Rachel Pollack, the award-winning science fiction author and tarot card expert, has died at 77, the Guardian reports.

Pollack, a Brooklyn native, was educated at New York University and Claremont Graduate University. She came out as a trans woman in the 1970s, becoming a pioneering activist for transgender issues.

She published her first novel, Golden Vanity, in 1980. Several more novels would follow, including Unquenchable Fire, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award; Temporary Agency; Godmother Night; and A Secret Woman.

She was the author of more than 20 books about tarot and helped create a tarot deck with novelist Neil Gaiman and artist Dave McKean. She was also a comic book writer, penning several issues of DC Comics’ Doom Patrol, which featured a character she created, Coagula, one of the first trans heroes in the comic book world.

Admirers of Pollack paid tribute to her on social media. On Twitter, Gaiman wrote, “May you, whoever you are, have a life like Rachel’s, one that changes things for people, a life where you follow your star and leave a more interesting world behind you. And may you, like Rachel, never lose your sense of humour.”

 And author and illustrator Jadzia Axelrod tweeted, “Rachel Pollack’s writing meant everything to me during a very difficult time. We never met, and now we never will, but I have been touched and changed by her work. Pollack was a true trailblazer. May we all, in our too-brief time on this Earth, shine as bright as she did.”

Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.