Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, I reread some of Pollack’s most influential work on the Tarot and marveled at the surprising realization that she was also a science fiction writer. While processing this news from the other side of the Atlantic, in my apartment in Europe, I cherished the opportunity to have met her at a crucial time in my own life.
#One shining moment 2002 full#
Full of ideas, and contagiously energetic with her electric ginger hair, it would’ve been hard to think then, as we discussed new releases in fiction writing, that Pollack would be leaving us so soon. It was in Rhinebeck that I met her last year, for lunch on a warm June day at a intimate suburban Italian restaurant. Until her passing, Pollack continued to write, mostly from Rhinebeck in Upstate New York, between her house in the woods and the local library, which she half-jokingly called her second office. She also authored five popular comic book runs for DC Comics. Clark Award and a World Fantasy Award and earned numerous nominations, including for a Nebula and a James Tiptree Jr. She gifted us a prolific and multidimensional writing career consisting of about twenty-two nonfiction books, mostly on the Tarot, seven fantasy and science fiction novels, and four short-story collections. Pollack, a Leo born on August 17, 1945, passed on from our world this April, after a long struggle with cancer. Rachel Pollack was probably among the only people on earth who could successfully claim this biography. It can happen, then, that when a writer wins a major science fiction award for one of her novels, she is already considered by many as one of the world’s foremost experts on the Tarot.
For decades considered the bastard child of literature, science fiction has allowed people who might not normally get published in stricter literary circles an entryway into a career in writing. Others yet, cooks, insurance dealers, and gardeners.
Others are sociologists and psychologists. As is fitting for the genre, some have extensive careers as biologists, technologists, and engineers. When science fiction authors first get their stories published, it is not uncommon for their lives to be occupied with things usually thought of as far removed from the realms of writing. Rachel Pollack with her deck The Shining Tribe Tarot.
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