Rachel Pollack (1945– ) is an award-winning US writer born in Brooklyn who lived abroad for almost two decades, most of that time in Amsterdam. Her fiction is often pointedly feminist or ecological in outlook and influenced by the tarot. Pollack published her first science fiction story, “Pandora’s Bust,” in New Worlds Quarterly 2 (1971), edited by Michael Moorcock, but her interests have, over time, taken her further and further from clearly identifiable genre fiction.
Pollack’s most famous work is the Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning Unquenchable Fire (1988). Set in an alternate America in which shamanism is as credible a means of understanding the world as science, Unquenchable Fire’s “bureaucracy of shamans” seeks out energy from deep within the Earth. Pollack’s protagonist is a miraculously pregnant woman with a rich backstory, told through flashbacks, who characteristically refuses her role as the mother of a new, possible prodigal shaman. A sequel, Temporary Agency (1994), continues the story. Throughout, Pollack’s portrait of a radically different but alarmingly similar United States is meticulously drawn, and her depiction of life in an alternate Poughkeepsie, New York, is frequently hilarious. Several stories—like “The Protector” (Interzone, 1986)—depict similarly transformed universes. From issue 64 to its demise at the end of 1994 with issue 87, Pollack also wrote Doom Patrol for DC Comics.
Her collection Burning Sky (1998), with an introduction by Samuel R. Delany, examines a variety of gender and women’s issues through a series of surreal short stories and folklore-influenced tales. As Delany writes, Pollack’s short fiction occurs “in a universe of wonders, where Free Women revenge sexist wrongs and a ten-kilometer-tall tree grows from the head of a comet…Pollack’s theme is the pursuit of ecstasy. Her characters approach that state from every conceivable direction.” Delany also identifies Pollack as in many ways an intellectual mystic, her writings in the service of a vision. This is a useful way to think of Pollack’s work, which is not turned in toward core genre but outward toward the universe.
In keeping with this stance, it’s unsurprising that Pollack has had a long professional interest in the tarot and that this has generated several nonfiction presentations of its underlying philosophy (and various packs) as well as an anthology of original stories, Tarot Tales (1989), edited with Caitlín Matthews, in which each contributor used the French Oulipo school of literary constraint to extract story ideas from a tarot pack. She has also written a series of fantasy tales assembled as The Tarot of Perfection: A Book of Tarot Tales (2008).
“Burning Sky,” reprinted here, is an incendiary and visionary classic of feminist science fiction from 1989, originally published in the infamous Semiotext(e) anthology, whose contributors included William S. Burroughs.