Genre search, fantasy/sci-fi, species change

This one's for my husband. He is on a search to find anything in the fantasy or sci-fi/speculative fiction style which features a character who undergoes a species change over the course of the story.

Some specifics:

Short stories are fine, novels are fine. Graphic novels are a maybe.
"Specific universe" books like those set in D&D branded settings or in Star Wars or Star Trek are ok, but not preferred.
Male or female characters are equally fine, and gender changes are ok, but just changing gender doesn't qualify.
Human to cyborg/computer/AI/android or vice versa don't qualify.
Human to animal doesn't qualify - animalish alien/fantastical species DO, but they have to be sentient.
The story doesn't have to involve an alien/fantastical species, but that is ok.
Character doesn't have to be human to begin with, but fairy-tale or folk-tale style stories that have an animal or animal-type spirit changing into a human (or again, vice versa) aren't really what he's going for.

Not a clue where to look for this type of story - any titles, ideas, or suggestions come to mind for anyone?

I have a feeling most of the suggestions will be from the 70s-80s dystopian area, and that's fine.

Many thanks for any help!

There's a sequence of short stories from the 1940s by Clifford D. Simak, collected as City, that uses this idea. In the later stories in the sequence the Earth has become depopulated because virtually everyone has emigrated to Jupiter, where they're transformed into a life form which can survive in the Jovian atmosphere and generally have a much better time they could in their human bodies. As I recall, the stories focus on those left behind.

*Lord of the Changing Winds by Rachel Neumeier
*Mind Storms (2-3 short stories) by Neil Shusterman
*Dawn Cook's First Truth (and rest of quartet).

If he's okay with very short changes, Nina Kiriki Hoffman's The Silent Strength of Stones and The Thread that Binds the Bones

I know some hard sci-fi that could qualify, but I have to remember titles.

Quite a bit of Jack L. Chalker fits here, especially the Dancing Gods series and the various Well World series. Body switching and transformation is about as common in Chalker's work as paranoia in Phillip K. Dick.

I think Animorphism is the word you are looking for http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Animorphism and http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HumanityEnsues

Joanne Bertin The last Dragonlord features human/ Dragon shapeshifters specifically about a human that finds out she is a dragon. Song in the Silence and One good knight both have a dragon falling in love with human so it's very spoilery but they do end up changing - Dragon to human in Song in the Silence, and both ways in One Good Knight (2 pairs of Dragon & humans).

I can think of a lot of stories where animals become human or vice versa but they are mostly fairy tales involving a curse - I don't know if thats what you are looking for Lackey is fond of the trope as one book features a man cursed to be a donkey and in Firebird, the titular firebird is a woman cursed to be a firebird, The Black swan and other books based on swan lake all feature women being swans. There are a lot of shape shifter stories, werewolves and other were creatures http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ShapeShifting.

As for sci-fi there are a lot of genetically modified human stories out there but I can't think of any where they are changing, just ones where they already are changed

This isn't a book, but in the TV series, "Babylon 5", Delenn transforms from Minbari to Human over the course of the series.

James Alan Gardner has several SF books that explore transformations on individual terms. Radiant has a character slowly being taken over by a sentient alien parasite. If your husband enjoys that one, Commitment Hour has a character choosing a gender as part of the species' biological requirement (less on your target plot but still recommended).

Friedman's This Alien Shore features a main character being taken over, not by a different species but by different personalities.

(Do werewolves count as fantastical?) Tanith Lee's Wolfland is one of my favorite Red-Riding Hood stories. Poul Anderson's werewolf in Operation Otherworld was heaps of fun for me. Larry Niven's Flight of the Horse anthology had one story that featured sentient people evolved from wolfs and another story that explored how magic and the absence thereof effect the werewolf.

In The Color of Distance, sentient frog-like aliens find a woman stranded on their planet. They partly transform her, she gets a frog-like skin which allows her not only to survive in this world, but also to communicate by skin patterns. (One day, while deeply immersed in this book, I found myself trying to do the same.) She gets changed back to human at the end of the book, and remains so in the sequel.

Has he read The Passage by Justin Cronin.

Wow. Lots of replies! Thanks so much!

In reverse order:

@9 yolana - No, he hasn't. He doesn't have much free time, so he tends not to read things unless they are recommended to him. Does it have animorphic (thanks for the word, Musereader!) qualities to the main plot, or is it just a side-note sort of thing?

@8 hnau - That's almost exactly what he was describing. I'll have to look that one up for him!

@7 MyriadBooks - Both Radiant and Committment Hour sound pretty close to what he was getting at - I'll have to check them out. I don't know his feelings on werewolves, I'll have to ask!

@6 leewit - He's specifically wanting books, but I'll mention it to him. We have friends who have been trying to get us to watch B-5 for a while now.

@5 Musereader - Those sound really good. He's read a similar set by Elizabeth Kerner; in that one the male changes from dragon to human. He's less interested in the fairy-tale stuff. That's what I had the most luck finding at first, and he wasn't really interested. I don't think he's really a fairy-tale kind of guy. I'll have to check and see how he feels about myths...

@4 DemetriosX - Chalker. I'll check him out. Always nice to have an author who does consistent motifs - makes it very easy to keep reading if/when you find something you like!

@3 infiniteletters - Thank you! I'll check all of those out for him. If you think of any of the hard sf titles as well, I would greatly appreciate those also. I have the hardest time predicting stuff he'll like, so I like to be as well-armed as possible!

@2 PhileasHannay - Do any of the short stories in City focus on the Jupiterians? I don't know if he'd want to get into a series if it's only going to hint at interesting goings on off-screen as it were.

Many thanks to all of you - and please, since this is a genre search, if you haven't replied yet, or you think of something else, please do still let me know.

I'll post back regularly to follow up and to let people know what he thought about them once I've actually found them.

Andre Norton's Moonsinger sequence has its central characters switching bodies, including to/from animals and other humanoid species.
The series starts with Moon of Three Rings. It is written as YA/Juvenile and is fairly easy to read but does contain some interesting ideas.

Haven't read them, but perhaps the "Xenogenesis" series by Octavia Butler? (Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago.)

Um, Darwin's Radio by Greg Bear has something similar. An evolutionary change that manifests originally as a disease changes the mothers and fathers of the next stage in human evolution into something more similar to their coming offspring....

Sorry, I wasn't clear, Song in the Silence is the Kerner book, One good knight is the Lackey book.

I suggest you ask in the science fiction fans group.

Singer from the Sea by Sheri S Tepper features transformation from standard human into a creature adapted to living in the sea.

At the end of Excession by Iain M Banks a member of The Culture is transformed,at his own request, into a member of the boisterous species known as the Affront.

Enchanted Village by AE Van Vogt http://hotmix.narod.ru/eng_online/village.htm
also the ray bradbury book Martian chronicles

There's a short story called Oh to be a Blobel! by Philip K. Dick. It features in Minority Report which I read earlier this year.

The end of The Ship Who Sang by Anne McCaffrey has several people transforming (technologically, and intended to be temporarily) into a very different species - some of them decide to stay behind. There's also a short story by her where Helga (the Ship) goes back and checks on them, but I don't remember its title.

The Dragon and the George series by Gordon R. Dickson starts out with a human transformed to a dragon - the first book is mostly about him dealing with that fact, then it goes off in all directions. Modern human moving worlds to a place where dragons are common and have their own society.

Some old classics:

Protector by Larry Niven, and some of the later books set on the Ringworld as well, deal with the idea that humans are actually the larval form of an alien species, and several human characters transform to the 'adult' stage during the course of the books, drastically changing both psychologically and physically.

Methuselah's Children, by Robert A. Heinlein, has a section where the characters are meeting alien species for the first time, and in both cases, members of the exploration crew become... changed, somehow, by contact with the other species, and the rest of the crew flee in revulsion.

The sci-fi books I was thinking of are A Plague of Change and Cannon's Orb by L. Warren Douglas

Also, Darkchild, Bluesong, and Starsilk collected in Daughters of the Sunstone by Sidney Van Scyoc

There are Sight of Proteus and Proteus Unbound by Charles Sheffield. it's not species change exactly, but people can go into tanks and have their body shape changed.

Manta's Gift by Timothy Zahn

A Miracle of Rare Design by Mike Resnick involves several such transformations, though they're brought surgically rather than by natural processes.

>23 ABVR: reminds also of All My Sins Remembered by Joe Haldeman. There's a similar sort of thing going on there.

Thanks so much for all of these - we're slowly getting them through the library, and he's enjoying looking at them.

He's been busy at work, so he hasn't started any yet, but I'll let you all know what he reads and what he liked!

Yay! I can't wait to learn what he thought of our recs.

Also, if you don't mind sci-fi without a "fantasy" flavor - Eva by Peter Dickinson involves humans and chimps.