User:Trismegistus Shandy

My stories:

• From Nowhere (2007; stand-alone time travel story; ~6900 words)
• Nat Holcomb series (superheroes, sort of)
  • Unpresentable Heroes (2007; ~15000 words)
  • Nat and the Telepath (2008; ~12200 words)
  • Nat and the Haemophiliacs (2008; ~17700 words)
  • Nat and the Vigilante (2009; ~59000 words)
  • Nat and the Housesitter (2009; ~10600 words)
• Noticing (2009; surreal sf; ~2000 words)
• Quarantine Cove (2010; secondary world science fantasy; ~10700 words)
• Butterflies are the Gentlest (2010; soft-apocalypse sf; 10200 words)
• Rodric and Melisande (2011; medieval fantasy; ~12800 words)

I'm currently serializing a fantasy of manners, Wine Can't be Pressed into Grapes, at Bigcloset; besides transgender transformations, it has a lot of animal transformations as well, mostly but not exclusively in the early chapters. The full novel is already available from Lulu.com. This is a revised version of the novel I serialized on the tg_fiction mailing list as Launuru's Return. I'll post it here at some point.

Recommendations

Here at Shifti, I would particularly recommend JonBuck's Actaeon Reborn and, with the caveat that it's unfinished, Cammy. His Eve's Apple is nominally unfinished, but it seems to me to have pretty good closure in its present state.

In print, I'll recommend the entire œvre of Nina Kiriki Hoffman, but especially her first novel, The Thread that Binds the Bones, and the loosely related The Silent Strength of Stones, with respect to the interests of Shifti readers.

Barry Pain's An Exchange of Souls is one of the earliest body-swap stories, and perhaps the first to involve a technological mcguffin instead of an unexplained mystical swap; it's also the earliest I know of that involves a transgender swap, and is known to have been an influence on H.P. Lovecraft's similarly-themed "The Thing on the Doorstep". All that said, as important and inflluential as it was, it's not my favorite of Barry Pain's books; that would be The One Before, available from Google Books among other places, which features magical personality changes but no physical transformations. The Octave of Claudius sounds interesting, but I've never seen a copy.

There have been a number of stories of interest to us posted at Strange Horizons over the years, of which my favorite is probably Ray Vukcevich's "Magic Makeup".

In "The Children of Main Street" by A.C. Wise, the children of a colony planet start changing sex, much to the consternation of their parents. As with most stories at Clarkesworld, it's available in both text and audio form.

Clarkesworld also published "Whose Face this is I Do Not Know" by Cat Rambo, with an involuntary shapeshifter as the viewpoint character. Text, audio.

Maeryn Lamonte's "You Meant it for Evil" is a good fantasy novel of warfare between Heaven and Hell disarranging the lives of people on Earth; she does interestingly varied things with the way similar transformations differently affect the lives of different characters.

The latest of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill's Leage of Extraordinary Gentlemen graphic novels features Virginia Woolf's transgendered character Orlando. They are a minor character in some of the stories and the major character of one story, which tells their life story.

"Chemical Magic" by Katherine Sparrow features a magician who undergoes strange transformations after an encounter with an alchemist.

"The Freedom" by K M Lawrence is set in a future where unpredictable body-swaps occur every day.

Year’s Best SF 15 edited by David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer (Eos, 2010) has at least three stories in it with transgendered and/or intersexed characters. "Collision" by Gwyneth Jones involves people being transformed, sometimes in intended and sometimes in unpredictable ways, in the process of teleporting across interstellar distances. I found it interesting but confusing; I think it's set in the same world as her novel _White Queen_ and its sequels, and would probably make more sense and be more enjoyable if one has read them. In "Blocked" by Geoff Ryman, one of the main characters turns out to be a post-op transsexual -- this is backstory, not an on-stage transformation. "Another Life" by Charles Oberndorf is set in a future where people can be resurrected in new bodies with memories up to date as of their last backup; mostly this is available only to the wealthy, but soldiers also have this recourse if they're killed in battle. People often change their sex when having new bodies made. There's one major intersexed character and several minor characters who change sex or want to do so but are stymied by constraints. I'd strongly recommend the latter two, and the former, though confusing in itself, makes me want to read Jones' Aleutian Trilogy.

More when I think of them...