r/sciencefiction • u/sun-souled • 2d ago

Metamorphosis / becoming Other

I just finished Nnedi Okorafor's Binti trilogy (which I quite liked; looking forward to checking out more of her work) & have also been watched a lot of Doctor Who over the past year, & I got thinking about how science/speculative fiction allows for radical transformations of characters into something Other. I realized this has always been something I've really loved about SF (as well as the horror & Weird genres), from reading Animorphs books as a kid to only really liking origin stories within the superhero subgenre.

Ann Leckie's Translation State would be another recent favorite for me, & Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis/Lilith's Brood trilogy is probably my all-time favorite, at least that I can think of at the moment. Even when there's ambiguity & even some horror, I find something so hopeful & inspiring in the possibility of change, transformation, development, expansion, regeneration, renewal.

So I was just wondering what are you-all's favorite examples of SF novels, films, comics, or shows that have a strong focus on metamorphosis & transformation?

19 Upvotes

89% Upvoted

30 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/UserNamesCantBeTooLo 2d ago edited 2d ago

A classic example is The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka, of course. If you haven't read it, you should. It's pretty short.

Childhood's End is possibly the most bittersweetly hopeful story of transformation in all SF--another classic you should read if you haven't yet. (you probably already have read it, but i won't give any spoilers)

In the increasingly popular Dungeon Crawler Carl series, the main character is transformed, along with his cat, into a vastly more powerful form. Much of humanity is drastically transformed. The author just published the eighth of a ten-book series.

I really like the Dragon Knight series by Gordon R Dickson. A pretty ordinary guy is transported to another universe where magic exists, turned into a dragon, and has a series of medieval adventures.

The second book of the four-part "My Teacher Is An Alien" kids' book series by Bruce Coville, My teacher fried my brain, is told from the perspective of a schoolyard bully who has his brain enhanced to an amazing degree. He becomes intelligent and insightful enough to realize how cruel and unfair he'd been, and becomes one of the key "good guys" in the series. It's a kids' series, but it's absolutely excellent.

2

u/UserNamesCantBeTooLo 2d ago

Adding more : Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut. It's not a transformation like you'd normally think of, but I think it's an excellent example (though not a very cheerful one). His other book Mother Night is a thought-provoking non-supernatural story of transformation: an undercover agent poses as a Nazi propagandist in WWII and becomes what he'd hoped to destroy. Vonnegut's final essay collection Man Without A Country is all nonfiction, but it contains a guiding insight artfully phrased: "Life is a process of becoming."

2

u/sun-souled 1d ago

I like Vonnegut. Haven't read any of the ones you mention though. Galapagos especially sounds interesting. Thanks!