Examples of mermaids present in
Literature.
- One story from Always Coming Home has a girl born who is part fish, with the extent varying from time to time. She eventually swam into the sea, and years later, came back pregnant. Her child and his descendants were fully human, except with lighter skin than others in the Valley.
- The original, printed page Aquamarine, by Alice Hoffman, centers around a Mermaid who is stranded in a swimming pool after a storm. She's a bit self-centered, but eventually realises she will need the help of the only humans who know about her if she is ever to return home and to her sisters. She cannot transform into a human at all. The rescue actually takes some time and effort — enough time for Aquamarine to develop a crush on a human man...
- Book of Brownies has a classical mermaid, but she's stranded on land after being kidnapped by an evil goblin magician, who turns her tail into huge, ugly, oversized feet to prevent her from escaping. The three heroic brownies managed to rescue her, and send her back into the ocean, at which point her feet turns back into a mermaid's tail.
- Book of Imaginary Beings: The Ocean Men of China have the heads and arms of humans and the bodies and tails of fish.
- In Dan Abnett's Warhammer 40,000 novel Brothers of the Snake, Aekon thinks he has been underwater too long because he is hallucinating a merman come to claim his life and carry off his soul. Then he realizes that it looks just like one of his squad-mates, and then he realizes it is the Space Marine in question, come to ensure that he survives.
- The Ustredi in The Chronicles of Magravandias. They are not dissimilar to The Fair Folk. Some are just straight-up Fish People and some are so beautiful it hurts to look at them. The beautiful ones are the most dangerous. The Palindrake family has the ability to command the Ustredi through means of an ancient contract.
- Mermaids appear in the third book in Michael Scott's The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel series, "The Sorceress". They are the daughters of Nereus, the Old Man of the Sea who has the octopus bottom but they all have fish tails. Josh notes that some are beautiful women while others resemble fish and crabs. They all have green skin and sharp teeth and claws (hint: they're not on the side of good) as well as having apparent powers through singing. Virginia Dare is attacked by one and claims to have stolen her voice, leaving her mute and then implies Nereus will "dispose of her" since she is useless to him now.
- In The Chronicles of Narnia series there are two varieties.
- There are merman and mermaids that attend the coronation at the end of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and sing in honor of the newly crowned kings and queens. These could live in and out of water, though no further description of any kind is given. The artist for the early editions draws them as typical mermaids and merman as beautiful humans with bare chests, green tails, and blonde hair.
- In The Voyage of the Dawn Treader Lucy encounters a hunting party of male and female Sea People far to the East in the deep oceans. Their skin is the color of "old ivory"and they have dark purple hair. Lucy mistakes them to be just like those they met before, but Edmund points out that these Sea People seem unable to leave the water, even for a short time, otherwise the Sea People would have attacked the two of them. Therefore they presumably looked at least somewhat alike. These Sea People rode giant Sea-Horses, wielded spears, and used hunting fish to hunt other fish for sport. The ones they saw had some sort of orange or emerald streamer from their shoulders, wore different kinds of coronets (some with gold) and some wore chains of pearls, but no other clothes. They had a large castle or city a top an underwater mountain, for, as C. S. Lewis points out from the point of view of underwater people, mountains and valleys' characteristics are reversed — mountains are the warm civilised areas near the surface, valleys are the mysterious dark areas populated by monsters. The artist for the early editions draws them as beautiful and bipedal.
- Chronicles of the Emerged World: Mermaids have their own civilization far into the ocean, where they coexist with the albino-like inhabitants of the Submerged World, although they maintain a government of their own — by necessity, as they live in the ocean itself and the people of the Submerged World in Underwater Cities within magically suspended bubbles of glass. A secondary race known as sirenids also exists, resembling albino humans with gills on their necks, and arose from the intermingling of mermaids and humans.
- In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "The Pool of the Black Ones", the arrival of a man on the deck of a ship at sea raises the question whether he's a merman. No, it's Conan. He's just been swimming for a while.
- In Kai Meyer's first installment of the Dark Reflections Trilogy, The Water Mirror, the mermaids who inhabit Venice appear to be normal-looking women with fish tails- until you notice that their mouths are larger, longer, and filled with very sharp teeth. They are sentient but are considered bestial by the Venetians, who use them to pull their gondolas and occasionally eat them. They cannot assume human form through magical means, but one mermaid lives as a human thanks to surgically-created legs and a mask covering the lower half of her face.
- In Elemental Origins by A.L. Knorr, mermaids transform between fins and legs at will, and have superhuman strength and senses. They're also known as sirens; they're alluring to men and can control minds with their voices. They live their lives in cycles, swimming in the sea until instinct compels them to return to land to reproduce with a male human, then returning to the sea after a few years, with their mermaid daughter or without their human son. It's eventually revealed that this cycle is not natural, but a curse, and there used to be male mer known as tritons, but because they were forced by the curse to do their reproducing with humans, tritons have long since died out.
- Elsewhere: Mermaids apparently swim in the ocean that's in between the world of the living and the dead (It Makes Sense in Context). They briefly appear when the main character is trapped under the water, unable to move or breathe. They are beautiful, but vain and meanspirited, making fun of how ugly she is before leaving her to drown. They seem more like The Fair Folk than evil though.
- John Ringo's Emerald Sea features mermen and mermaids created by genetic engineering. They look like traditional merfolk but have a unique physiology combining fish and dolphin traits. They also find it hard to survive in the ocean after the loss of technology reduces them to a stone-age hunter-gatherer society.
- L. Sprague de Camp features mermaids in several fantasy stories. In all of them (even ones in different continuities) the mermaids are part dolphin, rather than part fish. They are also streamlined for swimming, so the females breasts are generally smaller than those typically portrayed in mermaid art. The mermaids are fairly friendly: in one story ("Nothing in the Rules") one is even paid to enter a swim meet.
- Alastair Reynolds wrote about "Denizens" in his Revelation Space series; the Denizens were created by genetic engineering and are thorough fusions of human and fish DNA, along with sequences to secrete antifreeze and let them breathe hydrogen sulfide instead of oxygen. They look thoroughly monstrous.
- In the Doctor Who tie-in spin off Genius Loci one of the characters tells Bernice Summerfield a gruesome mermaid story in which a fisherman, with a fine sense of the pragmatic, chops a mermaid in two and takes the fish half home as his catch of the day. The bifurcated mermaid turns out to have been the daughter of the queen of the mermaids and hilarity ensues.
- In another Doctor Who novel, the "Missing Adventures" novel Evolution, the Doctor comes across a colony of artificially engineered mermaids, created by fusing abducted human children with a "gilled dolphin-creature". Both the mermaids and the "donor-animal" were created by a Mad Scientist who was lucky enough to witness the crash of a spaceship belonging to one of the amorphous shapeshifting Rutans and retrieved some Rutan healing gel, which has the ability to fuse genetic traits from different species together.
- Dream Girl by J. Conway Jameson features a lesbian mermaid named Áine, who seduces and kills unconvicted rapists, murderers, and abusers of women. She uses "The Splash Method", but taking after the Nixie legend, her human form has a perpetually wet skirt or pant hem.
- The Emily Windsnap books also use "The Splash Method". A "semi-mer", with one mermaid and one human parent, can become a mermaid when totally immersed in water, and will become human again when not, wet or dry; they can even take showers and baths, evidenced by the protagonist, who didn't learn she was a mermaid until taking a swimming class at the age of 13. Full mermaids are permanently mermaids and cannot even become a human by use of magic. It's also worth mentioning they have pockets in their tails.
- The mermaid in the poem "The Figurehead" is the daughter of none other than Davy Jones. And she's a Spoiled Brat about it; not exactly evil, but selfish and indifferent to the core. Like the sirens of mythology, her domain is littered with wrecks and bones, from which she's fashioned her home.
- In Four Kids, Three Cats, Two Cows, One Witch (Maybe) Kevin tells Beverly a story about a family of merpeople where the father gets fed up of being neglected by his family and leaves to marry a human woman. He loses his tail because of this but is able to regain it at night time.
- MaryJanice Davidsons' Fred The Mermaid erotica/paranormal romance has Fredericka Bimm as a lead character. She and the other mermaids in the series can simply become human at will. Even their human form is much faster and stronger than a normal human and they are all telepathic except for Frederika who is only telepathic underwater.
- In John C. Wright's Fugitives of Chaos, Amelia speaks of sailors who brought back mermaid wives — whose tails transformed when their wedding bells rang.
- Goosebumps: Deep Trouble: The main character is rescued by a mermaid before it is captured and almost sold to a zoo by the evil human antagonists.
- Halvgudene is a quite weird example. They have both women and men, that are all siblings and they vote forth their new leader which they call Mother or Father based on their gender. They are are a little more like Fish People due to having gills on their necks and have fish-like eyes.
- In Harry Potter merpeople appear during the Second Task of the Triwizard Tournament, when Harry and the other Champions have to visit their village in the school's lake. The merpeople Harry meets are rather ugly by human standards, with gray skin, green hair and yellow teeth and eyes. The spin-off media book Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them mentions that there are at least three kind of mermaids—the Scottish selkies that Harry sees, the Irish merrow and the warm-water sirens—and that the latter apparently fit the more traditional, "beautiful" model.
- The Heroes of Olympus also shows members of the merfolk. These are related to Poseidon, and even have some kind of training camp on the seabed. They look like humans, but have a fish tail as a lower body. They teeth resemble those of sharks, and their skin color can be green, blue, red or black. They also have glowing yellow or green eyes. They are both male and female. Poseidon's son Triton also belongs to the merfolk, but has two fish tails instead of one.
- Impossible Creatures: Merfolk live in the northern waters of the Archipelago. Their tails contain thousands of muscles and can be up to 30 feet long. Many of them are musicians, and their songs are thought to have inspired Vivaldi.
- In the Ingo Young Adult books by Helen Dunmore, the Mer (don't call them Mermaids, Mermen, or Merfolk) are described as half-human, half-seal. They can't become human but humans can become Mer apparently. They don't like humans very much, except for the Half-Human Hybrids with whom they can communicate.
- Kit Whitfield's Deepmen in In Great Waters are air breathing (although they can stay under for up to 30 minutes) mammals with tails, notably less intelligent than humans, although they have a language it's limited to purely practical matters, abstract concepts like religion being alien to them and can breed with humans. In fact all the royal houses of Europe (and possibly the world) have some Deepman blood.
- In Into the Drowning Deep, mermaids are a unique species of predatory amphibians with eel-like tails, bioluminescent hair, the ability to perfectly mimic any sound they hear, and sexual dimorphism similar to anglerfish.
- In Island of the Aunts by Eva Ibbotson, the standard mermaids are pretty standard, with the difference that they're not supernaturally beautiful. Of the three merpeople on the island, one is a visibly old woman, one is a standard mermaid, and the latter's baby son is so fat that he looks like a beach ball if you don't look closely. They were thrown out of their home by the young mermaid's husband, who fell head over heels for a french mermaid, who had two tails.
- Star Wars Legends: Junior Jedi Knights: The Melodies of Yavin 8 hatch from eggs, live on land for the first twenty years of their lives, then metamorphize into mermaids, and find it harder to breathe air the older they get.
- In the Kathi Appelt novel Keeper, a young boy named Jacques is a merman; he changes to his form via the "Splash" method.
- Anne Greenwood Brown's young adult novel Lies Beneath and its sequel Deep Betrayal feature mermaids who can change into human form at will (though depending on how long they've been out of water, immersion can trigger an immediate, instinctive change, and it is sometimes painful). In mermaid form, a silver ring is visible around their neck. Other abilities include generating electricity (which can be governed by emotions), telepathy with fish, and a telepathic bond with others in their family while in mermaid form, which can only be severed by the head of their family. Mermaids are instinctively drawn to others in the link, and it makes it very hard for a mermaid (or merman) to strike out on their own, though some with stronger wills are capable of doing so. They age at a rate of one year for every three that go by. Mermaids are unable to break a promise once made, and react VERY badly to humans who do so.
- Feeding-wise, Lies Beneath mermaids can eat normal food, but are drawn to humans whose auras shine with positive emotions, absorbing them directly from the human, leaving them as dried-out husks and providing the mermaid with a brief reprieve from their natural bleakness. They are predators, and act like them.
- Reproduction is done in two ways: first, directly with humans while in human form. After the birth, the infant is left with the father until they learn to walk, at which point they are returned to the mother, and live as a mermaid full-time. The other, less common way is known as "reinvigoration", in which a human drowns and has their heart restarted via the mermaid's electric shock. This method fully converts the human into a mermaid, and bonds them to their new family. It is a very rare event, but can be done, usually by a mermaid who had drowned a victim and had second thoughts.
- Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, of course. In the original tale, mermaids lived three hundred years before turning into sea foam; they did not have immortal souls and could not acquire one except through marriage to a human, which would give them the right to share in the human destiny. The Sea Witch required her most precious possession — her unusually fine voice — as payment for the transformation spell, since it required the Witch's own blood, and the voice was not refundable; the Sea Witch cut out her tongue. The transformation was very painful, as though she had been cut with a sword, and she was warned up front that forever afterward, every step she took would feel as though she were treading on knives. She was also warned that if the prince married someone else, her heart would break and she would turn to sea foam just as if she had lived out her full three hundred years. At the VERY end, the mermaid who wanted a soul dies and becomes an air spirit who can earn a soul by 100 years of good deeds — with the Anvilicious remark that an air spirit's time may be reduced if she sees well-behaved children who make her smile, or increased if she sees wicked children who make her weep. As the sea witch in this version isn't evil, she does provide a reversal to the spell: a knife that the mermaid can kill the prince with to regain her tail. The price for that is much cheaper: all of her sisters' hair.
- Sarah Porter's Lost Voices Trilogy has a rather dark and unique take on mermaids. Certain young human girls have the potential to come back as mermaids, if they suffered severe abuse or neglect in their human lives. They are reborn as beautiful mermaids with fish tails and enchanting voices that can entrance or madden humans — though the talent is actually pretty rare considering. These mermaids are ageless, though not completely immortal, and all still traumatized from what they endured in life. They also act a bit like water mammals — they do breath air, but they can hold it for a very long time underwater. They sink ships and drown people as revenge against all of humanity for what was done to them by parents/caretakers and other people in their previous lives — this is also implied to be something like an instinct. They form tribes in the oceans (this is for survival, as they can still be killed by humans, sharks, etc. and still need to eat, though they can survive on raw shellfish) and have strict laws against having any contact with humans other than singing them to their doom. Once transformed, they can't survive out of the water for long, and if trapped on dry land, they will revert to human form and then die (a very painful process). It is implied that certain young men and boys have the same kind of potential if badly treated in life, but attempts to transform them are usually unsuccessful.
- In The Lost Years of Merlin, mermaids are mentioned occasionally, though only seen, briefly, in the last book. Apparently Merlin's paternal grandmother was one. How they got around the Mermaid Problem isn't mentioned, but then, his grandfather was a wizard...
- H. P. Lovecraft's enigmatic Deep Ones are supposed to be the truth-behind-the-myth of mermaids. They're immortal, extremely unattractive... and they can mate with humans. The offspring are born effectively human, but undergo a slow metamorphosis.
- Minor note: The capacity for interbreeding is Handwaved by Lovecraft as "all life has a common descent," never mind the fact humans can't even breed with the closet-related thing, chimps.
- Humans are willing to do this for huge amounts of gold, sharing of knowledge of Black Magic, and because the offspring never grow old (Carrying on my family by making immortal kids? I'll put a bag over her head!)
- Worth noting as well that this is something of a bait and switch deal. The humans are given treasures and powers in exchange for minor deeds up until the Deep Ones are sure that their chosen human is completely dependent on them, then comes the proposition.
- Deep One hybrids can retain their human appearance for decades before undergoing the transformation, long enough for themselves to interbreed with humans and pass along the Deep One gene.
- Another very different — though friendlier — variation are Vonda N. McIntyre's "divers", who appear in several of her works. Imagine people with some sea-lion-like traits engineered in, plus lungs modified for use in either air or water. That's the short description. (They're also usually described as attractive... and decidedly not subject to the Mermaid Problem.)
- The Aquatics from Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future can be best described as creepy manatee-people with hands and gills. One population of them moves to the deep sea and is the only human-derived species, and probably the largest vertebrate, to survive the Space People's planetary devastation.
- The merfolk in the Mermaids (2001) trilogy come in two different varieties — normal merfolk (with green tails, sea-blue or sea-green eyes and blonde hair) and magical merfolk (with orange tails, goldeny-brown eyes, red hair and the ability to perform magic). Rani, the protagonist, is a magical mermaid who was adopted by normal merfolk when she was a baby. Merfolk generally don’t go to the surface because they get dizzy if they go too close to the surface. The merfolk that Morva and Rani are descended from are born with an innate ability to do magic, although merfolk from other places lack powers (with the exception of twin merfolk, who are born with the ability to hear each other’s thoughts).
- "The Mermaid's Madness" by Jim C. Hines features a proud tribe of merfolk (they prefer the term "Undine") who appear to be of the standard human-on-top, fish-on-bottom variety. Members of the nobility of this tribe differ however, in that they have two tails (bypassing the Mermaid Problem quite nicely.)
- The post-apocalyptic mermaids in Alida Van Gores' Mermaid's Song come in two varieties: Mirra (traditional) and Mog (more fish-like). The Mirra have dolphin-like tails (and reproductive organs) and constitute an oppressed minority. Unusually, neither species can transform, since humans appear to be extinct and the surface world doesn't figure into the story much at all.
- In The Merman's Children by Poul Anderson merfolk are humanoid, with blue-green skin, webbed hands and feet, gills and attractive enough that one of them seduces a human woman and has children by her.
- Monster of the Month Club: Chelsea, the April Selection, is based on a mermaid, and spends most of her time in Rilla's tub.
- McIntyre's historical fantasy novel The Moon and the Sun has the sea people, who have hind limbs adapted for swimming instead of fish tails, as well as webbed fingers and claws. They also have an anatomical adaptation (just like that of the divers, only they come by it naturally rather than being genetically engineered) that allows them to breathe water as well as air. And their language consists of songs.
- The Half-Human Hybrids of Jack Chalker's Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke novel The Moreau Factor (note the title) include at least three species of merfolk: hermaphroditic frog-women, humanoid dolphins and "Creature from the Black Lagoon"-style Fish People.
- Moribito: The Water Folk is a mysterious, barely glimpsed race of Creature from the Black Lagoon-style amphibious humanoids.
- The mermaids of My Vampire Older Sister and Zombie Little Sister include traits of sirens and selkies as well. Their entire body is humanoid, but they can wrap their long hair around their lower half to form a fish-shaped tail (similar to a selkie's skin). They can control anyone who hears their song, similar to sirens. One thing that stands out is their ability to control rock, not something generally associated with mermaids. This is based on the stories of mermaids killing sailors, similar to how rocks and reefs wreck ships.
- In Paul Jennings's short story Nails, merfolk can interbreed with humans, but the offspring look perfectly human up until their teens. Then their fingernails and toenails start to apparently multiply... these are actually developing scales, and when the process is complete, the hybrid has become a new merperson, legs fusing together into a tail which, like their arms, is covered in scales. To be more exact, the mermen have legs but are covered in scales up to their necks while mermaids are just traditional merfolk, so only a female half-breed's legs would fuse.
- In the short story National Geographic on Assignment: Mermaids of the Old West (included in the anthology Somewhere Beneath Those Waves, different species of mermaids correspond to different species of fish, including shark and catfish.
- K?b? Abe's short story Ningyoden (Mermaid Legend) is about a man falling in love with a flesh-eating mermaid. There's also some cloning involved. Since his work was influenced by Franz Kafka it's also a Mind Screw.
- Pact: Green Eyes is a flesh-eating mermaid bogeyman. She was originally human but was twisted into her current form by the Abyss. There's a fair amount of Body Horror involved, as her scales are barbed and hooked, allowing her to easily rip the flesh off of things she grabs; her skin is partially translucent, her bones and teeth visible though it; and her eyes are swollen and faintly luminous, like a deep sea creature. She's also mentioned at one point to be able to dislocate her jaw like a snake. However, she's also friendly and helpful to Blake, and becomes one of his closest friends and allies (possibly even his girlfriend).
- Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: Never stated in-story, but the cover of the eighth episode, features a Living Figurehead as a mermaid.
- In L. Jagi Lamplighter's Prospero Regained, several mermaids play minor roles. We are told that one recovered Hector of Troy's sword, Duranadel, to be given to Roland.
- The Reynard Cycle: The Naga are aquatic Chimera who blend human features with that of fish, serpents, whales, etc., etc. Some of them are depicted as having the ability to charm men to their deaths by drowning, but most of them just want to eat you. In Reynard the Fox, the Gate of Tears is the lair of one that has grown larger than a war galley, and has its human features mixed with those of a serpent, a giant squid, and a sea lion respectively.
- Mermaids in the River of Dancing Gods series are half human and half dolphin but their social organization resembles a pack of hyenas crossed with the mafia. They make their living extorting protection money from fishermen.
- The Skelks in The Saga of Larten Crepsley — their tails are hair, which they can grow out or suck back into their bodies at will. They communicate through their hair as well.
- The Saga of the Noble Dead has a young noble, who from time to time partly turns into a creature of the merfolk. His fiancée always locks him in, so that he can not swim out into the sea at this time. It turns out that some of his ancestors had common descendants with the merfolk, and for this reason the nobles in this family are not entirely human. And now and then some of them change, and swim into the sea. This noble man also turns completely into the plot, and finally escapes into the sea.
- Peter S. Beagle wrote a short story called Salt Wine where a merman rewards a sailor who rescued him by giving him the recipe for salt wine. It makes him rich, but then it turns out that a small number of those who drink it become transformed into mer-creatures themselves. Here, mermaids are portrayed as wild and inhuman, and they range from supernaturally hideous to supernaturally beautiful.
- There are sirens in Samhain Island but called “mermaids” by Tremaine. They’re ghoulish creatures who patrol and guard the Macabre from wandering tourists or monster hunters. Each siren has a noticeable injury or infliction. Marshall, partner to Santa Muerte, is pale green and has ice protruding from his back. Kaimana has unnatural grey hair and has the scar of a shark bite on her torso, and Pinwheel is sickly pale and trembles for an unknown reason.
- The Cray from China Miéville's The Scar are essentially lobster-bodied centaurs (lobtaurs?). The Grindylow from the same novel are much less friendly mermen.
- In The Sea Lady by H. G. Wells the mermaid is one who believes she doesn't have a soul but in questioning Melville she gets him to not be able to describe what a soul is. The Sea Lady is also immortal as expected all mermaids are given she doesn't understand Adeline's comment about "mer-child"s. She had zero problem living outside the water for an extended period of time. Also they read human literature that gets tossed into the sea.
- the secret lives of Princesses: Princess Eelizabeth is half eel.
- The Secret of Platform 13 mentions mermaids living on the Island; apparently, one even applied to become the Prince's nurse, apparently believing that she could get around the palace in a big tub of water on wheels or something. Some of the London mermaids also perform at the Midsummer's party for Raymond; one had cut her hair short and spiky for a beachfront rock concert, which kind of ruined the effect, though. Of course, it's important to mention that Melisande is not a mermaid, she's a water nymph; she has feet.
- Donna Jo Napoli's novel Sirena portrays mermaids in the traditional beautiful, sailor-seducing manner but adds a few details. Her mermaids (and their ocean-dwelling brothers mermen) are the product of the god Eros having sex with a tropical fish. They become immortal if they mate with humans.
- Merfolk appear in The Spiderwick Chronicles' Field Guide and the second series. They are portrayed as capricious beings with a simple culture who usually distrust land-dwellers and have the features of a wide variety of marine life (always of species found in their habitats) from lionfish to seahorses to shrimp. It's also noted that, like certain species of tropical fish, merpeople can change sex, hence why females are more common than males (with the latter sex being noted as far larger in size).
- The Star Trek Novel 'Verse has the Alonis, an aquatic race who resemble merfolk. That is, their upper half is vaguely humanoid and the lower half is a fish-like tail. They don't have hair, being scaly all over, and their "arms" are actually just lengthy fins, but the merfolk comparison is made. Lacking opposable digits, they used their telekinetic control of water to build an advanced civilization. They appear in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Relaunch, Star Trek: The Lost Era, Star Trek: Typhon Pact and elsewhere.
- In Der Stechlin, Countess Melusine's name is commented on a lot. It comes from a medieval French legend of a knight marrying a woman called Mélusine (sometimes spelled: Merlusigne) and one day, when he came home unexpectedly seeing in her true mermaid formnote In some versions she is more of a snake-woman. , causing her to flee from him. According to this legend the powerful Lusignan family was descended from her. Since Mélusine is usually described as a demoness or a water-spirit, it is no surprise that Adelheid von Stechlin deeply disapproves of Countess Melusine.
- The merrows in "The Stones Are Hatching" are monsters who steal human souls and imprison them in crab cages.
- You don't get much more different than Feejee the Mermaid (heh) in Tales of MU. She can change at will between three forms: standard lady-half/fishie-half mermaid, an intermediate form with a distinctly humanoid lower half covered in scales, and fully human-like. She can also assume a sort of fighting form by growing scale-armor all over her body and claws on her hands. It's implied she can also change her face to a... less appealing form. Oh, and she eats people.
- In fact, it's fairly strongly implied that merfolk in that universe basically are intelligent predatory fish with the magical ability to take on shapes more appealing to humanoids as a lure! They even have a myth about their goddess inspiring the land-dwellers to build ships for the express purpose of providing them with food...
- Shapeshifting allows Feegee to overcome the Mermaid Problem with her boyfriend, though only for recreation. Mermaids actually reproduce in a more fishy way. They spawn.
- In Andrei Belianin's Thief Of Baghdad, the main character (Fish out of Temporal Water with Laser-Guided Amnesia) and his friend Nasreddin
encounter a mermaid, who will only help them if one of them satisfies her. The main character, recognizing the Mermaid Problem promptly passes the "honor" to Nasreddin. After some time, Nasreddin returns with a smile. When asked, he is surprised that his companion doesn't know that mermaids briefly turn into humans when they want to "get it on". - The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: Merfolk of the fish-tailed kind turn up in the seas of Fantasyland. They have largely given up on trying to lure sailors to their death, and tend to be friendly sorts these days.
- Trash of the Count's Family: Mermaids are less human-looking and more fish-looking but are referred to as mermaids nonetheless. They secrete a deadly poison and dissolve into seafoam after death when in contact with ocean water. The Beastmen from the Whale tribe are Unscaled Merfolk but are less like mermaids and more like were-whales.
- The Treachery of Beautiful Things: Jenny thinks that the nix holding her captive are the origins of the tales. Especially the "luring to death" ones.
- Underneath - A Merfolk Tale: The Merfolk can shift at will and have been hiding as humans for centuries, becoming some of the richest families where they live. The Masquerade goes down the drain when one of their own is found on a beach in Maine unconscious and injured.
- Before The Little Mermaid, there was the novella Undine (1811) by German romantic writer Friedrich de la Motte-Fouqué, which was a great literary success all over Europe and in North America (it is, for instance, mentioned in Little Women). The story, which is based on the writings of Paracelsus and the French folk-tale of Mélusine, bears a strong resemblance to Andersen's fairy tale, but there are important differences. Undine, who has no difficulty changing to human form, is raised by a fisherman and his wife, and falls in love with the knight Huldbrand. As Undine's uncle Kühleborn ("cool spring") tells her, she could gain herself a soul if she married him. But she has a rival in the fair but haughty lady Bertalda who, it later turns out, is actually the biological daughter of Undine's foster parents, which leads to Undine being torn between her love for Huldbrand and her wish to be friends with Bertalda. Undine does marry Huldbrand, but then a three-sided argument leads to Huldbrand wishing she should return to her aquatic family. Undine now has to leave and later, when Huldbrand marries Bertalda, is forced to kill him with a kiss. Huldbrand is buried and Undine turns into a spring next to his grave. Fouqué adapted the story into an opera scored by his friend E. T. A. Hoffmann, two other opera adaptations were written by Albert Lortzing (1845) and Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1869).
- Vainqueur The Dragon: The first chapter has a description of a Dragon Hoard whose contents include loot from "mermaids".
- In a planned audioplay by Greg Weisman, he plans to have a mermaid character that he claims is different from any other mermaid. How different remains to be seen.
- Well World: The Umiau are an alien species of aquatic mammals that just happen to look remarkably like traditional mermaids, albeit light blue in overall color. Their hair is silvery, their ears shell-like, and their noses have flaps of skin that close to keep out water. They are air breathers, and as such prefer relatively shallow habitats and are tolerant of both salt and fresh water. They resemble human women but are hermaphrodites, who alternate yearly between producing an egg and incubating another's, which sure solves the Mermaid Problem.
- Xanadu (Storyverse): Alveric's mermaid stories focus on a number of people turned into mermaids — "mer" being used as the gender-neutral term — of various sorts. As with every other Xanadu transformation, there is a considerable amount of variation between individuals, but certain overall patterns are present:
- Most are women — only four or so mermen are present. Most are amphibious, possessing both lungs and gill slits beneath their ribs; the exceptions are one dolphin-bodied one, who's strictly an air-breather, and the four Silent Sisters, who can only breathe water. Some air-breathers can stay on dry land indefinitely, while others' fish parts will dry, crack and bleed if they go too long out of water. They cannot speak underwater or move easily on land, and so are by necessity bound to shallows and coastal waters. The mermaids seen in the stories proper are all permanently stuck in their forms, but others are mentioned who can shift back and forth when they become wet or dry, with the use of a magic phrase, or at will; these largely go back to their human lives, and don't interact with the permanent mers much.
- Most have two-colored tails, either banded or splotched, with fishlike scales and horizontal tail fins. Some also have large pelvic fins, which make them slower but more maneuverable swimmers. They also tend to have fingers webbed to the first knuckle. The Silent Sisters all have pelvic fins, in addition to dorsal fins, smaller ones on their arms, scattered scales on their upper bodies and sharp teeth; one also has a vertical tail. Mermen also tend to have a pair of frilly fins running down their tails, which mermaids find to be a turn-on.
- All mermaids are exceptionally good singers [and can use their singing to create magical effects. At least one mermaid can save drowning people by turning them into mer themselves.
- Unusual cases include the main character Hannah, who was in the middle of switching costumes when the change hit and turned into a Vulcan mermaid, a frat boy who got turned into Ariel, and a merman with a koi tail.
- Xanth:
- The series does the Voluntary Shapeshifting route, while the standalone book Mer Cycle uses genetically modified descendants of normal humans, in whom the structure of human legs (complete with *ahem* equipment) is hidden within the tail.
- Thea, in Mute, is a mutant with legs fused from the knee down and flipperlike feet. And yes, she averts the Mermaid Problem quite handily.
