A Miracle of Rare Design

Mike Resnick's novella doesn't really have a plot; it is more an illustration of two ideas, one bad, one good.

The main character, William Xavier Lennox, is a sensationalist writer who spends his time visiting alien cultures and ferreting out their secrets, usually at great personal risk. In the course of one of these adventures he has a severe mishap and is mutilated.

His fame and peculiar personality draw Nora Roberts to him, and she offers him a deal: he can be surgically altered to truly become a member of another species so that he can observe them without as much risk. After some thought, he jumps at the chance.

The first idea is that technologically gaining superior physical function is good, but this seems an aside, not really the intent of the author. The author's idea is that being human, with limited senses and physical capabilities, is not very satisfactory at all.

Better to have the night vision and reflexes of a Firefly, the enormous strength and empathic sensing of a Hawkhorn, the decorative web-building ability of a Wheeler, and the wings and voice of a Singer than to be stuck in the kludgy unformed body of a human.

My response to this? Foolishness. There is nothing that any of those races can do that humans can't do by using their minds. The other races are limited to what their existing sensory equipment has provided them automatically: none have moved much beyond the stage of perceptual thinking.

It is only a desire for automatic functioning that could lead someone to prefer the state of a well-adapted animal to a thinking human being. Sensory input and acute reflexes are a wonderful thing, but without rigorous analysis they are meaningless.