Rachel Pollack, the prolific author who wrote award-winning science fiction and fantasy, as well as bestselling books on tarot, died on April 7 at age 77. In 1980, Pollack published Seventy-Eight Degrees of Wisdom, a guide to tarot that has never gone out of print and has been described as the "bible of tarot." In 1989, she won the Arthur C. Clarke Award for her novel Unquenchable Fire, and its sequel, Temporary Agency, won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1994. Her book Godmother Night won the 1997 World Fantasy Award.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., in 1945, Pollack began her career as an author with the short story "Pandora's Bust," published in 1971 in Michael Moorcock's magazine New World. Pollack transitioned shortly thereafter, and while living in the U.K., she became an activist and coordinated a group within the Gay Liberation Front that in 1972 released the first trans manifesto, called "Don't Call Me Mister You Fucking Beast."
"Rachel was a crystallizing force in the trans movement and so many other areas," remembered British writer and cultural critic Roz Kavenay. "She was perpetually an inspirational figure, and was one of the first professional trans writers who had a career while out, and proved that it was possible to do that."
In the 1990s, Pollack helmed a 20-plus issue run of the comic series Doom Patrol for DC's imprint Vertigo, taking over from Grant Morrison. During her Doom Patrol run, Pollack created the character Kate Godwin, "considered to be the first transgender superhero in mainstream comics," the Guardian reported.
Writer and historian Morgan M Page said of Pollack's place in the tarot world: "Quite simply, Rachel was the greatest living authority on the tarot." She was a member of the American Tarot Association, the International Tarot Society, and the Tarot Guild of Australia. She taught at the Omega Institute for Holistic Studies, created her own tarot decks, and wrote the books for The Vertigo Tarot and Salvador Dali's Tarot, among others.
Author Neil Gaiman, a friend of Pollack since the 1980s who visited her shortly before her death, wrote: "Rachel was a beloved writer of fantasy, but I prefer to describe her as a magical realist. She wrote these wonderful books of heightened reality and magical worlds where she would concretize metaphor." Her most recent novel was The Fissure King, published in 2017.
