David W. Jones is a consummate creator. He began his writing journey with poetry in high school. Now focusing on fiction, his stories have appeared in Dark Paradise: Mysteries in the Land of Aloha, Kissing Frogs and Other Quirky Fairy Tales, and most recently, Lost in the Stacks. Formerly a professional musician and radio DJ, he occasionally blogs at dancingtreefrog.com.
Dan Simmon’s Hyperion Cantos series
A tetralogy set in a galaxy-spanning culture of humans, androids and artificial intelligences. The Core (AIs) gave them dimensional gates allowing instantaneous crossing from place to place, making the culture possible.
Conflicts within the Core and with humans lead the Core to decide to exterminate humanity. But the human leader of the culture figures out where the Core resides and destroys the gates. This breaks both the Core, and the human culture, too.
Like I said, total transformation.
M. A. Foster's The Morphodite Trilogy
A planet-bound culture dedicated to changelessness has developed an assassin that can change sex and age. They also primed the assassin to develop a “science” to identify and kill the one hidden individual upon which the culture’s stability rests (unknown to both the culture and the individual).
When the culture releases the assassin, they think the 'hidden individual' science is bogus.
But the assassin's science is real. He kills the hidden individual and the culture begins to disintegrate, changing rapidly - along with that of the off-planet organization that has been secretly studying the culture and intervening to keep it from changing.
Stephen Baxter’s Manifold: Time
Surviving human minds at the end of our universe, immortal but trapped in endless loops of the same thoughts, realize that they had missed to the true purpose of our universe: to produce and spread intelligence beyond this one universe.
The minds cause the birth and appearance of strange super-genius children in the past. The children establish a base on the moon, fend off suspicious humans and pursue their mysterious research.
The children’s purpose is to trigger the collapse of our universe to the true quantum vacuum state, where the energy in the fabric of space-time is zero. The collapsing area expands at the speed of light, destroying or transforming everything. (Is it destroying or transforming? The question can’t be answered.) As it expands, it spins off uncountable numbers of new universes, all of them seeded from our universe and (hopefully) inheriting its ability to produce intelligent life.
In this case, complete transformation of everything.
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