I don't know when I drew my first map of a fictional location, but this started at a young age. I know I made maps of the Land of Oz, but this was easy, given the omnipresent maps to imitate in the fronts of my Del Rey editions. I also made maps of Narnia and its surrounding environs, carefully mining the text of C. S. Lewis's novels for clues-- for some reason, good maps of this imaginary realm seem few and far between. (The Dictionary of Imaginary Places has one, but it doesn't go any further east than Terebinthia, or further west than Narnia itself, unfortunately.) I of course own a copy of Star Trek: Star Charts, and half the reason I bought Vector Prime was the glorious map of the Star Wars galaxy included in its endpapers. I say all this to explain that it was with no small anticipation that I picked up my copy of The Essential Atlas, a glossy, oversized book of some 243 pages.

What I've learned is that I actually don't care much about Star Wars geography! Not like I do Star Trek stuff. I still pore over my copy of Star Charts occasionally, but I can't see myself referring to this a whole heckuva lot. I just don't know Star Wars minutia well enough (and I know it very well)-- who cares where Ogem is? But this isn't to besmirch the book, which is in fact quite excellent. It's well-researched as far as I know, and the maps themselves are fantastic. My favorite part is the historical and political information the maps (and their accompanying text) communicate; the material on the Old Republic or the disintegration of the Galactic Empire are fantastic, showing coalitions, fleet movements, and battles across wide spans of time and short ones. The book opens up a lot of new historical information about the Star Wars galaxy, from Xim the Despot forward, advancing cartographic ideas the meanwhile. There's some nice, imaginative features, too, though I find the way that some of the features are dropped into the "Atlas of Galactic History" section somewhat random and confusing.

The planetary profiles are also quite solid, and here was a point where I didn't feel lost in obscurity, as the authors deliberately picks more well-known planets to focus on; the ones I didn't already know about were obviously important enough that I should have. My only fault with the book's text were the "Closer Look" sections, which often seemed to be random strings of planets (strangely not ordered) with dull descriptions. In "A Closer Look: Kashyyyk and Its Neighbors", for example, I learned that "Yitabo is a minor argicultural world settled by the Saurins, Wookiees, and Borneck." Try reading over two dozen of these "facts" strung together; I often found myself skipping these sections. But they're a small component of the book, which I was almost always absorbed in, even though I was well aware that it had to have been designed with someone even more obsessed with Star Wars than me in mind.