I just watched Avatar for the first time today and thought it was a good movie. However, as I watched it I immediately began to see similarities to Alan Dean Foster’s classic Midworld. So many similarities in fact that I was surprised there was no mention of Midworld as an inspiration for this movie. Sure the plots are not the same, but the environment and parts of the story are way too similar for this to be a coincidence. A quick Google search confirmed my feelings as I found several sites saying the same thing (and including Poul Anderson’s “Call Me Joe” as another inspiration). At the blog site Preserving Privacy, Sanity and the Individual, I read comments by people saying the movie was a total ripoff, the movie was nothing like Midworld, and opinions in between. There are some good arguments outlining the similarities between the movie and the book so I won’t repeat them here, but I do agree with the sentiments of some of the comments which say Cameron should acknowledge that he drew inspiration for Avatar from these two classic sci-fi stories.