Biostasis in Science Fiction
Positive portrayals and inaccuracies in written SF
The idea of indefinite lifespans – and the role of biostasis in getting us there – draws support and opposition throughout our culture. A strong element of culture is fiction – the stories we tell and the stories we hear. Given the still relatively unfamiliar nature of the idea, biostasis has appeared in a surprising number of stories, for good or ill.
People become advocates or opponents of ideas due to three forces: they are convinced by arguments, they are attracted to the emotions stirred, or they see the conveyer of the message as especially credible. This is the classic Aristotelian triangle of logos, pathos, and ethos as I described in an essay on “How to Communicate Life Extension Effectively.”
Fictional stories can shift our perspective, opening us or closing us to particular viewpoints and ideas. The rational approach of logos may play a role here, but narratives work primarily through the emotions (pathos), perhaps reinforced by the fictional credibility (ethos) of a core character in the story.
Stories can have more effect than facts and rational argument due to vividness and engagement. As an advocate, it helps to be aware of the narratives influencing acceptance and resistance to our ideas. Biostasis has appeared in more stories than you may think. There are too many for me to cover them all (although I will list most of them).
To keep this piece reasonably concise, I will limit my survey of stories by focusing primarily on stories that I am especially familiar with and those that are most familiar to large numbers of people. I will also consider some examples that should be better known.
I will focus on written fiction. Top of the list has to be the “The Jameson Satellite” by Neil R. Jones. You can read my dedicated essay for more details on this 1931 story but it’s special place derives from its role in spurring Robert Ettinger to figure out the idea of cryonics. It features one of the more extreme periods of preservation – it is only after 40 million years in suspended animation that Jameson is revived by aliens.
Although it does not involve cryopreservation or any remotely plausible scientific method, one of the earliest stories about skipping through time by means of preservation was Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle, in which a Dutch-American villager in colonial America inadvisably drinks strong liquor given to him by mysterious strangers and falls asleep in the Catskill Mountains, waking 20 years later to a different world following the American Revolution.
Significant early works involving preservation in ice followed by revival include W. Clark Russell's The Frozen Pirate (1887) and Louis Boussenard's Dix mille ans dans un bloc de glace (1889). A common use for the preservation idea (or trope) is to take a protagonist into the future where they must face a radically changed world. A classic example is H.G. Wells’ 1899 novel, The Sleeper Awakes, in which he wakes to a drastically changed London after two hundred and three years. On the upside, compound interest has made him the world’s richest man.
Suspended animation – both planned and accidental – appeared multiple times throughout the 19th century, including: Mary Shelley’s “Rodger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman” (written in 1826, published in 1863), Edgar Allan Poe’s “Some Words with a Mummy” (1845), Lydia Maria Child’s “Hilda Silfverling, A Fantasy” (1845), Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward, 2000-1887” (1888), and Jack London’s “A Thousand Deaths” (1899).
Laurence Manning is credited with the first real pulp SF exploration of future history using suspended animation in his The Man Who Awoke (1933). In addition to being a handy device for suddenly confronting characters with a transformed world, suspended animation also served as a plot device in long journeys to the starts. A famous early story of this type is A.E. Van Vogt’s “Far Centaurus” (1944). You may have heard of the core idea in this story where faster than light travel is invented while the travelers are suspended, enabling travelers departing later to arrive first.
Although many people may not quickly associate Marvel’s superhero Captain America with cryonics, the latter has always been a crucial means of bringing the character from 1945 to the present. In the Marvel mythos, Steve Rogers plunges into an extremely cold environment. His super-soldier serum apparently acts as a cryoprotectant. He is discovered and rescued decades later by the Avengers, enabling his adventures to continue.
Heinlein, Halperin, Cryoburn, and Frankissstein
Four novels involving cryonics deserve to be highlighted. First is Robert A. Heinlein’s A Door Into Summer. Not only is Heinlein one of my favorite SF authors, he is also considered a grandmaster and one of the very most influential authors of the 20th century. I devoured dozens of Heinlein’s novels and short stories, mostly in the 1970s and 1980s, getting to The Door Into Summer relatively late in 1985. Published in 1957, this novel doesn’t use the term “cryonics” – that wasn’t coined until 1965 by Karl Werner – but refers to “cold sleep.” This is essentially suspended animation.
The protagonist, Dan Davis, voluntarily enters cold sleep in the year 1970 to escape personal and professional betrayal. He wakes up 30 years later, in the year 2000, into a more advanced future society. Cold sleep is portrayed as a routine commercial service, somewhat like buying a long-term ticket to the future. It’s regulated and available to the general public. The technology is fully reversible—no brain damage or degradation, and revival is smooth, with no lasting ill effects.
Dan uses the jump to the future to rebuild his fortunes and eventually finds a way to manipulate events in both past and future. Importantly, Heinlein takes the idea seriously, portraying cold sleep as a technological service rather than a fantasy element—one that intersects with law, business, and personal planning. It’s notable for presenting cryosleep not as desperate last hope, but as a forward-looking choice, an act of agency and optimism—an attitude that resonates with many cryonics advocates today.
Jim Halperin’s 1998 novel, The First Immortal, is especially noteworthy. Jim is a long-time Alcor member and cryonics advocate and his novel is both compelling and well written. (I confess that I would rate even higher his novel, The Truth Machine.) The novel begins in late 20th-century America and follows the life and death of Benjamin Smith, a World War I veteran who becomes terminally ill in his old age. At the urging of his grandson Marshall, a physician with a growing interest in cryonics, Benjamin agrees to be cryopreserved upon legal death. Benjamin is frozen in the 1980s, at a time when cryonics is still a fringe concept.
The narrative then jumps forward to a future where science, nanotechnology, and AI have advanced enough to repair the damage from cryopreservation and revive him. The book follows not just Benjamin, but also multiple generations of the Smith family, who each grapple with the idea of death, aging, cryonics, and morality. Some choose cryonics; others reject it, raising tensions between traditional and post-human values. The book includes realistic discussions of how revival might be accomplished—through nanomedicine, memory reconstruction, and tissue repair. Ethics of immortality: It explores social justice, overpopulation, identity, and religion in a world where life extension is increasingly accessible.
Frankissstein, by Jeannette Winterson is a little unusual. Cryonics is portrayed as both a serious scientific endeavor and a philosophical metaphor—deeply entangled with themes of mortality, identity, technology, and humanity’s desire to transcend biological limits. One unusual feature is that it features real organizations and people, including Alcor and your humble author. (Winterson does a surprisingly good job of getting my voice right. I think she may have come on a tour of Alcor when I worked there.) Cryonics plays a key role in the modern storyline of the novel, which runs parallel to a reimagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Winterson walks a tightrope between satirizing the cryonics advocates and transhumanists as egotistical, tech-bro visionaries out of touch with reality or mortality and engaging seriously with the longing that drives cryonics—grief, love, fear of death, and belief in the possibility of revival via science.
In Lois McMaster Bujold’s novel Cryoburn, the cryonics corporations on the planet Kibou-daini wield immense economic and political influence. While the novel does not provide an exact percentage of their control over the economy, it strongly implies that they dominate the financial landscape. The biostasis companies hold vast assets in trust for their cryopreserved clients, many of whom have been in stasis for decades or centuries. These assets continue to grow due to investment, compounding wealth over time.
A large part of Kibou-daini’s economy revolves around the biostasis industry, from the facilities themselves to the supporting legal and medical infrastructures. The political system is heavily influenced by the biostasis corporations, as they maneuver to maintain and expand their control over government policies and economic regulation. The implication is that these corporations hold a majority share of the economy, making them one of the most powerful forces on the planet. [See Steve Bridge’s review in the April 2014 issue of Cryonics.]
Corpsicles
A horrible term. Critics frequently talk of “freezing corpses” to maximize the implausibility of cryopreservation. Unfortunately, several SF writers have adopted the related term “corpsicles”, starting with Frederick Pohl in The Age of the Pussyfoot (1969) where a corpsicle is depicted as “a zombie frozen in Alaska.” (I do not recommend this book.) Pohl used a variation of this term – “corpse-sicle” – earlier in his essay “Immortality Through Freezing,” published in the August 1966 issue of Worlds of Tomorrow.
This ugly term was embedded in science fiction especially by Larry Niven who used the term in his 1971 short story “Rammer,” later expanded into the 1976 novel A World Out of Time. Niven doubled down in “The Defenseless Dead” where cryonics patients have no right and are used as sources of organs. Even worse, in “Wait It Out” (included in the collection Tales of Known Space), the crew of the first manned mission to Pluto, finding themselves stranded, attempt to kill themselves by removing their spacesuits but end up as frozen but conscious people thanks to some handwaving about superconductivity. Ben Bova also uses the “corpsicle” term in his 2001 novel The Precipice, where revived cryonics patients lose all their memories.
Other significant books
2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke – both the novel and movie – deserve a mention because they are so famous and they portray suspended animation as routine and perfected. Clarke also uses suspended animation or cryonics in Childhood's End (1953) and The Songs of Distant Earth (1986).
In Fredrick Pohl’s 1966–1969 novel, The Age of the Pussyfoot, a man is revived from cryopreservation in 2527 after his clinical death in a fire 500 years earlier. This revival is made possible by charitable cryonics arrangements and later technological breakthroughs in nanomedicine and tissue regeneration. Cryonics is respected: In the future society, the cryopreserved are called “Icemen” (short for Immortality Corps), and their revival is taken seriously by medical and social systems. The novel explores what it would be like to reenter society, offering Forrester a new life with income, education, and freedom. The novel also explores Forrester’s feelings of alienation and cultural obsolescence.
I have previously reviewed Alan Harrington’s nonfiction, pro-cryonics book, The Immortalist. Harrington also wrote a peculiar and challenging novel, Paradise 1. A serum has been developed that reversing aging, setting off a frenzied competition for access leading to a collapse of society. Paul Peacock, public relations genius, sends off the first beneficiary of the serum into cryogenic storage. Peacock concocts a scheme to protect society from the effects of sudden biological immortality by keeping most of the population cryopreserved until the serum is more widely available.
Back in 1981 (and then again in 1985 and 2022), I read Clifford D. Simak’s Why Call Them Back From Heaven? (1967). I can’t say that I much liked it although it does have the virtue of showing cryonics working. In the novel, you can be prosecuted for trying to delay’s someone’s cryopreservation, causing “ultimate death,” and the financial estates of the frozen have become a political power-bloc, inviting criminal manipulation. Like Cryoburn, it envisions a future with major financial implications of widespread human cryopreservation.
I cannot fail to mention Planet of the Apes by Pierre Boulle even though it not thought of primarily as a “cryonics story.” Suspended animation plays a crucial role as a scientific enabler of interstellar travel and as a plot device to create time displacement. The protagonist, Ulysse Mérou (renamed Taylor in the 1968 film), travels aboard a spacecraft from Earth in the year 2500, heading to a planet orbiting Betelgeuse, which is light-years away. To survive the journey, the crew enters suspended animation (called hibernation in the novel). This enables the characters to endure long space travel without aging, allowing them to arrive biologically intact despite the passage of many years (and centuries) on Earth.
One of the best SF movies of the 1980s – no, of all time – is surely John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). This was based on John W. Campbell excellent 1938 short story, “Who Goes There.” (I cannot recommend Howard Hawk’s 1951 movie adaptation, The Thing from Another World.) There is no vitrification here nor scientific suspended animation. Straight-freeze cryopreservation combined with an alien physiology lead to the revival of a nightmarish alien after twenty million years.
Another novel that I can strongly recommend in this context is Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Charles Sheffield. This novel combines cryopreservation with the ultimate act of commitment to saving a spouse. Drake Merlin’s wife is dying of a disease without a cure… today. But the future will surely have a cure. Drake has Anna cryopreserved until she can be cured. He will follow her in suspended animation. This is just the beginning of a truly epic journey through time and space.
As a teenager, one of my favorite SF authors was Robert Silverberg. The remarkably prolific Silverberg provided a contrast to more hard-SF writers. In 1981, I read Recalled to Life, published in 1962 – the same year as the initial self-publication of Ettinger’s The Prospect of Immortality. The core plot centers on a scientific breakthrough that allows for the revival of recently deceased individuals, effectively introducing a form of medical revival that parallels modern ideas of cryonics or suspended animation. Though not involving ultra-cold preservation, the process in the novel mirrors cryonics in its core premise: the “dead” can be brought back to life—if they are preserved in good condition and revived soon enough after death. The novel raises profound cryonics-adjacent questions about identity, mortality, ethics, and social disruption.
A Deepness In the Sky by Vernor Vinge: The novel employs a technology called “cold sleep” or “freezer sleep”, which is functionally equivalent to suspended animation or cryopreservation.
Sadly, Vinge himself did not choose to be cryopreserved.
As Brian Stableford puts it in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, “As might be expected, most stories depicting people who try to ‘cheat’ death by having themselves frozen down find suitably ironic ways to thwart them.” On the other hand, the numerous stories showing biostasis working but where it is not the center of focus are helpful.
Some more cryonics/suspended animation stories SF enthusiasts might want to take a look at:
Counting Heads by David Marusek
Heads (July-August 1990 Interzone; 1990) by Greg Bear
Revelation Space by Alastair Reynolds has cryonics as central for some of the characters, and to a lesser degree for the storyline. Also: Absolution Gap. I have read three novels by Reynolds – although I haven’t gotten to these two yet – and can recommend them.
Crux by Ramez Naan.
The Black Corridor (1969) by Michael Moorcock and Hilary Bailey.
The Dream Millennium (1974) by James White – explores hypothetical psychological effects of long-term freezing.
The Worthing Saga (1978-89) by Orson Scott Card.
Between the Strokes of Night (1985) by Charles Sheffield.
“The Long Chance” and Between the Strokes of Night (1985) by Charles Sheffield. An excellent writer whose novel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow I highly recommend (above).
Bug Jack Barron by Norman Spinrad. A peculiar novel that some will enjoy.
Non-US treatments: Notes from the Future (1970) by Nikolai Amosov; Anders Bodelsen, Freezing Down (1971).
Giles Milton’s thriller The Perfect Corpse (2014) is set in a fictional cryonics laboratory and revolves around the resurrection of a perfectly frozen body found in the Greenland ice sheet.
“Restoree” by Anne McCaffery.
Thirteen by Richard K. Morgan, best known as author of Altered Carbon.
“A Kidnapping” by Greg Egan (1995) in Axiomatic.
Ann McCaffrey’s The Planet Pirates series in which one of the main characters ends up in suspended animation at least three times.
Giles Milton's thriller The Perfect Corpse (2014) is set in a fictional cryonics laboratory where a perfectly frozen body from the Greenland ice sheet is revived.
“Solstice” by James Patrick Kelly.
Capitol by Orson Scott Card.
Red Dwarf by Grant Naylor.
James White, The Dream Millennium.
Frozen in Time, by Ali Sparkes (Egmont, 2010 in USA; Oxford University Press, 2009 in UK)
I have not even begun to touch on biostasis in movies and TV shows. Perhaps I will write a future essay to cover that area. For now, see especially the first source in the references below.
Resources
A complete list of films about cryonics:
https://www.moriareviews.com/cryogenics-and-suspended-animation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suspended_animation_in_fiction
https://everything.explained.today/Suspended_animation_in_fiction/
Two pieces by Aschwin de Wolf on preservation and resuscitation in the fiction of H.P. Lovecraft:
That’s an amazing survey of the literature, Max. Truly impressive. Thank you for sharing.