We’ve had tales of shifters for a long, long time – many cultures have werewolf myths, and they’ve been in the popular culture for centuries.
In recent years, shifters have branched out beyond the “traditional” wolves, and we now have werecats, weresquirrels, werebears, and even (shudder) were cuttlefish.
But has this genre become played out? Have we said everything there is to say about shifters? Or is there some new angle out there that we’ve yet to explore?
As a long time “hard” SF reader I object to some of the ignoring of the basic laws of physics by almost all shifter stories. A squirrel or cuttlefish shifter? Where does he change in mass come from or go to just as a for instance? As I recall Poul Anderson was one of the few to write a shifter story that required the mass to remain the same in both forms. A male wolf shifter was a BIG wolf and a tiger shifter had to be a very heavy man. A shift to a form incompatible in size and weight was impossible so no elephant, eagle or squirrel shifters allowed.