read in the 90's, and just reread it. Great and original alternate reality fiction. ( )

While I do enjoy Unquenchable Fire, I think I do prefer Temporary Agency. The world feels more fleshed out in a way. Which makes sense, as this one takes place some undefined time after. There is a part of this one where it is mentioned as taking place three generations after the Revolution, and the timing is not defined even that well in Fire, but it just feels like the world has settled a bit more after the upheaval of the Revolution. Or maybe it's that Agency feels more encompassing of the world. In _Fire_, everything is focused on Jennie Mazdan, as she is carrying a being who will eventually be revered alongside the Founders, though we only get glimpses of Valerie. We definitely get the full feeling that the Bright Beings are manipulating Jennie for their own ends. Everyone else is just stage dressing ultimately. Even Valerie, since she only directly appears on a few pages.
in _Agency_ on the other hand, while we do have a viewpoint character, it is more of an ensemble cast. the other characters are not there just for their interactions with Ellen. ( )

review of
Rachel Pollack's Temporary Agency
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 17, 2017

The last, & only other, bk I read by Rachel Pollack was Golden Vanity ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1578911372 ). After learning that she's a Tarot card reader, I concluded my review w/:

"I'm sure Pollack's a boon to the Tarot world but she's also a boon to the SF world. I just hope she writes more SF before she goes to her reward in the great rotsville of tomorrow. I look forward to reading it all."

After reading Temporary Agency I'm not in such a hurry to read everything by her but I did like it - just not as much as I liked Golden Vanity. Given how overwhelming my copious bk review notes can be I'm happy to say that I wrote very few in this instance.

One of the 1st things that got my attn was this:

"Some people say — I read this in a book, actually — that the Bright Beings, the Malignant Ones and the Benign Ones, go back to the beginning of the universe. According to this Sacred Physics book, the Big Bang Story that broke open the cosmic ylem egg showered out the Beings along with all the quarks and tachyons and all the rest of them. The Beings came from a kind of impurity in the ylem, a sort of aesthetic flaw in the original story." - p 3

I 1st remember encountering the word "ylem" as the title of a Karlheinz Stockhausen composition (composed December, 1972). In the liner notes for the Deutsche Grammophon record of the 1st London version of that it's stated:

"Theory of the oscillating universe: every 80,000,000,000 years the universe explodes, unfolds, and draws back together again. The word YLEM is used by some people to designate the periodic explosion, by others to designate the essential material." - Deutsche Grammophon 2530 442

The world of Pollack's novel is a New Agey one in wch magik is the norm. Here's a taste of that:

"As a government agency, the SDA displays portraits of the president in all their offices. You know the kind — an official government photo of our nation's leader smiling blankly in his official bird costume and sacred headdress, with painted-in guardian spirits hovering in the background, like Secret Service agents." - p 70

"And I remember the incredible excitement when the president ordered the Spiritual Development Agency to drive out the Ferocious Ones." - p 5

The SDA being a rough parallel to the FBI.

"they drew those huge lines out from the corners of the building, changing the Pentagon to a giant Pentagram." - p 5

I'm reminded of the Yippie exorcism/levitation of the Pentagon.

The story concerns a young girl who goes thru a sortof spiritual trial-by-fire when her cousin Paul disovers that he's been dating a "Ferocious One", one of the powerful products of "a kind of impurity in the ylem".

"When Lisa finally lifted off the man, he went limp again, draped across the drenched bed. Only now Lisa took the flowers she'd bought and placed them on the man's genitals, where they — clung. That was the word Paul used. The flowers seized the man's crotch like some animal feeding on his discharges.

"Despite everything, Paul said, he was sure he didn't make any noise. He didn't gag, or shout, or anything. Lisa just stood there, naked, with her back to him and said, in a friendly voice, 'How was that, Paul? Was it what you expected? Was it scary enough? Or should I have laid rats on him instead of flowers? I could still do that if you like. I just thought this might be more fun.'" - p 19

Have you ever been on a date like that?

Our hero (or heroine if you prefer), Ellen, & her family become threatened by the Ferocious One.

"'Why are they sticking microchips in us?'

"'It's . . . it's to monitor what happens.' She looked so scared she could hardly talk. 'They said this way they could intervene if . . . if anyone . . . anything should threaten us. They'll know before it happens, they said.'" - p 60

Likely story.

Even if the "changing [of] the Pentagon to a giant Pentagram" wasn't inspired by the Yippies, the following has got to be inspired by consumer-protection crusader (& one of my favorite presidential candidates) Ralph Nader:

"Timmerman had begun his career with a highly publicized attack on Sacred Motors, charging that the hood totem for their Nightleopard car failed to establish soul configurations for safe journeys." - p 113

I can relate. The bean soup I tried to make from my Pinto tasted terrible. Even Monsieur Mangetout cdn't eat it.

In Pollack's world, even churches are now sacred spaces:

"A few blocks from Timmerman's office stood a Teller's Hall, one of those huge stone and stained-glass buildings from before the Revolution, a 'church' as it was called, converted to sacred space by Marion Firetongue, so that a statue of the Founder now stood just inside the doorway." - p 158

Eventually Pollack gets into Manchurian Candidate type territory:

"They were going to have to do something else, the old touching wasn't going to be enough, they couldn't count on the TV cameras simply picking up the liberation of a few people, they wanted to reach everybody who was there, really send out a message. And the world had to see. That was the point. Looking down at the floor, I noticed that the TV cameras from the networks were unmanned, set up on signal-controlled rotating platforms." - pp 179-180

There're rituals, ceremonial magik:

"I took out a silver jar from the bottom of the bag. The jar held dirt, and as I held it up I thought I could see Alison smile under her mud mask. The two of us had made this particular relic together, travelling out to the Forbidden Beach for sand, then setting it out on the floor of my apartment where we squatted down and pissed on it until we could form a brown paste." - p 191

SO, Ellen & Alison get evicted for constantly being covered in mud & for pissing on the floor of their apartment (SOME PEOPLE!), free love gets replaced by alt.right slavery - but becoming a Manchurian Candidate gets spread by TV & instead of STDs we get TVMCs & everyone dies except for the werewolves who live happily ever after.

OK, OK! That has nothing to do w/ anything. I just wrote that for the fun of it. I was being HECKish. This bk was fine, somehow I just didn't care, I reckon I wasn't in the mood or sumpin'. ( )

this was a fun, light read. I'm very into sci-fi alternate histories. lesbian sci-fi alternate history, even better. This one is not fleshed out very much. So, it's interesting but I'll probably forget it soon. ( )

Set in the same world as Pollack's [Unquenchable Fire], this book is an amazing introduction to Pollack's world ('the Living World'): a modern world in which the forces of magic have entered full force.

An amazing job juxtaposing the modern -- including the modern sense of science, laws, order, and bureaucracy -- with the fantastic. The Living World is a grim and somewhat dark world, but it holds up as bizarrely credible. Plotting is as good as world-building -- tense and interesting. And I enjoyed the characters, their histories, and relationships. ( )