Emergency Transformation / Literature

Emergency Transformation in Literature

• Downplayed/exaggerated in Animorphs—the morphing technology is based on DNA, so it basically rebuilds your body every time you use it. So if you're hurt, in either your normal form or morph, just morph and you'll be fine. The main characters can do this multiple times per book. Of course, this doesn't work for genetic disorders. The possibility of a sick person purposefully getting yourself Shapeshifter Mode Locked into a healthier body is mentioned in one book, though Andalites, who have a questionable view of the disabled, apparently think this is dishonorable.
• Interestingly, this is averted sort of in Anno Dracula by Kim Newman — there's descriptions of vampirized people who had syphilis in life still showing the symptoms and, oddly, tubercular vampires still coughing blood. The same novel has a scene where Genevieve attempts to perform this on a friend who has been fatally wounded in an attack, but the friend chooses to die rather than become a vampire.
• In The Apocalypse Troll by David Weber, Ludmilla Leonovna, who's effectively immortal via her symbiote-granted Healing Factor, falls in love with a normal human. While she could give him her symbiote any time she wants via a simple blood transfusion, this has a 99.99% chance of killing him. When he's mortally wounded and his lifespan is shortened from fifty more years to just five more minutes, though, she decides to risk it. It works.
• In a less life-or-death example, Sheen the self-willed robot from Piers Anthony's Apprentice Adept novels becomes inert when she crosses over from the scientific world of Proton to the magical world of Phaze. The Brown Adept animates her as a golem, allowing Sheen to function in Phaze.
• Subverted in the Betsy the Vampire Queen series: Jessica, Betsy's closest friend, is suffering from severe blood cancer. She makes it very clear to Betsy that under no circumstances is Betsy to vampirize her. The cancer is eventually cured via Deus Ex Ancient Vampire Power. Same thing happens with Kitty Norville's mother and her cancer- she declines getting werewolfed as a cure. Her health status is still in question.

• In the backstory for Severian's travelling companion in The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe we find out that Jonas was a highly intelligent robot who could not be repaired and given a human-like body of flesh in order to save him.
• All of science fiction author Jack Chalker's works seem obsessed with transformation and body swapping, and this kind of "rescue" appears in more than a few, with the ur-example being Nathan Brazil's soul transference from his dying body into a deer-like creature in Midnight at the Well of Souls.
• In Amy Thompson's The Color of Distance, a scientist crash-lands on an inhospitable alien planet, and the Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who find her unconscious body transform her into something closer to one of them to help her survive. She's human (ish) but with no hair, elongated hands and feet with extendable claws, color-changing amphibious skin, and 'spurs' that allow her to interface with other organisms the way they can.
• It happens three times in the Den of Shadows series. First in Demon in My View, Jessica is turned into a vampire so that Aubrey and Caryn could heal hear more effectively. Then Sarah gets turned into a vampire in Shattered Mirror. Finally, in Persistence of Memory, Sassy puts his blood in Erin's veins to turn her into a hyena shapeshifter in order to save her life.
• In Greg Egan's Diaspora, the Earth is about to be hit by the lethal shockwave from a neutron star collision. A pair of AIs (essentially translated humans) don robot bodies in order to offer last-minute help: let them shoot people with a lump of nanoware that reads their brains while eating them. They can live on as software, escape from the kilos of meat they can no longer protect. What a choice.
• In Fred Saberhagen's The Dracula Tape, Dracula turns Lucy Westenra to save her from death at the hands of Dr. Van Helsing, who's been stubbornly giving her blood transfusions in ignorance of blood types.
• The Dresden Files:
  • In Changes, Harry accepts the mantle of the Winter Knight because his back was broken. This has far-reaching effects, the least of which being that he is now weak to being pierced with iron and has to obey thresholds and other fey things.
  • In Skin Game, the human form of Archangel Uriel visits the mortal knight Michael Carpenter and heals his injuries so that he can assist Harry. This is treated as strangely overt compared to angels' usual modus operandi, but otherwise fairly unremarkable... until Uriel (who's still hanging around the Carpenter household) gets hit in the face and starts bleeding, something which should be impossible for multiple reasons. It's revealed that, because of his obligation to respect free will, Uriel is unable to actually heal a human - instead he temporarily transferred his "Grace" to the knight (i.e. his status as an archangel), allowing him to subconsciously heal himself. Harry is mind-boggled by the sheer overkill of this, comparing it to lending your friend a luxury jet because they asked for a book light. The transfer has relatively little consequence for Michael (who is unaware of what truly happened) but has enormous risk for Uriel, as it both renders him temporarily mortal and could allow his Grace to become tainted by sin. Fortunately, Michael is both an Ideal Hero and manages to return it fairly quickly.
• In the second Empire from the Ashes book, Dahak secretly arranges for his consciousness to reawaken in another starship when his original body is destroyed in a pseudo-Heroic Sacrifice, which he wasn't sure would even work.
• The main character of Peter Dickinson's Eva gets in a terrible car crash and wakes up in the body of a chimpanzee. A bit of a subversion, because she actually adjusts to her new life quickly after the initial shock. She eventually chooses to live out her life in the wilds with more conventional chimps.
• Emily, in The Girl in the Steel Corset by Kady Cross, is forced to turn Sam into a robot, because he died when a machine attacked him.
• Mercedes Lackey's Heralds of Valdemar has the talking sword Need, who was once an old smith-mage whose community was attacked. She and her apprentice survived, but weren't capable of rescuing their abducted friends and taking vengeance - so the old woman impaled herself on her sword and imprisoned her spirit in it, allowing her to guide and work through her apprentice. Need rarely evinces regret about this, between having chosen it herself and it happening unknown thousands of years ago, but after a Heroic Sacrifice that finally kills her Need brings up her afterlife options and says whatever she does, damned if she's sticking herself into a sword again.
  • During the Mage Winds trilogy, hearing about Dawnfire, whose disembodied soul has been trapped in the body of a bird and who's slowly losing her mind, Need offers to transfer her into either some other creature with a large enough brain to sustain a human mind, or something like a sword, saying "There are worse fates than being hard to break, heart included." Instead, Dawnfire's Star-Eyed Goddess comes to her and transforms her into an "Avatar", a half-spirit half-embodied instrument of her will, and takes her away.
• In the novel I Will Fear No Evil, by Robert A. Heinlein, the main character, Johann Sebastian Bach Smith, who is very old, is given a new life as a young woman by having his brain transplanted into the body of a beautiful young lady, who had been his secretary before she was murdered.
• In Invisible Werewolf Dracula Meets Vampire Mummy Frankenstein, Trials escapes death via witch trial by entering the body of a black cat.
• In Monica Hughes' Keeper of the Isis Light Guardian makes genetic modifications to Olwen to help her survive the planet's harsh conditions.
• A variation in The Last Unicorn: Schmendrick decides the only way to save the Unicorn from the Red Bull is to change her into some other creature. Then the Bull will have no interest in her. Thanks to the random effects of his magic, he winds up changing her into a human - and she does not react well.
• In Little Big, the mage Ariel Hawksquill has prepared a spell to relocate her soul into a different host body should she ever be fatally harmed. Unfortunately, she does not factor in the possibility of her new body's being that of a stork.
• Kerrelyn Sparks' Love at Stake series:
  • Gregory, a youthful vampire who was emergency turned by the main protagonist of the first novel. His own mother, now an elderly personal assistant to the main protagonist, even begged that he would be saved - thus creating the first vampire that never had to bite someone to survive.
  • Later, another (side-)character is emergency turned but thinks it is awesome, because he's got superpowers now.
  • An inversion: a character reacts astonishingly well to her new vampire form, although she hates vampires with a passion and no-one else believes her that she is fine with the way she is now.
• A universe (known to fans as the Rejuve Universe) was created by author Lurking Dragon in which technology exists for rejuvenating people to children aged e.g. 5 or 6. The newly rejuved people are the same people as the pre-rejuved old people, retaining their memories and knowledge, but acquiring the emotions of a child. While primarily used as legal punishment (criminals are rejuvenated back to children where they are raised by a new set of parents — sometimes several times — and have no power of their own), it is sometimes used in an emergency to save the life of a severely injured or sick person.
• In Machine Man, Dr. Charles Neumann goes to sleep a paraplegic and wakes up a Man in the Machine. While not a personal emergency, Better Future needed someone equipped to defeat the Cyborg Carl, who had run amok.
• In the Mercy Thompson series, this seems to be the backstory of at least one out of every three supernaturals.
  • In Moon Called, Dr. Carter Wallace is dying of cancer, and his son persuades him to undergo the Change to werewolf. His magical new immune system zapped the cancer and made him look thirty or forty years younger. Unfortunately, surviving as a werewolf requires psychologically accepting your new state, which the good doctor is loath to do.
  • The backstory of Charles's mother, mentioned in Moon Called and explained more thoroughly in Alpha and Omega, is that she was dying when a werewolf found her, fell instantly in love with her, and Changed her into a werewolf so that she would survive.
  • In Blood Bound, Mercy meets vampire Stefan's flock of human blood donors, most of whom are dying of cancer or drug addiction. The longer they donate to a vampire, the more powers they gain and the easier it is to turn them to vampires themselves.
• Mermaids of Eriana Kwai: At the end of Ice Crypt, Meela has sacrificed her blood to awaken Eriana's Host. She will now slowly bleed to death through the cut in her hand as long as she stays in human form. Lysi kisses her, turning her into a mermaid and saving her life.
• A number of Metamor Keep characters came to Metamor so that the Curse's transformation could cure their terminal illness. Such as Rickkter, who ironically discovered an alternative cure to his disease the day after he finished turning into a raccoon.

• A variation in the Night Huntress books, when Dave is brought back as a ghoul some time after he died because Cat inadvertently started the process when he was dying and when Bones comes back he helps the team finish it.
• In the Night Watch (Series), the vampire Kostya became that way because he was dying of TB as a child, and so his Friendly Neighborhood Vampire father cured him by making him a vampire. Similarly, in Twilight Watch, Anton encounters a pack of werewolves and finds out that two of the members are young children who were bitten by the leader, an older guy, to save them from death, and is a loving Papa Wolf (pardon the pun) toward them. Inverted later, when a friendly werewolf (one of said kids, by the way) takes a magical bullet for Anton while in wolf form. With her last dying breath she transforms back despite his protest that as a wolf she has a better chance to survive, but she prefers to die as a human.
• L. J. Smith's Night World: In Secret Vampire, Poppy is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which is rare, painful, and inoperable in her case. Her options are death and vampirism. Her childhood friend James does the honors.
• C. L. Moore's classic story "No Woman Born" concerns an actress whose brain was transplanted into a robot body after her body was irreparably damaged in a fire.
• Played straight in the Otherland novels by Tad Williams. Two main characters get their minds uploaded into a hyper-real virtual reality. One was an old man, and the other was a child suffering from a fatal disease.
• The Parasol Protectorate:
  • In book 3, Blameless, Biffy undergoes one of these after being mortally injured in a fight. Unfortunately, he was the favorite of a vampire who already had plans to have Biffy turned, and the only supernatural on hand during the emergency was a werewolf. It's implied the relationship will probably survive, anyway.
  • In the third book of the prequel Finishing School series, after Soap is severely injured, Sophronia persuades the dewan to turn him into a werewolf to save him.
• If a human character in the Perry Rhodan universe has artificial body parts (up to a full robot body housing the brain in at least one case), it's generally for medical reasons. Despite the artificial bits inevitably serving some plot purpose eventually, humans (unlike some alien species) don't go for just upgrading their natural bodies on a lark even in the distant future.
• This trope is used moderately with in Neil R. Jone's Professor Jameson stories. The Zoromes, a race of octopus-like aliens, transfer their brains into cyborg bodies when they near death (they also transfer well-preserved brain of the deceased title character). The transformation is portrayed as dulling the emotions, so Zoromes prefer to live a full life before being transferred. Occasionally a younger Zorome is fatally injured, as in the story Zora of the Zoromes and is transferred early. This is portrayed as very tragic, especially when two Zoromes who were very much in love are transferred prematurely, and then no longer feel anything for each other. On the other hand, the Zoromes don't seem to care if someone wants to transfer early, several aliens do so and join the crew of a Zorome ship in another story.
• Quantum Gravity: Lila Black came back from Alfheim missing...well, most of her body. She was given the choice to survive or deal with being legless, armless, eyeless...you get the picture. She became a Cyborg.
• Revelation Space Series: Happens to the antagonist character, Skade, early in Redemption Ark, who gets her body sheared in two. Unwilling to give up, she has her head cut off and attached to a life support system that she can plug into a robot body. She chooses this over getting a nice new human body because she is impatient, desirous of being more resilient to the harsh conditions on her ship, and a little bit... differently sane. It also helps that it makes her extra scary. She gets a new organic body before the sequel Absolution Gap occurs, though for other practical reasons.
• In Lynsay Sands' Argeneu and Rouge Hunter Series, this is the most common reason for the vampire-like immortals to "turn" others. It is occasionally played for laughs when it turns out that the danger they were "escaping" was all in their heads, though other times it is a serious matter as the turnee is brought near death by some outside force, such as a crazed geek with an axe, or a rival immortal seeking revenge by hurting the one closest to them.
• Safehold: When Nahrmahn is dying from a suicide bomber attack, Merlin breaks several Federation laws to pull an improvised Brain Uploading without permission and with no idea whether or not it will work. It does, to an extent — Nahrmahn remains the Empire's most effective spymaster and analyst, but he needs constant "life support" from the AI Owl to remain functional. Nahrmahn is still happy with the result, though.
• The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel has Joan of Arc getting a blood transfusion from the vampire Scathach. It doesn't turn her into a vampire, but it does make her immortal, which explains what she's doing in a series that takes place in the twenty-first century.
• In The Sex Gates, Lee, Donna and Russell are forced to push Rita through one of the titular gates after she is stabbed, saving her life at the cost of turning her into a man. Lee accidentally falls through as well, turning into a woman. Especially tragic since Rita was pregnant at the time, and unborn babies don't survive the transformation.
• In Skinned by Robin Wassermann, the main character Lia gets into a fatal car accident. To save her, her brain is uploaded into the body of an android. This is very rare, but it happens in her future world. These people are shunned because they look too perfect. The Christian church believes these people are abominations and do not deserve to exist, because they mean science is "creating life".
• In The Ship Who... setting, some severely disabled children are converted into "shellpeople", their bodies prevented from growing and made immobilized and insensate inside of titanium life support "shells", which can then serve as biological AI for spaceships, Space Stations, cities etc. In the first stories from the 1960s this was as an alternative to euthanasia. When new material was written in the 90s this changed to be closer to assistive technology, with several characters who would have died soon after birth without it. One shellperson, Tia, was seven years old and both paralyzed from the chin down and restricted to a small sterile part of a hospital before she was enshelled, and saw it as a way around her Dream-Crushing Handicap.
• The Sookie Stackhouse Mysteries:
  • Sookie Stackhouse is given Vampire blood to save her life rather than to bring her all the way over to the vampire side. In fact, Vampire blood is a Fantastic Drug in this/these series, because it enhances humans temporarily.
  • Bubba, aka Elvis Presley was vamped in a hurry to save his life. It was not precisely a success.
• Star Wars Legends:
  • This happens to Jedi Callista Masana twice. Once when she's dying and transfers her consciousness to a ship's computer in order to continue her mission, and then again 30 years later when the ship is about to self-destruct and Jedi Cray Mingla—who is suicidal—offers her body so Callista can escape the computer. The first time is just better than death, but when she loses all contact with the Force after the second transfer, there is much angst.
    • Also subverted in the same book, Children of the Jedi. Cray's lover and fellow Jedi Nichos Marr contracted a fatal disease and Cray attempted to transfer his consciousness into a droid body using alien technology. However, the result was merely a droid programmed with Marr's personality.
  • Phanan of the X-Wing Series. While he's a funny Deadpan Snarker, wow do things get tragic after Face finds him drinking and complaining that it's easier to get drunk. Every year, less meat, more machine.
    "A long time ago, back at the Battle of Endor, the frigate I was working on as a doctor was hit by an Imperial barrage. Blew out whole sections of the hull, sucked crewmen out into hard vacuum. I was hit by a falling beam superheated by laser fire. One minute I'm helping a pilot with a concussion, the next minute that pilot's been dead for two weeks and I'm just waking up with a mechanical half a face and a mechanical leg. Ever since then, no woman has looked at me with any sort of serious interest. [...] Something died when I was hit in that medical ward, and I think it was my future. I think people, maybe only women, can just look at me and say, 'There's no future in him.' [...] There's no mechanical replacement for a future, Face. And every time I take a hit, and they have to cut away another part of me and replace it with machinery because I'm allergic to bacta, every time that happens I seem to be a little further away from the young doctor who had a future. He can't come back, Face. Not all of him is here anymore."
    • And then there's later.
      Phanan: Starting over means more time. More time for Zsinj to bombard more colonies, to destroy more ships. Another day may mean some bright young doctor gets it the way I did and ends up what I am.
      Face: What you are is pretty good.
      Phanan: Not as good as some kid with a superior intellect whose only aim is to make people better. I'd rather he be out there than me.
    • And right after that...Read the book.
  • Some other characters also get cybernetics, but they tend to be more along the lines of Artificial Limbs and sometimes eyes.
• Tales of the Five Hundred Kingdoms: Siegfried's bird companion in The Sleeping Beauty isn't dying, but gets an emergency (and permanent) transformation into a firebird because it's the only way Siegfried will be able to get through the wall of thorns. Lily is worried that the bird will see this as a curse, but the bird's delighted.
• Tortall Universe: During Emperor Mage, Emperor Ozorne is given an artifact to be used in a moment of greatest need, that will take him from his enemies "on wings of steel" and remove him from Death's grasp for all time. At the climax, faced with a choice between surrendering, abdicating, and going on trial or being killed by hyenas, he decides to Take a Third Option and produces the artifact... which transforms him into an immortal harpy-creature that leaves him unable to use his old magic or hold his throne at all.
• The Twilight Saga:
  • Edward turns Bella into a vampire after she almost dies from childbirth. They always planned to transform her eventually when they married, but her Surprise Pregnancy ultimately drove those plans. This goes for the others as well, since Carlisle only ever changed people who would have otherwise died for sure, because he didn't want to condemn anyone to his immortal existence.
  • Also, Alice was transformed to save her from a hunter-vampire, and Esme was changed after an almost-successful suicide attempt after losing her only son. Carlisle and Jasper however, were not.
  • This also happened to Edward. In 1918, at age 16, he and his mother were dying from The Spanish Flu. She took him to Carlisle, begged him to save Edward at any cost, then died.
• In The Two Princesses of Bamarre by Gail Carson Levine, the cure comes too late for Meryl, who has to be turned into a fairy, and it turns out this is also what happened to legendary epic hero Drualt.
• Subverted in The Underneath. Hawk Man can save himself from Grandmother's venom by transforming into a hawk, but refuses to do so due to not being able to change back and ends up dying.
• Anne Rice's The Vampire Chronicles:
  • Happens in Queen of the Damned with a female character, Jesse, and a male character, Daniel.
  • Even though Marius had planned to make Armand a vampire anyway, he didn't want to bring him over as early as he had to when Armand was about to die from a stab wound with a poisoned blade.
  • And in The Vampire Lestat, Lestat's first vampire offspring was his mother, to save her from death by tuberculosis. She more-or-less gave her consent beforehand and, arguably, took to vampirism better than Lestat.
  • Subverted in a manner with Claudia in Interview with a Vampire. Wracked with guilt over his own recent transformation, Louis is wandering the backstreets alone when he finds a little girl who has just been made an orphan by the plague. Desperate with hunger, and thinking he can perhaps grant her the mercy of a quick death rather than catching the plague or starving to death on her own, he feeds and takes her to the brink of death. Lestat then pops in and, deciding it would be fun to have an eternal vampire daughter (not to mention something/someone to help bind Louis to him), he turns her. Louis spends years (if not decades) blaming himself for taking her mortal life, and while Claudia forgives him (she sees vampires as predators and thus has no moral problem with him having killed a human girl), she comes to hate her other "father" Lestat for making her an eternal child.
• In The Wheel of Time series, Elayne bonds Birgitte, one of the Heroes of the Horn, as a superhuman Warder (the first known female Warder) after Birgitte is ripped out of the dream world by Moghedien, one of the Forsaken, and materializes in critical condiiton in the real world without having reincarnated properly yet. Birgitte doesn't have any obvious physical changes, but the angst is still there—A, because she's been separated from her Reincarnation Romance with Gaidal Cain, and B, because the Warder bond turns out to be more effective if you're both the same sex.
  • Later in the series Gawyn needs to be made into a Warder by Egwene to survive after being wounded, but it's what he wanted anyway.
• In The War of Embers Joshua Woods is irrevocably transformed into a dragon in order to bring him back from the brink of death after being Trapped in Another World. Somewhat deconstructed in that the novel focuses on the mental and social aspects of the transformation such as how he struggles to live a normal life on Earth which is a magic-less world, requiring him to return to the other world every so often to "recharge his batteries".
• Wings of Fire: In Escaping Peril, Peril realizes that Queen Ruby's earring was put there by Chameleon to make her never be able to win a fight with Queen Scarlet, but she doesn't realize that removing it will turn her into a different dragon altogether. Transforming into Tourmaline heals her wounds and allows her to kill Queen Scarlet and win the throne.
• The Tin Woodsman from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz got Serial Prostheses after a series of axe injuries, until eventually he was made entirely of tin.
• Inverted in Xenocide: as the setting's version of the Internet is brought down, it threatens to bring the artificial intelligence Jane along with it. The only way she can survive is by taking a human body... and afterward, even though it's possible, she doesn't want to go back to being what she was before.