The Secret History and Continuing Adventures of Star Wars: The Essential Atlas

Mapping the Galaxy by Daniel Wallace

"When I was hired on to the [Shadows of the Empire] project, one of the first questions I asked Allan Kausch was if someone had made a map of all the planets in the Star Wars universe. He just laughed. There's no way; there's too many planets."

That 's a quote from Steve Perry, writer of the 1996 novel Shadows of the Empire. Here's the thing: he was absolutely right. The Star Wars galaxy began taking shape back in 1977 -- and not just Tatooine and Alderaan, but obscurities from the movie novelization such as the Fire Rings of Fornax. By the mid-1990s, Star Wars had welcomed three films, two TV movies, a number of immersive video games, two animated cartoons, countless novels and comics, and a bookshelf of roleplaying materials. Nobody involved in creating this material was working with a map, so what hope was there that any of it actually made geographic sense? And who would be crazy enough to try to find out?

Enter (ahem) Daniel Wallace and Jason Fry. While Jason and I are lifelong Star Wars fans, we both suffer a bit from excessively precise memories and narrow organizational skills that aren't confined to Star Wars -- I can dissect the DC Comics universe pretty handily, and Jason can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the New York Mets. But it was our love of, and obsession with, the Star Wars galaxy that led to the publication of Del Rey 's Star Wars: The Essential Atlas.

The roots of this book go back to 1994, when Jason and I met as message board participants in America Online's Star Wars Fan Club. Stoked by the Star Wars resurgence heralded by Timothy Zahn's Heir to the Empire and by the information superhighway's ability to create communities for like-minded souls, I started making an alphabetized text document of Star Wars planets that spread via file libraries. Jason, meanwhile, started an Excel database of planet notes and placements that he maintained for his own reference. Not long after Steve Perry lamented the lack of a Star Wars map, I started writing for Lucasfilm in an official capacity with Del Rey's Star Wars: The Essential Guide to Planets and Moons. Yet even with that project I declined to tackle a map, unconsciously agreeing with Perry 's assessment that the task was simply too large.

The situation changed in 1998. LucasArts' Haden Blackman, working on the CD-ROM encyclopedia Behind the Magic, pushed for a top-down view of the galaxy that would include 16 movie planets, including Hoth, Endor and Chewbacca's homeworld of Kashyyyk, plus a sneak peek at Naboo (which would appear in The Phantom Menace the following year). Blackman, with Vince Lee, made an attempt at depicting the galaxy's major geographic regions as specified in the roleplaying game (Outer Rim, Mid Rim, Expansion Region, Inner Rim, Colonies, and Core Worlds), but as he noted in an email to editor Allan Kausch, "There is much conflicting information about some locations and very little useful information about others." Because the project had potential overlap with The Essential Guide to Planets and Moons, I was brought in to consult. The resulting map was a promising start, but for geography nuts it only opened the door to new questions.

But the map couldn't have come at a better time. Over at Lucasfilm's publishing department, a five-year saga was in the early planning stages in collaboration with Del Rey. The New Jedi Order, set 22 years after Return of the Jedi, would detail a brutal invasion by the extra-galactic Yuuzhan Vong as they crushed civilized space under their bootheels. As planet after planet fell to the enemy in story conferences, it became clear that the logistics of this tightly-plotted series would require outside resources.

James Luceno, writer of the New Jedi Order novels Agents of Chaos and Jedi Eclipse, worked with me to build a galaxy map that had sufficient detail to serve as the backbone for the New Jedi Order invasion. Our first step was to ensure we captured the Behind the Magic placements, which I accomplished in the most low-tech way possible when I printed out a Behind the Magic screenshot and traced it on a fresh piece of paper using a brightly-lit window.

From there, the hard work started. Jim and I knew we couldn't in good conscience overturn any prior contributions to Star Wars cartography, so we collected everything that had ever been published, from sector maps in West End Games products to specific travel-time references in novels. The module Secrets of the Sisar Run revealed a nice slice of Hutt Space, the Star Wars Adventure Journal offered up a pocket of the Core Worlds, and the backbone of the Rimma Trade Route was outlined in Lords of the Expanse. In Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy we learned that Wayland and Myrkr are a mere 350 light years apart, despite the fact that their region placements (Outer Rim and Inner Rim, respectively) would seem to put them in impossibly distant neighborhoods. In this case, it meant that the region layers lying between the two would need to be the thickness of a ribbon.

Trying to reconcile these existing pieces against Behind the Magic became a maddening fanboy rendition of "Dem Bones": The Parmel sector's connected to the Sarin sector, the Sarin sector's connected to the Quence sector...

To visualize the unseen webs that tied planets to one another, I diagrammed every possible link on paper, by now relying heavily on Jason's outstanding planetary database which he had never stopped updating. On one occasion, an attempt to locate the gambling world of Elshandruu Pica resulted in an explosion of lines and arrows that left my head throbbing and my vision blurry. Jim Luceno took one look at the faxed results and replied, "Thanks for that... thing, the likes of which I haven't seen since my days as a psychiatric aide at a mental health facility."