Many aspects of modern societies require human specifications within a narrow, predictable range. People possessing unusual cognitive characteristics, who are too vulnerable to UV or not vulnerable enough, whose dimensions and shapes are outside the default range, may be difficult to accommodate… or exploit. What is to be done with non-standard humans? Greek myth offers one solution…
The ancient Greek innkeeper Procrustes struggled to deal with guests who made the lifestyle choice not to fit his beds. Procrustes stretched or shortened guests until they did fit. Imagine the Yelp reviews! Clearly Procrustes is an example to emulate.
SF abounds with stories in which humans are transformed in order to better serve society. Below you’ll find five classic examples.
Fireflood by Vonda N. McIntyre (1979)
The subjects who became diggers began as baseline humans unsuited for the environment in which they were to spend their lives laboring. The solution was to use advanced biotech techniques to convert the diggers into unsightly but durable forms fit for their new workplace. It was a solution that satisfied everyone (who mattered).
By the time the conversions were finished, the project for which the diggers were intended had been deferred indefinitely. Being too ugly to impose on Terrestrial society, the diggers were consigned to a small, unpleasant reservation where nobody else would have to look at them. One brave digger sets out on a quest for justice for her people.
Fireflood is the title novella from McIntyre’s Fireflood and Other Stories, my favorite disco-era McIntyre collection. The collection abounds with stories that could teach management some new ways to maximize the unhappiness of their workforce.
Cage a Man by F.M. Busby (1973)
The alien Demu wish only the best for the lesser races of the galaxy. Possessing as they do displeasing shapes and subpar cultures, the non-Demu will never meet proper standards if left to their own devices. This is why, when the Demu encounter non-Demu, they provide them with surgical and behavioral modifications to bring them up to Demu standards.
Re-homed by the Demu, veteran soldier Barton bitterly resents the Demu efforts to better him, interpreting his experiences as kidnapping, torture, mutilation, and body-horror. Provided the opportunity to express his profound ingratitude, Barton does his best to convey his deep-seated anger.
Older reviews, when the book was published, often compared what the Demu were doing to Communistic brainwashing. However, nations across Earth often engage in protracted efforts to transform persons of low-status cultures into the dominant society’s image. No doubt readers can easily think of examples from their own societies.
The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey (1969)
Galactic society euthanizes most babies who look like infant Helva. In Helva’s case, her brain was as promising as her body was displeasing. Therefore Helva’s body was discarded and her brain salvaged. Installed in a starship, Helva effectively becomes the starship.
Transforming people like Helva into Ships is expensive. Someone has to pay the cost. Specifically, Ships must provide decades of labor in exchange for the alterations forced upon them. It’s a good thing for the Ships that they live so long. They will need the extra decades to pay off their medical bills.
The novel’s unique blend of ableism and debt peonage is presented as a positive development (albeit with drawbacks like outliving any humans to which Ships become attached). It would seem logical that any civilization able to create Ships probably should be able to offer a wide range of less-dramatic coping mechanisms for the disabled. This particular civilization cannot be bothered.
“Call Me Joe” by Poul Anderson (1957)
Humanity needs resources to be found on Jupiter. But no human body can survive the conditions on Jupiter’s surface. The answer is for humans high in orbit over Jupiter to teleoperate artificial bodies down on Jupiter’s surface. Humans cannot live on Jupiter, but their avatars can.
Rather, their avatars should be able to. Ed Anglesey—angry, embittered, and confined to a wheelchair after an accident—is finding his connection to his Jovian increasingly unreliable. Psionics expert Jan Cornelius must determine what element of the system is failing Ed. Is it the equipment? Or can the issue be found within Ed himself?
Modern readers may wonder why it is that a civilization able to create bodies to order could not offer a man unable to walk any alternatives better than a wheelchair. Well, there wasn’t really room in a short story to explore that question. However, not only is Ed’s treatment in keeping with the mores of Eisenhower-era America, immiserating Ed makes him willing to serve in the Jupiter project, which helps move the story along.
No Woman Born by C. L. Moore (1944)
Beautiful, graceful, possessed of a magnificent voice, Deirdre was adored by audiences across Earth. Tragedy struck when fire consumed Deirdre’s theatre. The world mourned a woman lost so young. In fact, reports of Deirdre’s death were premature.
Deirdre was burned beyond recognition, but she survived. Maltzer, a scientist, provided her with a new body, a machine to replace her lost flesh. But what of the woman inside the metal? Is it possible Deirdre will go mad within her glittering new form?
The men in this story fear that a woman denied conventional beauty will be driven insane by what she has lost. Deirdre has a clearer perspective. Deirdre revels in what she has gained. Pity the poor, puny, clumsy fleshlings around Deirdre.
This isn’t one of those stories where a cyborg goes mad and starts killing people. Deirdre’s new body is a substantial upgrade in all ways over her old one, so why wouldn’t she be happy? But the men are, of course, focused on superficial appearance.
***
These are but a few of the SF tales about people who have been transformed without consent. Have fun filling the comments with all the works I omitted due the constraints of the usual five-book format! Note: the list is incomplete in a different way: it largely overlooks people who willingly embrace transformation in order to better realize their own goals. That is a subject for another day…
In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, four-time Hugo finalist, prolific book reviewer, and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Interzone, Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021, 2022, and 2023 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). His Patreon can be found here.
Bujold’s Falling Free has the quaddies though I’m not sure if they count since they’re grown in their useful form rather than modded from living humans.
I wonder if Elizabeth Bear’s right-minding counts (from her White Space novels). Humans are clearly bad at living in post-scarcity conditions so direct adjustment of our neurochemistry can stretch us to fit our utopian beds. (NB I may be misrepresenting the esteemed Bear’s ideas).
John Brunner’s The Stone That Never Came Down centres on a drug that removes the human ability to ignore inconvenient facts, deliberately spread without consent to prevent WWIII from breaking out.
James Patrick Kelly’s Look Into the Sun features an architect who get manipulated into accepting an off-world post, one of whose requirements is radical body modification.
I don’t recall whether Oscar Goldman bothered to ask Steve Austin if he wanted a six million dollar upgrade.
The protagonist of Arthur C Clarke’s ‘A Meeting with Medusa’ is extensively modified following an accident; whether it was entirely voluntary I also can’t recall. Guess I need to go back and re-read some things!
The Zetarians in Star Trek‘s ‘The Lights of Zetar’ were converted to energy to escape the destruction of their homeworld; I imagine they would have preferred not to have to do that.
And, lest we forget, Spock certainly didn’t ask to have his brain removed and installed into the Controller’s enclosure!
@@.-@: No consent from Steve, with some hints in the original TV movie that Steve’s accident wasn’t an accident
Sarah Pinsker’s We Are Satellites falls right in the middle of the voluntary/involuntary body (specifically brain implant) modification spectrum. It’s hypothetically voluntary but the story centers on how social pressures make nominally voluntary choices utterly involuntary for all practical purposes.
I don’t recall the title, but Heinlein wrote a short story (or maybe it’s a chapter in a novel) about a society so radically devoted to equality that anyone smarter/stronger/etc. than average is involuntarily physically handicapped. That one is definitely meant as a Cold War era criticism of socialism/communism.
6: Not Heinlein. You’re thinking of Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut.
To the various writers’ credit, Col. Austin pointing out the lack of consent for his body modifications was a key part of the novel and the TV series premiere.
I’m not sure if Setlowe’s “The Experiment” counts, as the surgical removal of the cancerous lungs and replacement with artificial gills were done after the subject had donated his body for scientific experimentation and no one including the subject expected him to regain consciousness.
How about John Varley’s “The Barbie Murders”? Or Theodore Sturgeon’s Venus Plus X?
See also Braking Day by Adam Oyebanji. The inhabitants of the generation ship Archimedes are given neural implants at birth that enable them to interact with the computer systems and databases on board. They represent a faction of humanity who have chosen to leave an Earth overseen by AI, and this is a way of making sure that cybernetics remain subordinated to humans.
@9 It’s been a while since I read “The Barbie Murders” but I thought all the Barbies had gotten modified consensually.
Cordwainer Smith’s Underpeople didn’t ask to be morphed from animal to human-shaped. Same for David Brin’s Uplift.
@7: Crap, you’re right. I think I conflated that with a Heinlein chapter (maybe in Number of the Beast?) where they punish wrongdoers by inflicting precisely the same amount of damage to them that they did to others.
@@.-@: From in fact the Memory Alpha Web site, the Lights of Zetar are 100 “survivors” from their dead (in humanoid terms) planet. They implicitly chose their current state over death, but only in order to search “for one through whom we can see and speak and hear and live out our lives.” Or so they say. The alien lights in “Enterprise” episode “The Crossing”, which I am now spoiling, also lied about their condition. Their spaceship outperformed Enterprise but its non-corporeal-life support was failing. Their goal was to take over human bodies permanently. Their origin isn’t examined; we know they are sensualists; presumably some corporeal agency built that starship, maybe non-corporeals enslaved corporeals on some planet. Maybe this ship’s non-corporeals wore out their supply of corporeals. And presumably Captain Kirk and his crew knew about this NX-01 encounter, if it happened in the same history.
About wheelchairs and ship minds and so forth… Presumably these stories have a purpose, besides fame and often modest money for their writers. We might say that it is to examine how a human character deals with the story situation. But the in-universe morality of getting them into the situation may be troubling. That can be intentional. Then again, we shouldn’t necessarily despise an alternate human culture, even an ableist culture.
A better sci fi alternative to a wheelchair would be – what? A career in outer space so that you can float wherever you want (I’ve seen that)? A robot porter to carry you around? A human porter, maybe? Or artificial legs? If it involves removing meat parts of you, perhaps you prefer to keep those instead, despite the inconvenience. You may hope for eventual repair. Or maybe meat is a better look. And U.S. readers don’t have to imagine a society where relief of the afflicted has a price tag. I’d have to re-read to see how much of Helga’s debt is the price of the starship which becomes her home and her embodiment, versus being her medical bill. Although I don’t recall a less adventurous career being offered, bus driver?
Roger Zelazny’s short The Keys to December has characters who were gene modified in the womb to be “cold-world catforms” for a mining company. Unfortunately they were intended for a mining world whose sun inconveniently went nova before they could be shipped out, which meant that they had to be kept in expensive artificial habitats. Eventually they manage to find a world that can be Terraformed (well, made a LOT colder – normal humans couldn’t live there) over a few hundred years to suit their needs. Unfortunately it then turns out that there are natives, who will all be killed if the project continues. The protagonist rebels against this and tries to slow the Terraforming to give the natives more time to evolve for the new conditions. This does not end well for him, or the natives.
The Lilith’s Brood trilogy by Octavia Butler has the remnants of humanity presented with three options. Consent to being genetically crossbred with the very alien Oankali and develop into a new species, be dropped back on near-destroyed Earth to scrabble for the possibility of survival, or be humanely euthanized then and there. Lilith Iyapo picks option one, and her descendants have a hell of a time explaining themselves and their new appendages to the humans who didn’t.
Doctor Who‘s Cybermen definitely fit the criteria. The Daleks may as well.
Superheroes who acquire their powers accidentally probably qualify. The Amazing Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, Daredevil, the Fantastic Four, Doctor Manhattan — none of these asked for super powers or bodily modifications.
Robocop?
There is a story by Charles Beaumont, I think “The Beautiful People,” that was adapted for Twilight Zone as “Number 12 Looks Just Like You,” in which people are made to fit into one of 12 body types whether they like it or not. I like the episode. It feels like “The Jetsons” gone mad.
Jamoche@12: Similarly, the test subjects of a certain Doctor Moreau on a certain island didn’t ask for their conversions, either.
And the children of Earth (below a certain age) in Clarke’s Childhood’s End didn’t ask to be relieved of their corporeal forms and absorbed into the Overmind.
There’s quite a lot of sci-fi these days involving societies where everyone has some kind of neural implant that allows them to interact with data networks, environmental systems, etc.
Was it Kin Stanley Robinson who had convicts modified to live on Mars to help with the initial terraforming, creating an environment where they couldn’t live? IIRC some of them ended up way up at the top of Olympus Mons where the air was still thin enough for them.
@1
I would count the quaddies. (For those not familiar,they’re humans with arms where legs normally go, genetically modified to live and work in free fall environments. As with the diggers from Fireflood, they became obsolete almost before they were created, in this case because of the development of artificial gravity.) Jackson’s Whole also practices involuntary body modification in the Vorkosigan universe, the most extreme form being brain transplants (which are voluntary on one end, technically).
@14
Depends on local technology, and on why someone needs a mobiity aid. If there’s antigravity technology, hoverchairs are the way to go (as in the Vorkosigan universe, mentioned above, used by the quaddies when they’re in gravity, among others). Walking exoskeletons are another strong contender, there’s work being done on those now, even. Chairs with legs are a viable option as well, in many settings. If you can fly to other planets and establish settlements/industrial parks there, you can provide mobility aids that function in the absence of infrastructure there.
Along the lines of Call Me Joe, I was horrified by the body modification in Pohl’s Man Plus. I still remember the shock of reading the first third or so of the story, even though I have no memory of what the plot or resolution was.
Michael Swanwick’s “Radiant Doors” had underclass refugees from a brutal future arriving in the present, many having undergone involuntary body modification imposed upon them by the technologically-dominant 1% of their time so they could serve as sex slaves and such. Horrific stuff.
The Rifters of Peter Watts’s Rifters Trilogy were physically modified to live and work under abyssal conditions (artificial gills etc.), but the psychological adaptations required for enduring the darkness and isolation were induced (without their knowledge or consent) by the imposition of false traumatic memories by the corporation that they worked for,
Stephen R. Donaldson’s “The Gap” series (basically five volumes of horrible people doing horrible things to each other) includes forced cyborgization, “zone implants” that give control of your body to whoever’s holding the remote, and “bio-retributive surgery” which is every bit as much fun as it sounds. This is stuff the various humans do to each other; when Donaldson’s evil aliens the Amnion enter the story, things get… well, not worse, I suppose, just different.
I remember a K. W. Jeter story that involved some fairly extensive and undesirable modifications, such as the chap who got his central nervous system confiscated and turned into a high-quality audio cable – I think this one also included the (voluntary) surgical procedure called the “Full Prince Charles”… maybe I’m lucky that I can’t remember the title of this one.
The “god” Osiris in Roger Zelazny’s Creatures of Light and Darkness also does things with his enemies’ brains, such as building them into commonplace domestic furnishings. And then there’s Christopher Hodder-Williams and 98.4, where human beings are also offered exciting opportunities to be turned into hi-fi stereo systems, but this is merely a sideline to the main business of building NCBMs – nerve controlled ballistic missiles, or, basically, nuclear missiles with a pilot built in to them.
Basically, there seem to be a lot of uses for your brain in SF which don’t involve it still being in your head.
Bob from the Bobiverse series didn’t really consent to having his brain state copied and turned into an AI, and the dozens of people in the Old Man’s War series who have their brains removed and wired to ships like those in The Ship Who Sang definitely didn’t consent. Like the Quaddies in the Vorkosican Saga that @1 mentioned, the various casts of people in the Red Rising series are genetically modified in the germ line for their roles, but the Pinks (sex slaves) seem to have it particularly bad post-birth.
@olethros6: “Harrison Bergeron” was my first thought, but I note that the handicaps are all hung on the excessively-skilled, like weights in the saddle of a champion racehorse. The climax of the story begins with Harrison breaking off all of his handicaps and those of someone who in our world would be a prima ballerina; there’s no body mods involved.
@23: was the lead in Man Plus not a volunteer? OTOH, one of the mid-book surprises makes clear that he either wasn’t warned or didn’t listen to the warnings about how extensive the mods would be; I suspect the former but I haven’t read the book since it came out. There’s an old Walter M. Miller story, “Crucifixus Etiam”, which runs somewhat along those lines: the people terraforming Mars are much more modest cyborgs (since this was written before we knew just how un-Earthlike Mars is) who realize they won’t be able to revert even when their work is done. (In addition to the religious title, ISTR the story referring to Moses not actually getting to the Promised Land, as if invoking the malign-thug deity of the Old Testament somehow makes everything all right.)
In Dragonwriter (a collection of essays about Anne McCaffrey), it’s suggested that The Ship Who Sang was written as a response to the plight of thalidomide babies (born mainly in late 1950’s – early 1960’s). But its influence was wider than that; one poignant essay in Dragonwriter was written by a woman who first read Ship as she was in the hospital after the birth of a child who had many challenges. Right book at right time; the concept of a vibrant mind in a deformed body helped her see her baby as a person with a mind, beyond the body which might not last too long. (spoiler alert: the child lived at least into her teens, at the time the essay was written) (I can’t recall the writer’s name). Even though Ship has some concerns, as Nicoll rightly points out, clearly it resonated with some readers.
Sam Worthington didn’t (technically) consent to be turned into a prototype Terminator in Terminator Salvation (2009).
One quibble: McCaffrey’s brainships are called brainships but the body is still onboard, encased in a cylinder that provides total life support. One of the problems that arises when assigning a brainship a mobile partner, then sending them on long voyages during which they may have no company but each other, is that the two may fixate on each other. It may get to the point that the brawn (the mobile partner) tries to get into the life support unit so that the two can actually touch–and the brain (the ship-person) consents.
The broader consent issues in the series flew right past me when I first read The Ship Who Sang. Flying through the stars! And singing! And kicking butt! While singing! So cool!
Oh yeah, I forgot about Childhood’s End – I think I was the only person in my college SF Lit class that thought the ending made it horror, not desirable.
There is also the ST:TNG episode “The Hunted”, where a society exiles to one of their moons the men they altered and conditioned as soldiers for their last war, the premise being that the alterations are either too expensive or impossible to reverse and the former soldiers, with, among other things, their lethal hair-trigger responses to anything that might be perceived as a threat, are too dangerous to reintegrate into society.
@31: I read it in high school and was like, “This reads like somebody’s dream diary, and they are kind of an Eeyore, aren’t they?” I think it may have inoculated me against transhumanism. So dreary.
Classically, “The Island of Doctor Moreau” by Wells and, arguably, “Frankenstein” by Shelley.
Somehow we have gotten this far without anyone mentioning Jack Chalker. Well, consider him mentioned. (Possibly not all of his books involve body modifications, and some of the modifications that occur are consensual. But,)
In HM Hoover’s The Delikon, the main character, a Delikon, is altered to look like a human, in order to be a teacher to the children of human nobility on a conquered Earth.
Unlike pretty much every other modification listed here, she fully expected that her modifications would be temporary; after all, nobody thought the humans would stage a rebellion…
What about Huxley’s “Brave New World”? The fetuses of future low-class citizens are subjected to any number of treatments which impede their development, and everybody is subjected to social behavior modifications and brainwashing of one sort or another …
@32
Sounds rather like someone was inspired by Zahn’s Cobra books, which have a similar premise, where the protagonist and others are modified cybernetically to be super guerrillas, including computerized combat reflexes that make it hard to reintegrate inti civilian life. That government’s solution is to ship them all off to a recently discovered planet far, far away to guard the colonists against local wildlife.
Donovan’s Brain by Curt Siodmak comes to mind here.
@36: similar to Michael Faber’s Under the Skin, where protagonist Isserly wasn’t really prepared for how extensive the surgery would be, to transform her into something approximating a human. (The book is pretty clear that she is just about convincing if you don’t get a good look at her. So, in the movie, she’s played by Scarlett Johansson, because Hollywood.)
Does the Twilight Zone’s Eye of the Beholder count here or in the voluntary mod group?
Now that the intelligent comments have been made, I want to hang a left and ask our beloved host if he (or anyone else) remembers the spoken-word-over-music piece “No Anchovies, Please” by the J. Geils Band? Now there’s a twist.
@39; wasn’t Donovan’s brain salvaged after his body was killed in a plane crash? I don’t know if that counts as “voluntary” – though he certainly soon took control of the situation!
I think one of Captain Future’s crew in the 1940s pulp series was a voluntary “brain in a jar” though; and 1930s-40s SF were numerous examples of advanced alien races who had voluntarily swapped their fleshy bodies for mechanical versions, retaining only their brains; eg, the race in Neil R Jones’ long-running “Professor Jamison” series. Which makes me wonder – what was SF’s earliest “brain in a jar” story.
Later, in the early ‘60s, the future-humans of David Bunch’s “Moderan” stories had replaced most of their bodies with metallic parts, retaining only “flesh strips”.
@43
The earliest brain in a jar story appears to be Le Prince Bonifacio, by Louis Ulbach, in either 1860 or 1864. (Sources differ on the publication date and I haven’t the energy right now to sort it out)
@27 chip137 the protagonist of Man Plus is almost certainly a “volunteer” based on my hazy memory of a book I last read forty or more years ago :) But I remember one scene where he discovers that the body mods include the removal of some cherished anatomy and he definitely didn’t sign up for that.
I’m not sure how to classify Charley Gordon’s brain surgery in Flowers for Algernon. Is it clear that he has given “informed consent,” or is he actually competent enough to be able to judge and understand what the doctors were telling him before agreeing?
Any list of brain in a jar stories should include Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness”.
Scott Westerfield’s Uglies series! Those modifications are…dubiously voluntary, mandated by societal pressure, as I recall.
China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station comes to mind–in his world people are punished for crimes by being Remade and having their bodies non-consensually modified to do some kind of forced labor, like becoming a human-cab hybrid or having one’s mouth and genitals switched places for brothel enslavement (yikes).
I’ve just realised that I posted my comments @43 thinking that this was the associated “works about voluntary body modification” article, so apologies for my criticism of @39. Naturally I am blaming James for producing two related articles in quick succession, rather than my own slackness in not checking properly before posting comments. Can I put it down to the ongoing blur of the post-Christmas period?
deleted — belongs in the other column.
The ship’s pilot in Tim Pratt’s The Wrong Stars was given extensive body mods by well-intentioned aliens who discovered the wreck of a human ship and did their best to provide emergency medical care the survivors.
Regrettably the aliens did not properly understand the difference between “survivors”, plural, and “survivor”, singular.
@18 I disagree. There is a big difference between having something happen to you without an external actor making a decision (other than God, fate, or the author) and someone inflicting something on someone else. So while we would all agree that Steve Rogers consented to the super soldier serum, the fantastic four likely knew there were risks to space travel and just were unlucky (or lucky) , and Wolverine’s skeleton and claws were almost certainly done to him because of the mutation he was born with. Daredevil or Spiderman? Just chance, no one was trying to make them into anything.
@32 – The body and psych mods performed on the soldiers in “The Hunted” were voluntary. The volunteers were presumably motivated by patriotism, etc.
What’s “externally mandated” was their government and society’s refusal to even consider reversing those modifications to enable them to be reintegrated into society, until their hand was forced at episode’s end.
In much the same way that the inhabitants of Talos IV had never seen a human before when repairing Vina.
See also “A Planet Named Shayol” (1961) by Cordwainer Smith. Convicted prisoners are sent to a penal colony on Shayol, where native symbiotes, “dromozoans” cause them to mutate grotesquely, randomly growing additional limbs and organs, which are then harvested for transplant purposes.
@@@@@55 I always thought that was a kind of a dopey “twist”. The Talosians were fairly humanoid, and if nothing else would understand bilateral symmetry of the body.
@53: You name characters who mostly pass as unaltered human, except for “The Thing” in “Fantastic Four”. Better examples of characters whose changes are a misfortune are most of the Doom Patrol and some of the original X-Men, and arguably the Incredible Hulk. Perhaps the Human Torch if he isn’t able to be not on fire. And nearly all of these are accidents, not a purposed change without the free consent of the people involved. Well, except for various stories, including Fantastic Four and Ultimate Fantastic Four, where time travel allows the original accident to be either prevented or deliberately caused.
Specifically for the UFF, whose powers are from a dimensional transporter accident, which the UFF then go back in time to prevent, leading to a happy future with widespread superpowers and contact with aliens who then exterminate all humans except for Ben Grimm who goes back in time again to sabotage the dimensional transporter. However, I don’t remember that this Ben Grimm knew about the Fantastic Four or intended to create them, he just wanted to stop the alien contact.
Default User@57: Yes, I always thought that as well, but kept my suspension of disbelief shields on maximum because it’s Star Trek, dammit. I imagine if Roddenberry had had the effects budget, the Talosians would have been some sort of multi-tentacled creatures (much as the Kelvans in ‘By Any Other Name’ were meant to be in their true form) that didn’t appear at all humanoid, which would have been better.
(For that matter, who’s to say that the way the Talosians appear is actually how they really are?)
In _Eva_ by Peter Dickinson, a teenage girl, fatally injured in an accident, has her brain transplanted into a chimpanzee to save her life.
I think Fireflood and Other Stories was mostly Vonda venting about the 1960s-standard medical “ethics” :-O (what happened to wards of the state in Australia until the 70s was horrific, and the USA couldn’t have been much better or worse) … her later novels and short stories are more sane, even with Kristen van de Graaf maintaining the personality of a transforming Barovian hag (blunt, control freak).
jack womack’s Ambient (and its companion volumes) has characters with modifications that run the full range from freely-chosen to externally imposed, with special emphasis on the “how free can a choice be under capitalism and the state” zone inbetween.
and to get more specific, following an earlier comment, rachel pollack zts”l did thoughtful things to the question of choice, imposition, and coercion in her run of Doom Patrol.
@55, @57, @59: Maybe the Talosians had already declined to the point of being quite bad at surgery but good at psychically persuading the patient that the operation was very successful. They even may have given up on reconstructive surgery altogether because you can just project yourself as good looking. But Vina can’t.
…in reply to “NomadUK” and “Default User”, evidently.
…and I am “Robert Carnegie”. Can I go on being, please? Thank you.
…Found it! I had to change my “Nane” in profile from, I think it was, …maybe I don’t want to say. I think I’ll be coy about my age, too. This media is way too social. :-)