STAR WARS: THE ESSENTIAL ATLAS - Mapping Hutt Space

MAPPING HUTT SPACE
By Jason Fry

In December 2006 I sat down at my desk, pulled a sheet of paper out of my printer, and started to draw. Using a blue ballpoint pen, I roughed out the approximate borders of Hutt Space, then added dots for the region's star systems that had appeared on maps: Here were Sriluur and Klatooine, there were Kessel and Honoghr, farther down were Toydaria, Nal Hutta, and Ylesia. There were eleven in all. Hutt Space looked awfully empty.

I put down the pen and picked up a pencil.

My friend Dan Wallace and I had just received the go-ahead from Del Rey and Lucas Books to tackle our dream project: an atlas of the Star Wars galaxy. Our atlas would not only show how all the star systems dreamed up by George Lucas and other Star Wars creators fit together--ideally, it would also make the galaxy far, far away feel like a real place, one with its own societies, economics, and traditions. It would be a travelogue and a history book and much more.

Dan and I had written an outline for what became Star Wars: The Essential Atlas. We'd figured out the maps we wanted or needed to show, from the full galaxy to close-ups of regions, including the ones we'd always wanted to explore in greater detail. We were armed with our Star Wars libraries of novels, comics, videogame manuals, and role-playing games, as well as with an Excel spreadsheet I'd obsessively updated for years, stubbornly convinced it would one day prove valuable. The spreadsheet--by then nearly a megabyte in size--listed every Star Wars star system I knew of by sector and region, along with references to what sources it appeared in and any details about where it might be in the galaxy.

But now I realized getting the go-ahead had been the easy part and gathering reference materials had just been a preliminary. That largely blank page had to become Hutt Space, just as Dan and I had to somehow take all those planets invented for all those different stories and make them into a coherent whole.
To fill in the blanks of Hutt Space, I started with what we knew, paging through The New Essential Chronology, The New Essential Guide to Alien Species, Geonosis and the Outer Rim Worlds, The Dark Empire Sourcebook, and searching my Excel database. The Hutts were slavers and crimelords, of course - we'd met Jabba the Hutt up there on the big screen back in 1983. Expanded Universe lore taught us that the Hutt clans were called kajidics, and competed fiercely without resorting to open warfare. Yet there were bits and pieces of an ancient history that sounded rather different: The Hutts had defeated Xim, the pre-Republic warlord of the Tion, and they'd destroyed their original homeworld in a terrible civil war. They'd then stolen the planet Evocar from its natives and renamed it Nal Hutta. Nal Hutta's moon, Nar Shaddaa, had begun as a respectable port, but fell out of favor and became a lawless den of smugglers, thieves and worse - an anti-Coruscant of the Rimworlds.

From those bare bones and a host of other clues and fragments, I fleshed out a history of the Hutts: They'd been expansionist warriors until their ruinous civil war, which had led to the emergence of kajidic--a philosophy of avoiding direct conflict in favor of plots and dirty dealings. (The Hutts would follow kajidic so devoutly that their clans would become synonymous with the name.) But at all times they were cruel masters. They'd ruined many worlds and exterminated many species, and they knew many secrets.

That was the story; now I needed the map to tell it, too.

I gathered the roster of worlds that hadn't been placed but that sources indicated were in Hutt Space - the likes of Saki, Ganath, Kleeva, Moralan, Circumtore, and Nimban - and added them to the map in pencil. Then I went through the database and to my shelves, hunting through every story, RPG adventure, and source that prominently featured Hutts. I wanted star systems that were associated with the Hutts and would thus give Hutt Space the right "feel." That put worlds such as Cyborrea, Carnovia, and Sionia onto the map, as well as Sleheyron, a Hutt industrial world that had been cut from the Knights of the Old Republic videogame. A few placements were problematic. Kwenn Space Station, a favorite of the old West End Games books, was described as a day from Tatooine and pretty near Ithor, which later maps had made impossible. Kwenn was the gateway to the Outer Rim, at the edge of the Mid Rim, and a place frequented by different species and a mix of Imperials, law-abiding spacers, and smugglers. It was a logical entrepot for Hutt Space.

Hutt Space was beginning to take shape; now it was time to draw the trade routes. I wanted these to have an exotic feel, so I got out my copy of the Galactic Phrase Book and Travel Guide. I coined Pabol as the Huttese word for "route" (it's a corruption of "spaceship" + "go") and joined it with other Huttese words. The Ootmian Pabol was the Outlanders' Route (listen closely in Episode I and you'll hear Watto mutter about ootmians), the Shag Pabol was the Slave Road, and the Pabol Hutta spoke for itself.

I wanted to give Hutt Space a sense of mystery and malice - as I imagined it, outlanders were forbidden to travel within its interior, and would trade whispered wild tales about it in cantinas. I remembered looking at the map in the back of The Lord of the Rings and wondering about the parts of Mordor Frodo and Sam never visited, and tried to summon up that feeling. Hence a minor trade route became the Dead Road, and a region of Hutt Space became the Cairns.

For Hutt Space to feel mysterious, I knew it couldn't just be a collection of familiar names. So I began penciling in new worlds. Some got Hutt-sounding names - Nar Chunna and Nar Haaska, for instance. Others were meant to sound like they were named by other species - Affavan and Ulmatra, for instance. And then there were names I thought sounded strange and vaguely foreboding, such as Saqqar and Usk.

As a final touch, I invented a secret heart of Hutt Space - the Bootana Hutta, "the Garden of Hutts." Here were the kajidic throneworlds and planets stolen from Hutt slaves, a secret place about which even the Empire knew only rumors.

With that, Hutt Space was on its journey to becoming a finished map, and one section of The Essential Atlas had been written. If Dan and I could just do the same for several dozen more maps and a few thousand more star systems, we'd have a book.

To see exclusive page spreads from the book and watch interviews with authors Dan Wallace and Jason Fry please click this link.

For a chance to win a copy of Star Wars: The Essential Atlas autographed by authors Dan Wallace and Jason Fry along with illustrators Chris Reiff and Chris Trevas click this link. Contest ends August 21st.