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.
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."
Despite the migraines, one guiding principle remained: draw the roads and the rest will follow. Ever since Han Solo pointed out that "flying through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops," the Star Wars galaxy has distinguished itself from other sci-fi settings with its noteworthy approach to faster-than-light travel. Ships in Star Wars can't just fly wherever they want (unless they have a yen for flying through stars or bouncing too close to supernovas) and are required to employ hyperspace coordinates and trade routes.
West End Games had already done a fine job of formalizing this concept, and had even named the galaxy's backbone hyperlanes: the Perlemian Trade Route, the Hydian Way, the Rimma Trade Route, the Corellian Trade Spine, and the Corellian Run. After much angst (the Rimma had to pass near Dagobah, the Trade Spine had to pass near Hoth, the Perlemian and Corellian Run had to define "the Slice"), we were able to complete the proto-map for the New Jedi Order.
Populating it with planets came next. As this email from Jim to me illustrates, the process was a mix of art, science, and required story beats:
Draw a capital J, beginning at Dantooine, passing close to Kashyyyk, curving left somewhere between Nar Shaddaa and Tatooine, and coming to finish at Coruscant... This sort of end run around Corellia might work as an invasion route. The events in Bob's book [Vector Prime] could be set in the Outer Rim, with Lando's asteroid mining enterprise, the SETI base, et al. If we could locate the Unknown Regions from, say, 8-11 o'clock, the Invaders would pass close enough to Zahn's Nirauan system to allow for involvement of the Chiss (in Mike's books), and Ithor, providing we could locate that somewhere between Dantooine and Ord Mantell.
The first New Jedi Order map, finished by the end of 1998, included more than 50 planets. We continued to work on expanding it as well as to provide detail on areas that might prove useful. The heroes might flee to Galantos? Here's a map of Galantos and its neighbors within the Farlax sector. The Yuuzhan Vong will occupy Coruscant? Here's a map of Coruscant's neighborhood, including a route into the Deep Core and the farming worlds of the Ag Circuit.
But at this time the map was still intended as a tool for story planning only, not as a publicly-available resource. Convinced by now that the map would prove to be an invaluable aid for readers, Jim and I lobbied for the map to appear in each of the New Jedi Order books. To make the case I purchased copies of Vernor Vinge's sci-fi epic A Fire Upon the Deep (which contained a galaxy map of its own) and Michael Shaara's Civil War narrative The Killer Angels (which featured battlefield maps of Gettysburg), and Jim brought them to a March 1999 meeting. The map was greenlighted for publication in Vector Prime that November.
Chris Barbieri did the final artwork, choosing to alter the top-down depiction for a slightly tilted, edge-on view that would provide the model for many subsequent maps. His hand-drawn, pen-and-ink approach gave the exhibit the feel of an old pirate treasure map.
But updates to the original map continued, which by this point was beginning to resemble a placemat doodled on by a bored restaurant patron. Fortunately, Jason had been updating his database (which had swelled to over 4,000 individual entries), while at the same time working to formalize our joint approach to capture everything in a full-color atlas. We hoped to capture some of the same scholarship and attention to detail that you might encounter when picking up a reference book from National Geographic.
If Del Rey and Lucasfilm were willing to publish a new version of The Essential Guide to Planets and Moons, this time Jason and I wanted to do it right.
Making the Atlas by Jason Fry
Like Dan, I had always wanted to see a map of the Star Wars galaxy, but assumed the task was impossible. So imagine my feelings when one day Dan let me in on a secret: There was a map. Would I like to see it?
This was long enough ago that he sent it to me by fax -- I remember shifting impatiently from one foot to the other as it spooled out of the machine. (It was maybe half an hour before I began complaining vociferously about the location of Ithor.)
The map was wonderful, but it only whetted our appetites for what could be. We first pitched the idea of The Guide to the Star Wars Galaxy in the fall of 2005. Over the next year our outline changed somewhat -- proposed sections about the Imperial Survey Corps and Shadows of the Empire disappeared, as did detail maps for the galactic neighborhoods of Coruscant, Naboo, Ralltiir, Alderaan, Naboo and Mandalore -- but the basic plan remained the same. We wanted the Atlas to explain how the geography of the Star Wars galaxy had shaped its history, economics and social institutions -- and we wanted to fulfill our own fanboy dreams by placing each and every one of those 4,000-odd star systems. In the fall of 2006, Del Rey and Lucasfilm gave us the green light -- and it dawned on us that getting our project approved had been the easy part. Now we had to make it a reality.
Mapping a galaxy is like eating an elephant; you go a bite at a time. I plunged in by taking a closer look at Hutt Space, an area that had always intrigued me and whose territory and history were both relatively unexplored. Dan and I had divided the work down the middle, and over the winter and spring of 2007 we traded completed chapters like baseball cards -- until in June I spent one night putting all our chapters together into a single manuscript, which I sent to my co-author with an unprintable but happy expression of triumph.
Reading over the manuscript, I was relieved to feel that the Atlas held together -- it veered back and forth between science (of a sort) and politics and history and sociology, but the geography linked these disparate themes together. It felt -- at least to us -- like an exploration of a real place. Along the way, Dan and I had a grand time playing in George Lucas' sandbox. Dan brought to life the Twenty Wonders of the Galaxy, wrote up a selection of intriguing galactic mysteries, and explored the Chiss Ascendancy. I tackled the Hydian Way by writing notes for an imaginary opera, gave the smuggling careers of Han and Chewie a twist, and explained why the meeting aboard the Death Star includes an admiral referring to "your starfleet" in upbraiding a general. We both got to pay homage to West End Games, whose authors invented so much of the Expanded Universe's connective tissue, and we forged connections to sources as diverse (and obscure) as The Maverick Moon and "Tilotny Throws a Shape."
We faced some dilemmas. Chronicling the Clone Wars was a challenge, as the animated show told stories set at various points in the conflict, making it hard to construct a satisfying timeline. (And giving us rather different takes on Ryloth and the Mandalorians than what we'd seen before.) Our answer was to address the war thematically rather than sticking to a strict chronology, and to eliminate a map showing the state of the galaxy in the middle of the Clone Wars. On the other hand, publication delays let us address the entirety of the Legacy of the Force series, offering a nice segue between the New Jedi Order era and the "epilogue" of the much-later Legacy era brought to life by Dark Horse. We struggled with retcons, which please hardcore fans but can leave more-casual readers out in the cold, and every so often we ran aground on situations where the lack of maps had led unwitting authors into geographic impossibilities, forcing us to toss something aside. Happily, there weren't too many of those, and wherever possible we tried to at least preserve the spirit of things that couldn't be made to fit.
In the digital age that was a surprise, but not a shock -- Dan and I didn't meet in real life until Comic-Con 2008. We felt it shouldn't matter how old or how far away Modi was -- he was the best guy for the job. To their credit, Del Rey and Lucasfilm agreed. Modi (who would wind up splitting the enormous job of map production with the very talented Chris Reiff) made beautiful maps and saved us from innumerable mistakes as the Atlas got closer to completion.
How did we place systems? It depended on what we needed to accomplish. Sometimes we had a specific system we wanted to place in a specific spot. In that case, we'd search through the database looking for connections between that system and others, and then go to the primary sources to read more. That would generally tell us whether or not that placement would work. (Though sometimes we didn't immediately realize that a chain of geographic dominoes would fall and wreck a desired placement.) Other times, we had a dot on a map that we wanted to be something -- a mining world, for instance, or a system devastated by slavers. In that case, we'd hunt through the database for candidates, then check the primary sources to whittle down the candidates to a few or one. (Or, sometimes, none.) Finally, sometimes we had a bunch of dots that simply needed names, and we'd mix and match unassigned worlds to get the right "feel" for that galactic neighborhood.
By this spring the Atlas was in the home stretch: Modi and Chris Reiff were finishing their lavish maps, while each day seemed to bring gorgeous new sketches from Chris Trevas. With our mapwork complete, Dan and I were enmeshed in the final piece of the Atlas puzzle: the appendix.
We had originally imagined the appendix would take up 28 pages; thanks to some magic from our editor Erich Schoeneweiss and designer Brad Foltz, we were able to squeeze 4,387 systems into 14 pages. By the time we got to the appendix, around 3,000 systems had been placed. For the remainder, I re-sorted our trusty Excel spreadsheet by source and Dan and I divided what was left up, taking a couple of hundred star systems at a time. Finally, they all had homes -- worlds from movies and novels and comics and video games, not to mention worlds from RPGA adventures, monthly poster magazines and choose-your-own adventure books. We were finished.
Except we weren't, of course. Since the Atlas went to press new novels, comics and RPG material have appeared, introducing nearly 40 new star systems. Which might seem like we're stuck on some cruel geographic treadmill, except it fits nicely with what we hope the Atlas will become.
The Atlas is -- at long last -- a book, one that we're proud of and that we hope future Star Wars authors and artists will find useful. But neither its story nor our work ends here. We've been preparing an online version of the appendix, one that can include new worlds and correct our inevitable mistakes. (If you see any, send them to essential.atlas@gmail.com). You'll soon get to read about the worlds of the Tion Hegemony and the history of Xim the Despot. And we're working on new maps, ones that we hope will make the galaxy even richer by filling in information that was beyond the scope of even this project. With Lucasfilm's help, we 're working to make the Atlas a living document, one that can grow and change to keep up with all the wonderful tales yet to be told about that galaxy far, far away.
