light propulsion technology.
Word of this incident will take 4 years to reach Earth. The first reactions from Earth will take eight years to be heard in Alpha Centauri system.
James Cameron, the writer/producer, wisely chose to keep the human social systems on Pandora minimal. It made the story of Sully’s learning native ways stand out. But it inserts an element of unreality into the story that I’m going to have to twist around hard to explain in my sequel.
Cameron’s backgrounder claims that Earth is a dying world, running out of energy, and that’s why Unobtainim is important and valuable -- it’s some kind of energy component. It’s also a violent world -- Quaritch and Sully trade brief war stories hinting of personal experiences with desperate violence. Sully also explains that he doesn’t get his legs fixed because he’s too poor, and in the first quarter of the movie Quaritch bribes him to spy with an offer of new legs.
...Umm
...All of these elements above I’m going to have to ignore completely. Here’s why:
First, if the Solar System is launching manned starships to Alpha Centauri, it’s a wealthy place. Even the simplest of starships are expensive, and constant acceleration manned starships are a thousand to a million times more so. The Solar System will be widely explored, colonized, and massively productive before the first manned starship is launched. Nanotechnology and genetic engineering will also be much more advanced, as will overall productivity. There will be crises in the Solar System community, they will be serious and plentiful and have lots of emotion wrapped up in them, but any sort of contemporary poverty or materials shortage will not be among them. Sully may not have time to get his legs fixed before the starship heads off, but expense shouldn’t be a problem.
Here is a more concrete example of what I'm talking about when I speak of differences in crisis thinking. Consider the differences in daily worries between an American living in suburban America in February 2010 and a Haitian living in Port-au-Prince at the same time (just after the big earthquake). Both the American and the Haitian have things on their mind that are of great concern, but the details of those worries is night-and-day different. Cameron chose, wisely for his story telling, to give movie watchers familiar worrisome issues. They are familiar, but they are wrong.
Second, Alpha Centauri is the obvious first star system for humans to explore: It’s the closest and the twin stars are sun-like. To find a jungle-like moon there, Pandora, should put Pandora fully under The Curse of Being Important. The Curse would mean that the Pandora region should be crawling with government and NGO people, and scientists of many persuasions. And it should be under the attention microscope of half the social moralists and all the science fiction lovers still on Earth.
In Cameron’s story, it is not. It is a complete backwater -- the only people there are RDA company people, and it’s an irresponsible collection of company people, as well!
How to explain this?
What I have come up with is that at the time of this story there are a lot of other human projects going on in the Alpha Centauri system. The system turns out to be a complex place with many, many interesting things for humans. It’s a frontier place now, with about 50,000 people who are working on many different activities -- all brand new, and all competing for money, people, and attention. Thus Pandora is a backwater because there are many more interesting projects for people to be working on, so this jungle world has slipped under the social radar and is not plagued with The Curse -- until now, that is.
Now that there’s been a massacre of humans and a whole colony of a thousand or so people has been kicked off a world, the Baleful Glare of The Curse is suddenly hard upon Pandora, and the powers-that-be in frontier Alpha Centauri Land. Still, this is a frontier land, and there are still lots of other things happening that are more important to the locals, so the frontier government has to stretch to address is sudden blip on the local radar.
This is where my story takes up.