Artist Profile: Olivie Blake on the Meaning of Life, Surprising Endings, and Rewriting Canon

“The Atlas Complex,” the final book in Olivie Blake’s bestselling Atlas series, was released on Jan. 9. Set in the future where magic runs the world as much as money, the survivors of a murderous initiation ritual to an organization with untold knowledge and resources must figure out how to survive and whether to risk the world now they have been given access to untold power and possibilities.

Reflecting on “The Atlas Six,” the first book in the series — from self-publication in 2020, to blowing up on TikTok and being traditionally published by Tor in 2021, to the trilogy finally reaching its end, Blake discussed how the series was an ambitious project.

“Definitely when I started writing this, I thought there was no way that it was marketable. I still feel a little bit like I was right about that,” Blake said in an interview with The Harvard Crimson.

Blake described how the series began with a series of character studies against a dark academia backdrop, a genre that has exploded in popularity in recent years. However, Blake has always intended to tell stories that her readers might not expect from the original premise.

“Libby Rhodes, for example, is a character that I really wanted to feel very familiar. I wanted you to start reading and be like, oh, this is Hermione Granger, this is Alina Starkov, this is, you know, every single female character that we have seen in the fantasy canon. And then take her journey in a very different direction,” Blake said.

She hopes that the right readers, who bought into her virally successful first novel, will find themselves satisfied with how the books treat no subplot as impossible.

“I knew readers would go into the book thinking it was one thing, then hopefully follow me realizing that these are six totally unreliable narrators,” Blake said. “The kinds of romantic things that you would expect to happen don’t happen, things that are normally queerbait-y type things do happen, like, ‘Oh, it’s not a trick!’”

Though the Atlas series books are dramatic, funny, and thought-provoking — featuring improbable magic, sexcapades, and deeply unserious interactions — they also deal with big questions.

“It’s a projection of classic ethical problems,” Blake said.

For Blake, the series meditates on the question of life’s meaning. Beginning with the perspectives of six struggling, privileged, powerful characters, it zooms out in scale to ask what is wrong with the futuristic, magical society they live in, and whether it’s egotistical for a character to believe they can change the world.

“It’s very Western and very late capitalist to think that you have to have a purpose, there has to be a meaning, or that some people are worth more because they have a purpose,” Blake said.

Appropriately titled, “The Atlas Six” explored nothing but the six central characters’ own whims. but “The Atlas Complex” breaks this mold, expanding beyond the original six characters to explore how “ordinary” people experience the world to show the lessons Blake wanted her characters to learn.

“It’s not about the answers. It’s about doing the most good you can with the resources you are given,” Blake said. “Which was why it was so interesting to start with a group of people who have every resource in the world and never asked themselves once, ‘What good should we do with this?’ until they lose something personal.”

Blake described how “The Atlas Complex” dealt with alternate possibilities and the multiverse, because it was important for her to imagine that every possible scenario might exist for her characters.

“I come from fanfiction, I come from a world of understanding that there are going to be people who imagine different endings,” Blake said. “I wanted to write this book from a world where that is true. And all these things exist.”

While it has become less taboo for published authors to admit to being former fanfiction authors, Blake has been outspoken in showing respect for the form.

“It’s almost going back to the oral storytelling tradition — there is no origin story, this is the story the way your grandmother told it to you — except it was someone on AO3. And there’ll be people all the time saying, I don’t know where this ship name came from, or I don’t know where this quality came from, I don’t know why they’re written like this. But because we all read the same things. And, now we’re all working in the same imaginary playground.”

Blake’s upcoming fairy tale retelling anthology, featuring republished and new short stories, will be released in October this year.

—Staff writer Millie Mae Healy can be reached at milliemae.healy@thecrimson.com.