LIFE ON TATOOINE

Life on Tatooine is governed by the two suns, Tatoo I and II. The planet is moving at an infinitesimal rate towards them, under the spell of their gravitational attraction. Millions of years ago its oceans were evaporated, leaving only barren areas of sodium-rich sandwastes and sharp, arid mesas. Millions of years hence the planet will be a fiery, uninhabitable inferno. In the meantime, it is a frontier world where many life forms have adapted to the harsh environment and maintain a precarious, often desperate existence.

It is an old settlers’ saying that it is more dangerous to gaze upon the reflected glare of the flatlands than to stare straight up at the twin suns. Protection from the heat and the double dosage of solar ultraviolet, the sudden sandwhirls and sandstorms, is a dominant factor for humans and quasi-humans alike. Farmers like Owen Lars live underground, their houses excavated from the sides of crater-like holes. These homes evolved as a defense against both the weather and hostiles like the Tusken Raiders. The living quarters and farm work. shops open onto a large courtyard some thirty feet below surface level. Access is by a sloping ramp lined with electrostatic repellers to keep out drifting sand.

Centered on townships like Anchorhead and Bestine, the settlers provide the basis of the planetary economy. Using evaporators, irrigation units, and multifunctional ‘droids, they work giant “moisture farms” whose sheer size makes up for their lack of fertility. The vaporators, which draw what little moisture there is from the air, are the key to this capital-intensive type of agriculture. When Luke’s uncle Owen is examining the various ‘droids offered for sale by the migrant Jawas, he says to See-Threepio: “I need a ‘droid that knows something about the binary language of independently programmable moisture vaporators.”

Threepio, who claims versatility as his middle name and is determined to escape the clutches of the repulsive Jawas, replies quick as a blaster’s flash: “Vaporators! We are both in luck. My first post-primary assignment was in programming binary toad lifters. Very similar in construction and memory-function to your vaporators…”

The harvested food-plants from the moisture farms are shipped off-planet from the Mos Eisley spaceport and fetch high prices in the galaxy‘s over-populated urban worlds. Luke tells his friend Biggs: “Uncle Owen’s finally got enough vaporators installed and running to make the farm pay off big.” But the prospect of large agro-profits fills Luke with indifference. He longs to get off-planet and join the Space Academy. Spending his time maintaining his uncle’s various ‘droids — Treadwell models and agricultural Artoos — and checking on the vaporators and irrigation units: that’s no kind of life for a young man thirsting for adventure. The local township of Anchorhead is a place as bleak as a black hole, its only form of entertainment computer-assisted pool. Luke’s favorite pastimes are hunting womp-rats from his landspeeder and dicing with death by flying the suborbital skyhopper spacecraft down Tatooine’s narrow, twisting canyons – a practice that stands him in good stead in the attack on the Death Star.

TRADERS AND RAIDERS

“What a forsaken place this is!” Threepio exclaims on first seeing the marching ranks of Tatooine’s sanddunes. Forsaken maybe, but inhabited by scavengers of both flesh and metal. The two robots are soon picked up by a group of Jawas, the three-foot tall semi-human species who travel the flatlands in their giant sandcrawlers looking for valuable minerals and salvageable mechanicals. Anthropologists hypothesize that the Jawas were once human themselves, but they have long since evolved into a distinctive form. Dressed in monk-like habits of thick brown cloth with hoods that reveal only their glowing red-yellow eyes, they have never been seen naked but are reputed to be extraordinarily ugly. Certainly they smell, causing Threepio, with his human-analog ability to sense offensive odors, to stifle an expression of disgust. Their faces are surrounded by small clouds of insects with which they apparently live in some weird symbiosis.

Relations between Jawas and humans are unfriendly but businesslike. The diminutive scavengers provide the farmers with a cheap, no-questions-asked source of ‘droids and minerals. They have to be watched of course. Though too cowardly to resort to outright stealing, they aren’t above passing off shady goods. The six-armed agricultural ‘droid Owen Lars first buys from the Jawas who captured Threepio and Artoo promptly breaks down, its servomotor-central shot to pieces. The incident almost leads to a confrontation, but Threepio cunningly suggests to Luke that the broken cultivator unit can be swapped for Artoo-Detoo! Another Jawa trick is to drain off most of the energy from any ‘droids they pick up to help power their sandcrawlers. When Luke takes Threepio and Artoo down to the garage to clean them up, he refers to the Jawas’ “reluctance to part with any erg-fraction they don’t have to” before connecting Artoo to the recharger.

Artoo, of course, escapes from the Lars homestead, a very unrobotic piece of behavior. And it’s when Luke and Threepio go in search of him the next morning that we meet the dreaded Tusken Raiders, or sandpeople. Where the Jawas are marginally useful to the settlers, the sandpeople are simply a threat. Where the Jawas are instinctively timid, the sandpeople are aggressive and fearless. Riding on their shaggy-haired mammoth-like banthas, they maintain permanent guerrilla warfare against the farmers, raiding and plundering wherever defenses are weak. Xenologists believe they are part organic, part mechanical. But no one is sure: no one has ever got that close to a Tusken, or seen what lies beneath their swathings of bandages and loose bits of cloth. Taller and stronger than humans, they are fearsome enemies, wielding great double-edged axes called gaderffii which are made from cannibalized freighter plating.

“There are some awfully strange things living out here,” Luke tells Threepio just before the Tusken attack. “Not all of them have been classified. It’s better to treat anything as dangerous until determined otherwise.” One of these ‘awfully strange things’ is the Krayt dragon. We never see one of these beasts, but it is by imitating their unearthly howl that Ben Kenobi drives off the sandpeople and rescues Luke and the robots. Kenobi is a pretty strange inhabitant of Tatooine himself: the last of the Jedi Knights masquerading as a desert hermit. Why Kenobi chose the planet for his self-imposed exile is unclear, but perhaps he was aware through the Force of the role young Luke would one day play.

It is not just coincidence that the future galactic hero should have been born and bred on a planet as apparently insignificant as Tatooine. Under the glare of its twin suns, he has been schooled in a harsh world where survival is paramount: the kind of education he would never have received on one of the galaxy’s more “civilized” inner systems. Under Kenobi’s subtle tutelage, he will soon receive a further education — learning to be receptive to and in control of the Force. It’s a lesson that begins when old Ben and Luke, plus Artoo and Threepio, are stopped by Imperial stormtroopers on first entering the rough frontier spaceport at Mos Eisley. But that’s another whole story.