Olivie Blake Q&A: The Atlas Six
A dark academic debut fantasy that reads like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History meets the series The Umbrella Academy
The Atlas Six by Olivie Blake is the first in an explosive trilogy: The Alexandrian Society, caretakers of lost knowledge from the greatest civilizations of antiquity, are the foremost secret society of magical academicians in the world. Those who earn a place among the Alexandrians will secure a life of wealth, power, and prestige beyond their wildest dreams, and each decade, only the six most uniquely talented magicians are selected to be considered for initiation.
Enter the latest round of six:
Libby Rhodes and Nico de Varona, unwilling halves of an unfathomable whole, who exert uncanny control over every element of physicality.
Reina Mori, a naturalist, who can intuit the language of life itself.
Parisa Kamali, a telepath who can traverse the depths of the subconscious, navigating worlds inside the human mind.
Callum Nova, an empath easily mistaken for a manipulative illusionist, who can influence the intimate workings of a person’s inner self.
Finally, there is Tristan Caine, who can see through illusions to a new structure of reality—an ability so rare that neither he nor his peers can fully grasp its implications.
When the candidates are recruited by the mysterious Atlas Blakely, they are told they will have one year to qualify for initiation, during which time they will be permitted preliminary access to the Society’s archives and judged based on their contributions to various subjects of impossibility: time and space, luck and thought, life and death. Five, they are told, will be initiated. One will be eliminated. The six potential initiates will fight to survive the next year of their lives, and if they can prove themselves to be the best among their rivals, most of them will.
Most of them.
“The Atlas Six introduces six of the most devious, talented, and flawed characters to ever find themselves in a magical library, and then sets them against one another in a series of stunning betrayals and reversals. As much a delicious contest of wit, will, and passion as it is of magic, this book is half mystery, half puzzle, and wholly a delight.”—Holly Black, New York Times bestselling author of The Book of Night
An Amazon Best Book of March 2022: “Magic saturates the pages of The Atlas Six and Blake’s world rises above her words to engulf you, as you furiously read page after page wanting—and not wanting—to see how this electrifying whirlwind of a fantasy will end.”—Seira Wilson, Amazon Editor
About the Author: Olivie Blake is the pseudonym of Alexene Farol Follmuth, a lover and writer of stories. She has penned several indie SFF projects, including the webtoon Clara and the Devil with illustrator Little Chmura and the BookTok-viral Atlas series. As Alexene, her young adult rom-com My Mechanical Romance recently debuted.
Interview with Olivie Blake
Q: Could you introduce yourself for everyone here?
“I’m Olivie Blake, a novelist. I’m bipolar and I started writing one day when I was super manic and couldn’t sleep and I started writing fan fiction. I realised that writing helped me much more than medications and creativity helped me channel all my energy into something that was worthwhile and soothed me.
“Eventually, I started writing my own books. I came to writing later in my life, when I was already in my mid twenties since it was more like a compulsion for me and something that I had to do, but now I feel very lucky to be able to do it!
“The first version of The Atlas Six was one of the first books I had written and finished but when I finished it, I wasn’t very happy with it and completely scraped it. Two years later I had a better idea for the secret society and them competing with high stakes and takes how this book came about!”—Interview with Olivia Blake (It’s Just a Coffee Addicted Bibliophile)
Q: What’s your reaction to your novel spreading far and wide online; what do you think about the fact that so many people are sharing it?
“Definitely my immediate reaction is, and has been, terror [laughs]. There’s so many pieces of it that are hard to explain, when I wrote this I was getting very frustrated with the traditional publishing process, I had already been self-publishing, for three years, I had been querying for two years and it just was starting to feel like okay, I know I have a small but very loyal audience, I’ve got people who are going to be really into this concept. I basically wrote it like, this is the kind of book that I would want to read, this is interesting to me, I know there’s going to be some people who like it—I’m just going to release it and you know, we’ll see what happens.
“I never thought it was going to become a big thing and I never queried The Atlas Six, because to me it was hard to pitch in a query. I was like you know what, this release I will just see what happens—it’ll be my fun little side project, so to watch it have a bigger appeal has just been mystifying.”—Interview with Olivie Blake, Author of The Atlas Six // a beautifully written book full of secrets and magic (Stories & Stardust)
Q: The Atlas Six has one of the most unique and intricate premises for a sci-fi I’ve read in a long time. Can you tell us a little about what inspired the story and its characters?
“Years ago, I wrote a fairly derivative portal fantasy that bored even me—something much more Archetypal Magic Romp, with characters who fell in love and joined up to take down a Big Bad and save the world. As I was revisiting the draft, I realized there was a better book in there somewhere if I scrapped what I had, pushed some of the intriguing (but “unlikable”) secondary characters to the forefront, and tossed out the more predictable storylines in favour of a more intimate, cloistered academic setting.
“I wrote this version of the book in 2019, when politics were… let’s say complex, and I wanted to reflect that. I wanted morally grey characters who were functionally their own unreliable narrators, and I also wanted to play with tension, something more psychologically complex with hard emotional beats.
“I wanted academia, competition, pressure—something moody and cerebral, like The Secret History’s brand of slipping away to interiority and scholarly conversation. I just needed sufficiently high stakes, and once the story’s fundamental conceit hit me during a long car ride, I knew I had a much more interesting concept on my hands.”—Olivie Blake On Going Viral, TV Adaptations And Her Hit Sci-Fi Novel, The Atlas Six (United By Pop)
Q: What exactly does the word “Atlas” refer to in the title? Is it Atlas the character “Atlas Bakely” or is it something that has to do with the six characters being from all around the world?
“It’s definitely supposed to shift its meaning when we find out about Ezra and how he’s connected to Atlas. So, initially it is supposed to be The Atlas Six as in when you first open the book and then there’s this guy named Atlas and he’s picked six people, and it’s supposed to be, oh, so that’s what it means.
“But then when Ezra reveals who the actual six are—or who Atlas intended the six to be—it’s supposed to shift a little bit. It is sort of intended to be perfectly clear until it isn’t anymore. But it does revolve around, not him as a character but as a concept.”—Talking of Tales — Interview with Olivie Blake, Author of ‘The Atlas Six’ ♡ (Talk of Tales Book Blog)
Q: Your novel is about magic and secret societies (among other things). What kind of research did you do to create that world? What other works inspired you?
“Ahhh yes, the magic in this world is deeply informed by quantum theory—I’m bookish by nature, but still, I’ve never willingly read so much science in my life. There has been Carlo Rovelli’s oeuvre on the nature of time and reality (plus a little Einstein for the palette), Guido Tonelli’s Genesis, The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert, Man and His Symbols by Carl Jung, The Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins, various theories on immortality, Mesopotamian creation myths….
“Basically, every magical subject explored in the book stems from my own interest in what we might know or understand about the world if we had not had historical setbacks—you know, from imperialism or any of its friends—and what we could do with the answers to some of our most profound questions about existence. Which is to say, some pretty alarming things.”—Spotlight on: Olivie Blake (Locus)