This page of the List contains "spoiler"
information--information that gives away the secret plot twists of a book or story, and
might spoil your reading enjoyment of that book or story if you haven't read it yet.
Proceed at your own risk and expense. All the ratings, publication info, and non-spoiler
comments are on the other pages. If you're not interested in spoilers, then go to some
other page Right Now...
Awlinson, Richard
- Characters turn into gods at the end of the series. -54
Baum, L. Frank
- Major spoiler: The ruler of Oz is transformed into a boy. -42
Bulgakov, Mikhail
- Sharik abuses his position and is screwing one of his subordinates, threatening to fire
her unless she submits. The surgeon takes the girl aside, and explains to her Sharik's
origins--much to her alarm. Sharik tried to stab the surgeon after an argument-- the
surgeon decides he liked Sharik better as a dog, and forcibly reverses the operation.
After ten days of Sharik's absence from work, the police show up suspecting murder only to
find the doctor with Sharik, his naked dog-man, who is re-growing his fur and obviously
morphing back in to a dog. When Sharik speaks random giberish to the comrade policemen,
they rediscover their peasant superstitions and beat a hasty retreat. The story ends with
Sharik again a dog, happy in the home of his master, the surgeon. -125
Busby, F. M.
- ...The children produced to be resistant to the cause of the declining birth rates turn
out to be cyclic hermaphrodites. -11
Card, Orson Scott
- SF novel in Ender's universe. Miro's body is restored on a space voyage on a ship based
on Buggers technology. -79
Clement, Hal
- A classic of hard sf about a world apparently inhabited by two intelligent life forms.
Major spoiler: They turn out to be alternating generations of the same species. Thought
provoking. Again, I don't know whether it's on topic. -42
Crowley, John
- ...Has several transformations (details are spoilers. In fact, the reader has to figure
out for himself that any transformation has occurred; he isn't told explicitly). One of
the characters is transformed into a trout by the fairies (as punishment, perhaps, though
I'm not sure). Later, several characters become the new fairies when the old ones go away.
There are also some more subtle mental/spiritual transformations. -75
Deitz, Tom
- The bit about the gruesome transformations is because they put on the skin of the
creature they are going to be transformed into. Oh, the goodies are the dolphins, selkies
and humans and the baddies are the orcas (killer whales) - but that isn't really a spoiler
- you find it out in about the second chapter. -177
- The transformations which take place are caused by the user putting on a skin of the
animal to transform into. -177
Foster, Alan Dean
- The protagonist is an artificial organism, constructed by aliens to steal a technology
from humans. He doesn't know this at the beginning, having fake memories. he discovers
that he has superhuman abilities, and is unwittingly compelled to carry out his mission.
I'm not sure if this counts as a physical transformation or a mental one, but it's
well-written for either interpretation. -103
Garrett, Randall; Heydron, Vicki Ann
Goulart, Ron
- The missing person and a bunch of other dissidents have been turned into dog-like
animals by the government as a humane way to get them out of the way. -103
Gunnarsson, Thorarinn
- At the end of the book, the human wizard is changed into a dragon and goes to live with
the good dragons in their world. -Ph
Hambly, Barbara
- The heroine of the book is faced with a choice of whether to allow herself to be turned
into a dragon or not. She is turned into a dragon (which makes her immortal) but decides
in the end that she'd rather stay human with the man she loves. -69
Hogan, James P.
- There is a naturally evolved planet with intelligent natives inside a colossal computer.
When humans use a virtual reality system that's part of said computer, the natives of that
information universe can sometimes come out and mind-transfer into the bodies of the
humans who were linked in. -75
Klause, Annette Curtis
- The girl, Vivian, reveals herself to the human, who she promptly scares off, and causes
her to run off in disgust and (possibly) kill a human. -176
Koontz, Dean
- Sci-fi whodunnit with a faux-werewolf killer. -87
- I'm not sure this is a spoiler, but better safe than sorry... -Ph
Lackey, Mercedes
- Evil witch has lived for hundreds of years by forcibly trading bodies with her teenage
daughters. -171
Leiber, Fritz
- Old woman forcibly trades bodies with beautiful young wife & tries to get husband to
kill her old body. -171
Niles, Douglas
- Gods transform their worshippers into monsters (i.e. orcs, trolls). A very minor
spoiler. Crucial to the plot; this is how the enemy army is built. -54
Noon, Jeff
- [...]an older woman whose consciousness gets transferred to her daughter's life. -144
O'Keefe, Claudia
- The book is about this guy who is in coma for 12 years after an accident. He is enhanced
with cybernetic implants to survive in the nuclear winter and to help save ordinary
people. He is basically the modern-day messiah who has trouble coping with his
superhumanity. -56
Park, Paul
- [Result: MD. The "humanization" is] actually a
dumbing-down, narrowing the native's perceptions to match humans. -144
Shepard, Lucius
- Voodoo magic may also be involved. -144
Shinn, Sharon
- The shape changer's wife is actually a tree. -144
Smith, George O.
- Mekstrom's disease kills people by slowly creeping up the limbs, turning flesh as hard
as rock. Two groups discover a way that a victim can survive the transformation, becoming
superhumanly strong and resilient. The powerful group wants to become a class of supermen
and rule the world; the underground group wants to give everyone this boon. But neither
can achieve their goal until they find some way to purposefully infect someone
with the disease. Enter the protagonist, who is a carrier and doesn't know it. Both sides
try to manipulate him to their own ends. -103
Tepper, Sheri
- A race of aliens living on a planet in the far future, their passage through life
consists of several transformations. They start off as white crawly things called peepers
which don't have much intelligence, move up to the Hippae, a bunch of relatively
intelligent horselike creatures, and eventually metamorphose into the Foxen. Unfortunately
something has gone wrong with the system, the Hippae who are the vicious adolescent stage,
is not progressing to the Foxen stage. The lead character of the story has to puzzle out
the world to save humanity (which is dying of a mysterious plague). -47
- SF novel in the universe of Grass. Voorstodean invaders are transformed
into trees by Hobbs Land's Gods. -79
- SF novel in the universe of Grass. Siamese twins are separated and
afterwards transformed into a seal and a bird by The Arbai Device/Hobbs Land's Gods. -79
Thomas, Dan
- ...the final pages talk about the transformation of the Earth by a nuclear war as the
purpose of humans on the planet. Monkeys with a finger on the H-bomb trigger. Nice book. -101
Tilley, Patrick
- There is actually more than one [alien spacecraft]... -96
Wagner, Karl
- Disfigured Queen forcibly trades bodies with beautiful young stepdaughter & turns
King's army against her enemies. -171
Wells, H.G.
- Although the Eloi have evolved from the dominant section of humanity, they are now
preyed upon by the Morlocks, who feed on them. The author gets some philosophical mileage
out of this irony. -96
Williamson, Jack
- It turns out, the enemy (a brother-being) was also waiting for the final transformation
and thought he (the enemy) needed to die to make this final transformation. Which turned
out true. But only at a chosen time. It seems like a certain group of human beings are not
human but humanity is a stage (childhood) of another kind of being. Only one final
transformation - several temporary transformations - also some other kind of
transformations; mind-changing; minor. Rating: 3 Cause: NA
Result: BX,EA,RM Significance: +. -134
Beagle, Peter S.
- ...About a woman who becomes Death. -3
Brown, Fredric
Card, Orson Scott
- ...A very good story about a man who can turn into a bear (though that constitutes a
spoiler); there is a man and a bear, and late in the story you find they are the same
person. Other people can turn into animals too, but they don't know it. -75
Chalker, Jack C.
- Powerful aliens from another universe, stranded on an isolated planet in our world,
turned grazing herbivores into (more or less) sentient bipeds, and have fun raising them
to civilization and pitting nations against one another, etc. When they finally find a way
to get home again, they turn their toys back into grazing herbivores and leave. -75
Clingerman, Margret
- Very ugly, poor fat lonely woman forces body exchange of lovely, happy wife and mother. -171
Davidson, Avram
- ...Involves induced lycanthropy; an old couple has a ring which enables either of them
to turn into a leopard. -75
deFord, Miriam Allen
- Saturation: Only (spoiler) two transformations, the story deals with their adaptation to
his change. Spoiler: Henry winds up accepting the change, then muses, "You know,
vampires make people they bite into vampires, I wonder if werewolves do the same."
"But you're a weredog," Lida replied, absently. "Henry, you wouldn't!"
-135
Dick, Philip K.
- The captain kills & eats the wub to shut it up, and later startles the crew by
continuing the Wub's dialogue where it had been so rudely interrupted... -77
Donaldson, Stephen
- The story of a man who suddenly and inexplicably starts to transform into a unicorn. -11
Gardner, Craig Shaw
- This one is good, the author sets out to catch you on your expectations, if you're not
careful. A bit of a spoiler--the protagonist is not a werewolf but a catalyst for creating
werewolves. -28
Heym, Stefan
- The story ends with every male, except one boy, transformed into females. -76
Hoffman, Nina Kiriki
- Werewolf meets wereman. -11
Le Guin, Ursula K.
- Le Guin seems to like stories that reverse your expectations. When the wizard uses his
enemy's true name to force him into his true shape, it turns out that the enemy wizard is
actually the dragon, who toasts the wizard and then goes out for a snack. -Ph
- Due to the way it's told you probably won't catch onto this until the very end, but it's
a reverse-lycanthropy story; a wolf turns into a man under the full sun, and eventually
gets hunted down by his own pack. -Ph
Lovecraft, H. P.
Maclean, Katherine
- The plagues are artificial viruses that are genetically modifying the plague survivors
(greatly extended life span, silicone metabolism...) An impressive concept for the date
this story appeared, as at that time it was not even quite certain what the genetic
material was; and this is a story about genetic manipulation using a retroviral plague
spread (initially) via pooled blood plasma. -77
- The preacher has not seen the real adults. The adult form is a non-intelligent
creature resembling a sea anemone. The 'torture' is intended to prevent the young turning
into the vegetative adult form. -77
Phaedrus
- Cause: MA Result: BM/AN/FU. A man commissions a fox
drawing from a famous artist at the convention. It turns out that the drawings are
magical, and turn the purchasers into the furry drawn. I wish I knew how to do this in
real life; I imagine I could sell a lot of drawings... -Ph
- Cause: MA Result: BX/AN/MD/AR. A wolf cub grows up with
strange memories. It turns out that the wolf is a human, changed into an infant wolf by a
wish from a genie. The second and third wishes set up future stories which will probably
never be written. Oh, well. -Ph
Shaw, Bob
- That it is a transformation story is a spoiler. It begins with a woman and a man, with
several sons, alone on a planet. The woman is sort of amnesiac but her memories are slowly
coming back, and they are very puzzling. As the story is finally reconstructed, it seems
that there were two men who escaped from a human colony after an alien invasion with a
spaceship loaded with an organ bank. The aliens hit them with a 'warp scrambler', which
threw them millions of galaxies away. They find a planet and land. A few months later, one
of the men knocks the other out with chloroform, uses the organ bank to perform a crude
but effective sex-change on him, and then uses LSD and hypnosis so that she doesn't
remember being male. What happens after she discovers what happened is an even bigger
surprise, a good, strong ending. Rating: 2 or 3. -75
Smith, Clarke Ashton
- King Adompha has a magic garden, created by his court magician, in which parts of his
dead adversaries are grafted onto plants. When the king grows tired of this he kills his
magician and buries him in the garden. He then makes the fatal mistake to return to the
garden some months later, only to find the dead wizard transformed into a gigantic
plant-human hybrid, which proceeds to kill him. Rating 4; Cause
MC?; Significance 0; Description -; Saturation 0. -141
- First published 1933. Even calling this a transformation story constitutes a spoiler.
The powerful wizard Maal Dweb once a year summons the most beautiful woman of one of the
surrounding tribes to his palace, from where she is never seen again. A hunter sets out to
rescue the wizard's last victim, and perhaps even kill the wizard, but his attempt is
disastrously unsuccesful. The wizard's goal is to eternalize the beauty of women by
turning them to stone, while transforming any would-be rescuers into ape-like creatures
'so that their outer semblance may conform more strictly to their inner nature'. And so
the hunter can watch his beloved turning to stone, while he himself is turning into an
ape.
This easily is the best transformation story I ever read. The description of
the transformation is very vivid, and the way in which the spell is brought about is
highly original (and fot that reason not mentioned in my spoiler). The story works well on
different levels. As a straightforward fantasy story it is poetic (but perhaps a bit
morbid for some). But it is also a comment on the standard heroes and heroines of fantasy
fiction (especially of his friend Robert Ervin Howard). And one dreads to think what
Sigmund Freud would have made of this one. Rating 5; Cause MA;
Result BM; Significance +; Description +; Saturation +. -141
van Vogt, A. E.
- There is a relatively classic short story of a space-wrecked man transformed into an
alien by an alien city, allowing him to survive. The author and title are long forgotten,
but the final scene has the hero smoothing his whiskers and having a tail. -20
- Hopefully this is the one he meant, anyway... In any case, it's very good. Giving away
the ending might constitute a spoiler, though. -Ph
Wyndham, John
- Arachne has a midnight snack attack, presumably after sex with woman's husband, and does
what comes naturally to female spiders. -94
Yolen, Jane
- A woman is turned into a deer by the magic of a forest. -Ph
- ...After a while, [[the researcher] begins to experience a sort of "evolutionary
regression" until he finally transforms into a primitive hominid. -115
- The house itself transforms itself from old to new as it seems to draw energy for
renewal from the pain, nightmares, and death of its inhabitants. Throughout the movie,
Karen Black undergoes very subtle changes until the very end when she is suddenly changed
into the evil old matron who seems to be the embodiment of the house itself. But overall,
transformation is a major theme of the movie. -115
Where to from here?
Copyright © 1993-2000 Phaedrus /
Etcetera 
Transformation Stories List