When Olivie Blake self-published The Atlas Six and launched her Atlas trilogy in January 2020, she admits she had no idea how the series would conclude.
“I was like, no one’s gonna read this,” she says with a laugh over Zoom from her Los Angeles home. “I’ll end it however I end it.” But, several months after its publication, The Atlas Six unexpectedly went viral, first on X (formerly Twitter) and then on TikTok. Now, with legions of fans eagerly awaiting the bestselling series’ final installment, The Atlas Complex (Tor, Jan. 2024), the pressure is definitely on.
Blake, the pen name of Alexene Farol Follmuth, is no stranger to fandom. The 34-year-old author got her start writing fan fiction, which she describes as invaluable experience. “Fan fiction had no barriers to entry,” she says. “It provided me with my 10,000 hours. Not just of writing, but of writing as part of a community. I started to understand how you make a person care.”
As the daughter of an immigrant, Blake, who is Filipino American, says becoming a writer was never considered a responsible choice by her parents. But after burning out in law school, being diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and taking an uninspiring job in commercial real estate, writing became her outlet. “At that point, I’d already broken my mother’s heart,” she says, “So I thought, I’m gonna try to do this for real.”
She self-published eight novels before the Atlas series, which centers on a modern-day secret society that controls an extant Library of Alexandria and all the arcane knowledge therein. Every 10 years, a new class of six potential inductees—the most powerful magicians of their generation—spend a year living together in the archives. But to become full members of the secret order, they must pick one among their cohort to murder.
In the time between The Atlas Six’s publication and its virality, Blake had secured an agent, Amelia Appel at Triada U.S.; inked a book deal for her YA rom-com My Mechanical Romance; and placed the Atlas series on indefinite hold. But with the sales spike, Blake’s agent told her to turn the book into a pitch she could send to publishers. The Tor edition, which went through structural edits to better set up book two, debuted at #3 on the New York Times bestseller list in March 2022.
“While it was going viral, I was giving birth,” Blake says. “I can’t explain what happened, because I was busy being torn in half by my son.” In many ways, the book is perfect fodder for fandom obsession: a character study centered on six impossibly intelligent, impossibly attractive 20-somethings, any one of whom could conceivably kiss or kill the others. “I wanted it to be a little pulpy,” Blake says. “I wanted it to feel like you were binging a reality show.”
This quality also garnered criticism, amplified by the inevitable backlash to online hype surrounding the series. Blake herself concedes that the books are, “arguably all vibes, no plot.” Much of the page count is dominated by excavations of each character’s psyche alongside dense discussions of magical theory, which draw heavily from quantum physics. “I don’t pace correctly according to SFF as a genre,” Blake says. But, thanks to her success as a fanfic author, where the usual rules don’t always apply, “I already knew that I could ignore that kind of feedback,” she says.
The slow-burning series may break with fantasy conventions, but it does slot neatly into the dark academia subgenre, a perennially popular category on BookTok. Indeed, The Atlas Six was intended as a response to The Secret History by Donna Tart, arguably dark academia’s urtext. “There’s even a certain emptiness,” Blake says, “to the derivative quality of the first book. Readers have seen secret societies before and been asked to kill a member and gone along with it. The Atlas Six is meant to be a bottle episode: let’s buy into the stakes and not question the ethics of the outside world.”
With each subsequent book, however, Blake has expanded the series’ scope. “Now in book three, it’s like, and here’s the rest of the world. Did you forget where you were? Did you forget what actually matters?” she says, noting that publishing a trilogy may have worked to the story’s detriment. “There were people who were really disappointed with book two because they bought into what I was selling. I think they may be disappointed with The Atlas Complex as well. It’s been weird to carry that awareness around with me.”
The way the Atlas series concludes is a secret kept under lock and key. Blake describes learning that journalists were required to sign an NDA before reading a galley of The Atlas Complex as an “unexpected and sexy” career achievement. At the same time, she’s palpably nervous about how fans will respond once the book is published and is planning to avoid social media for a while.
“The fandom creator in me is always aware of the reader as an entity that’s involved,” Blake says. “Once I’ve written the book, it then becomes everyone’s story.” She finds it both delightful and surreal that people now write fan fiction about her work. “I gave them lots to play with!” she says, laughing. “I’m very generous!” Still, reader demands—especially surrounding the potential romantic pairings—weigh on her. When the books went viral, Blake says, some readers became focused on aspects of the story—e.g. a relationship between two characters the author never intended to be romantic—that she finds uninteresting.
Still, she says, “Coming from fandom, I think I was more driven than other authors to assign credence to what readers were seeing. I decided I’m going to intentionally honor the fact that this is what people are reading into this. But I did have to weigh: does it cheapen what I initially intended to do?”
Blake is clearly highly attuned to both her fans and her critics, a function of being very online. “I love BookTok,” she says, lauding the community for fostering a passion for reading in young women. “I have felt a bit punished for being a BookTok author and I don’t think that’s fair, because it’s not punishing me, it’s punishing my readers.”
Blake describes those readers as an “intellectually curious audience,” noting that the concept of the Atlas series stemmed from a thought experiment: If magic existed, could it solve the world’s problems? Would access to all the power and knowledge in the universe change anything? “I came to these books from a place of rage,” says Blake, citing gun violence, climate anxiety, and the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision as contributing to her mental state. “I wanted to assign that essential angst, loneliness, and fear to these characters and give them a world where magic is real but solves nothing. It’s this very millennial ennui. Like, what if this shit doesn’t change? What if we can’t change it? And the ultimate answer is, you try anyway.”
