asianamlitfans | A Review of Olivie Blake’s The Atlas Complex (Tor, 2024)

Written by Stephen Hong Sohn

Edited by Lizzy Sobiesk

So, I leave us with a review of the final installment: Olivie Blake’s The Atlas Complex (Tor, 2024). Again, I must briefly make my spoiler warning before providing us with the marketing description: “An explosive return to the library leaves the six Alexandrians vulnerable to the lethal terms of their recruitment. Old alliances quickly fracture as the initiates take opposing strategies as to how to deal with the deadly bargain they have so far failed to uphold. Those who remain with the archives wrestle with the ethics of their astronomical abilities, while elsewhere, an unlikely pair from the Society cohort partner to influence politics on a global stage. And still the outside world mobilizes to destroy them, while the Caretaker himself, Atlas Blakely, may yet succeed with a plan foreseen to have world-ending stakes. It’s a race to survive as the six Society recruits are faced with the question of what they're willing to betray for limitless power—and who will be destroyed along the way.”

The description is somewhat off, since Atlas Blakely is dead, killed by the hand of Libby Rhodes, who has unleashed her full medeian potential. Meanwhile, the “lethal terms of their recruitment” mean that one in every cohort needs to die. Atlas’s cohort didn’t follow this rule, believing they could skirt around it. What happened when they tried to avoid having to sacrifice a member of their cohort was that every single member of that cohort eventually died instead of one. Thus, the six that Atlas himself recruited in book 1 realize that they have to figure out the appropriate sacrifice from their grouping in order to avoid the same outcome. The problem is: who should be killed? This question is more complicated than one thinks, because apparently, there is a right answer. One of the six is supposed to be most deserving of being killed off, and only the archives, which are the sentient knowledge source from which all the magical texts come from, can be the arbiter of whether or not the sacrifice is appropriate. Blake has a ton to deal with in this text. She added another wrinkle into the equation by introducing the Forum, an organization hell-bent on ending the Society and disseminating all the information in the archives itself. In my humble opinion, there was a little bit too much to wrap up here, and I definitely wanted more information about the rules of this world. For instance, we discover that Dalton Emery, a medeian with the power to animate and create life, doesn’t fully realize that his power might have to draw this life force from somewhere else. This element is the huge question that I still have about this particular installment. In fact, I still do not understand why the archives require a sacrifice at all and wonder if it is connected to the cost that exists to use magic in this world. In any case, the final piece of this trilogy is certainly exciting and for this reason alone, I do think many dark fantasy readers will want to give it a shot, but the ending is truly going to be polarizing. The choice of who dies is not going to sit well with all readers. While I felt Libby’s character development made sense (despite the devastating direction she went), it was one of her foils, Parisa Kamali, that I had the hardest trouble wrapping my head around. Finally, I did find the character dynamics to be quite frustrating, only because so many of the characters seemed to detest each other for most of the three books, and this level of tension could be exhausting, at least to me. Despite my critiques, I am going to be incredibly clear: Blake is obviously super talented and can really drive a story forward with energetic momentum. The books themselves are gorgeous publications, with some fully sketched out images of characters, which only add to the quality of the overall work. And I know I’m going to find someone who has read the work, if only to ask the questions I’ve brought up here. I’ll definitely read as much of Blake’s other publications that I can, and there are many!

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