Vintage Treasures: Changing Fate by Elisabeth Waters
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Elisabeth Waters’ first publication, “The Keeper’s Price,” was co-authored with Marion Zimmer Bradley and appeared in Bradley’s 1980 Darkover anthology The Keeper’s Price and Other Stories. That launched a lengthy writing career that includes over 40 short stories and a novel in the Trillium series, also co-authored with Bradley. Since 2007 Waters has been the driving force behind the Sword and Sorceress anthology series, taking over with Volume XXII at Norilana Books. The most recent, Volume 32, was released last month by the Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust.
Waters published a single standalone novel, Changing Fate, in 1994, with a striking wraparound cover by Lord of the Rings artist John Howe. It grew out of the short story “A Woman’s Privilege” in Sword and Sorceress 3, published in 1986; it was nominated for the Locus Award for Best First Novel, and won Andre Norton’s Gryphon Award. A sequel, Mending Fate, finally appeared last year, 22 years after the first volume, from the Marion Zimmer Bradley Literary Works Trust.
Changing Fate was published by DAW Books in April 1994. It is 240 pages, priced at $4.99 in paperback. The cover is by John Howe. It was reprinted in trade paperback and digital formats in 2015. Read more at Elisabeth Waters’ website.
Between lotteries and televised poker tournaments, horse racing and casinos, games of chance play a large part on the world’s stage. It should come as no surprise that they play an equality large part in fiction, and perhaps in genre fiction in particular. As writers, aren’t we always looking for something for our characters to do while they’re talking to each other? Preferably something that also reveals character, and is interesting in itself?
There were two screenings I wanted to attend at the Fantasia Festival on Saturday, July 29. First was the Russian science-fiction film Attraction (Prityazhenie). After that was a triple-bill of animated shorts: “Valley of White Birds,” from China; “Scarecrow Island,” from Korea; and “Cocolors,” from Japan. All together, a promising day of fantastic imagery on the big screen in the 400-seat D.B. Clarke Theatre. (In addition, a long short film preceded Attraction, “Past & Future Kings”; as it happens I know some of the local creators, and so feel it would be inappropriate to write about the movie here.)
On Friday, July 28, I had two films on my schedule at the Fantasia Festival. The first was a German period crime film with biographical aspects, a movie called Fritz Lang that imagined the great director of the title mixed up with the killings that would shape his now-classic film M. The second was a screening of George Romero’s 1973 film The Crazies, arranged quickly by the festival’s organizers as a tribute following Romero’s death only 12 days before. Together the movies would make for a day that, to me, exemplified much of what is best in Fantasia: a profound appreciation of film history of every kind, mixed with challenging genre artistry.
