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Rachel Pollack

Unquenchable Fire Paperback – July 1, 1994

by Rachel Pollack (Author)

48 ratings

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Book by Pollack, Rachel

Print length

400 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Overlook Books
Publication date

July 1, 1994
Dimensions

5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches
ISBN-10

0879515309
ISBN-13

978-0879515300
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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

It's uncomfortable to be chosen for Great Things. A lot of fantasists admit that, but Pollack's Jennie Mazdan shows us just how uncomfortable it can be. This is suburban fantasy, reminiscent of Philip K. Dick's suburban SF, and the protagonist is a nice suburban middle-class person who, in a recognizable America informed with rational, non-Christian divine powers, copes with supernatural imposition on her life. Perfectly balancing the anchoring familiar mundanities against her brilliant, fascinating Living World---surly bureaucrats at the National Oneiric Registration Agency, tourists photographing the Founder's Urinal shrine in Poughkeepsie---Pollack tells Jennie and Valerie's story of transformation, acceptance and triumph. Potently stocked with archetypes, yet down-to-earth and even funny, this is great fiction and great fantasy.

From Publishers Weekly

Pollack's Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning feminist fantasy is set mainly in New York's Hudson Valley.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Overlook Books (July 1, 1994)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0879515309
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0879515300
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1 x 8.25 inches

Customer Reviews:
48 ratings

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Rachel Pollack

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Rachel Pollack is considered one of the world's foremost authorities on the modern interpretation of the tarot. She is a member of the American Tarot Association, the International Tarot Society, and the Tarot Guild of Australia, and has taught at the famed Omega Institute for the past 15 years. She is an award-winning fiction writer and has also written 12 books on the tarot. She lives in New York.

Customer reviews

4.1 out of 5

48 global ratings

5 star		48%
4 star		29%
3 star		13%
2 star		4%
1 star		6%

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Top reviews from the United States

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C. J. Silverio

Wow. Fantasy or SF? This book is its own thing.

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on May 27, 2000

In the medium-near future, a revolution has taken place. The forces of science and rationality have lost. The newage Founders of the new reality have loosed the forces of mysticism and the world has changed. Miracles happen routinely. Government and society have restructured themselves to accomodate this new strange reality.
A suburban woman has a strange experience during a holy day. She finds that she has been made pregnant by an unknown agent. How will she cope? How will her very suburban neighborhood cope?
My husband had been trying to get me to read this book for ages. Finally he got me when I couldn't escape and began reading this aloud to me. When he stopped after the first chapter, I demanded he hand the book to me so I could finish.
This book came from nowhere for me. I don't know of anything like it. I guess this is shamanistic fantasy. It feels SF-ish, though, in that it's a consistent future world with sensible rules. Whatever it is, it's a stunner, the kind of book that leaves me incredibly excited and optimistic about the state of SF & fantasy.

17 people found this helpful

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Joe Kessler

Like little else I've read before

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 31, 2020

This is a supremely odd book, and I'm honestly not sure whether I like it or not. The incomplete and elliptical reveals to its slipstream worldbuilding offer ambiguities that feel worth lingering over, but they also keep the reader at a certain distance from fully engaging with the struggles of the heroine. On the other hand, we don't need to understand everything about that woman's society to see how little she wants her mystical pregnancy, or how frustrated she is with the powers forcing her life along this path. (There's no rape per se in the story -- the protagonist just wakes up pregnant after an exceptionally vivid dream -- but the incident is framed as a clear violation of bodily consent, and it's a decent exploration of that subject in a heightened genre way.)

Author Rachel Pollack also includes some interesting ideas about how religious and political movements calcify from their starting principles into meaningless ritual, although again this might be stronger with a clearer sense of the particular setting. I can't decide if I'm more entertained or frustrated by the text overall, but it's certainly like little else I've read before.

4 people found this helpful

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Sean E. Mcgrath

Pure Imagination...

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 6, 2000

Jennifer Mazdan is pregnant.. except she's a virgin, and there was no man involved but an Agency who needs Jennifer to give birth to this child to save humanity from dry morals, banal religion and oppressive dogma.
Wait.. doesn't this seem familiar...?
Here, Rachel Pollack has created a Messiah story that focuses on the mother of the Messiah, and how she doesn't want to be "chosen", how she'd prefer to be left alone and be obscure, the same way everyone else in her world is - dry, homogenized, merely going through the motions of life. Jennifer rebels in every way possible, but the Agency finds ways to keep her on track... but never docile and accepting.
The book tells several stories at once, each from different times, told for different purposes - "The Place Inside", "The Meaning of a Story", "The Lives of the Founders", Valarie Mazdan's adventures (a few), and, of course, Jennifer Mazdan's saga. "The Place Inside" chills me still.
The editing is uneven to say the least, but we can't fault the author for that, but rather Tusk Press. Typos abound.
Find a copy of this book and enjoy it.

10 people found this helpful

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zzz05

strange book indeed

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 16, 2005

not my favorite type of book, but i was compelled to finish it anyway, which i guess is a compliment. amazingly vivid and lifelike depiction of the heroine and her so different yet similar parallel world... yet with so little view of the underlying scaffolding of how it got that way. really a category of its own.

4 people found this helpful

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Melia

Incomprehensible

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on January 15, 2022

I am able to follow any sci fi plot you can throw at me. But this author does not connect any of these thoughts. It is like a dream without any context. Do not waste your money. The author does a great job with astrology books. Stick to those!

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Top reviews from other countries

Lark

Surely more fantasy than sci fi?

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 7, 2013

Verified Purchase

I would recommend this book to anyone who enjoyed The Iron Dragon's Daughter (although it is not nearly as dark and sinister as that book in its conclusion or throughout) or its sequel The Dragons of Babel , it is more moderate fantasy in its telling and happier in its conclusion so I think it would be a little more like The Anubis Gates (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) or The Drawing Of The Dark (FANTASY MASTERWORKS) .

Although all those titles are part of the fantasy masterworks rather than the sci fi masterworks!

I think perhaps the reason this is part of the sci fi masteworks is that many of the trappings of modernism and post-enlightenment or scientific society remain in this setting, ie cars, apartment blocks, TV, government agencies and bureaucracy, even though there has been a quite fantastical and spiritualist transformation of reality. This is never "worked out" or revealed as having an underlying explanation or pathology, such as was in I Am Legend (S.F. MASTERWORKS) or Iron Dragon's Daughter (depending upon how you read it), it is truly magical, like offerings in the masterworks series such as The Land of Laughs or Anubis Gates.

This is a wonderfully constructed narrative in which the commonplace of today's world, seeking to navigate unhelpful bureaucracies without any satisfaction in doing so or with the results, is blended with the magical, offering enactments, sacrifices, witnessing individual and group mystical revelations or experiences, but the magical has become commonplace too.

The style and pace of the narrative is a like clunky at times and it does not "flow smoothly", in part this is because stories and story telling is central to the plot and some of the actual stories told by the tellers, central characters in the story, are spliced into the overall narrative, so one moment you are reading about the characters and their lives, mainly one character as she goes about her business and feels hijacked by a higher power, then it switches back and forth between some truly strange stories. I could not always make direct connections between what was going on in the tale and what was going on in the overarching story, although when I stopped worrying too much about that I was able to just enjoy the book.

Reading this I thought that it was a little anti-climatic in its conclusion, there's such a build up throughout the book that it would have been nearly impossible to draw it into a satisfactory conclusion but there is still a proper beginning, middle and end to the story and it is an enjoyable read. Thematically there are issues to do with having your own individual will usurped or whether you can be the master of your own fate or not but what I thought was most brilliant was how the author was able to demonstrate that the most, literally, wonderous and miraculous things could be rendered mundane by ordinary quarrels or priorities and by social conventions or organisation.

4 people found this helpful

Treacle

Fabulous

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on December 12, 2012

Verified Purchase

Clever and layered comment on how we live ... plus miracles, possessions and little gods galore. Wonderful writing which reminded me of Moorcock, Gaiman type style. None of this could exist all together in one time and place in our current reality (or mine at least) but parts of it are happening now somewhere, or has happened in our recent past. Which, given the fabulous nature of the story is ... sobering. Wry observations on motherhood, power, small town politics, bureaucracy, superstition, religion and the weakness of humans - just great. My brain wakes me up in the small hours to read more.

4 people found this helpful

MangaraLock

Weird, strange, a novel like no other.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on February 19, 2013

Verified Purchase

Despite being a SF Masterwork, Unquenchable Fire is very much a work of speculative fiction. Set in an America following a spiritual revolution, science is the last thing on the mind when surrounded by miracles and spirits.

Immensely imaginative the story follows Jenny, a young woman chosen for great things who just wants to live a regular life. The main theme of the book is how losing control affects Jenny who is trapped in a world where ritual and religion is the only thing holding society together.

The imagery in the stories of the founders is rich, and the stories will stay with you a while after reading them. I can't help but feel that there is a lot of the spiritual aspect of the book which went straight over my head, due to lack of familiarity with subjects such as Tarot, a subject the author is an expert on.

I found this book to be a challenge, by taking a location familiar to the reader but changing the rules of society so completely led to a disorientating feel to much of the book. A bit too abstract at times I found it difficult to follow, but the narrative is rewarding enough if you can manage to stick with it

3 people found this helpful

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Unquenchable Fire Paperback – July 1, 1994

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Rachel Pollack

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