History Main / HumanPopsicle

** It's also at least hinted that the DAVE (Dangerous And Very Expensive) FTL drive actually reverses relativity, so that the trips appears to take ''longer'' from the point of view of the travellers, making cold sleep essential.

* In ''ComicBook/ElfQuest'' the the buglike preservers can freeze time for living beings by encasing them in cocoons made out of "wrapstuff," and a bunch of the characters use this method for waiting out ten thousand years when they need to catch up with a group of time travelers.

* ''KyoryuSentaiZyuranger'': The Zyuranger were frozen in their native time to come back in the present.

* LarryNiven

The ability to freeze and later revive some simple organisms--including human embryos--currently exists and has for some time (one motivation of cryonics is that some animals have an innate ability to survive a similar naturally induced state), but there are many technical problems with applying this to a fully grown human[[hottip:*: Namely, not all of your organs "freeze" at the same temperature, some react well to freezing while others react poorly, and unfreezing someone is an iffy proposition at best, usually resulting in significant organ damage]]. And as mentioned above, people cannot legally be cryonically suspended until they are pronounced clinically dead (or aren't legally alive yet, like the aforementioned embryos), which could cause problems if brain damage occurs due to anoxia. For the sake of television, we just assume that whoever does the thawing has the technology to [[HarmlessFreezing overcome this]]. Sometimes this problem is HandWaved by claiming that what's actually going on is some sort of localized time stop (TimeStandsStill, except inside out), although all other aspects of the trope remain the same.

* The ''GuardiansOfTheGalaxy'' character Vance Astro spent 1,000 years in suspended animation for a slower-than-light trip to Alpha Centauri... Only to find Earthmen had invented hyperdrive and beaten him there by several centuries.[[hottip:*: However, they did throw him a welcoming party.]] As a bonus bummer, the long time he spent in the tube has damaged his body so that he needed a full-body life-support suit to survive.

* The ''Revelation Space'' novels by AlastairReynolds are full of {{Human Popsicle}}s, as they deal with a universe in which slower-than-light interstellar travel is common. Notably, they make some attempt to deal realistically with the health dangers of cryogenics, beyond outright failure.

* AlastairReynolds

* This was all part of a XanatosGambit by [[LegionOfTheSuperHeroes Brainiac 5]] to [[FinalCrisis defeat Superboy-Prime]]. After {{Superboy}} died, Brainiac had Star Boy go back to the past, one year after Conner died and take him to the Fortress of Solitude, placing him in a healing chamber, where he would stay for a thousand years. After snagging a piece of the balding LexLuthor's hair, they went to the Fortress in their time and revived Conner just in time to battle Superboy-Prime at full power.

* In ''Webcomic/SchlockMercenary'', the ([[LifeEmbellished real]]) Gav Bleuel put himself into suspended animation in the 21st century, and is later awoken (after being found in a disused storage locker) in the 31st, where he is accidentally [[CloningBlues duplicated]] nearly a billion times and becomes the largest single ethnic group in the galaxy.
* ''Webcomic/{{SSDD}}'' had Norman Gates faking his death and being frozen for some 400 years as part of a centuries long XanatosRoulette involving time travel (not his plan of course). Also used for cheap interplanetary travel, referred to as little more than pressurized freezers that someone without cybernetic upgrades shouldn't be able to survive.

->"''You can freeze/Like a 30 century man/Like a 30 century man''"
-->-- '''ScottWalker''', "30 Century Man"

* Sleeper units in Creator/VernorVinge's ''Literature/ADeepnessInTheSky'' are the only way for slow-zone spacers to survive the decades and centuries between ports. At one point, the young Pham Nguyen avoids using one out of fear and spends a couple of years studying instead.

* Subverted in ''Science Ninja Team Gatchaman'' episode [[http://www.gatchamania.net/thread.php?postid=100959 ''Gatchaman, 20 Years Later'']]. G-1 and the scientist he was protecting ''appear'' to have been frozen for twenty years in arctic ice after a forced landing. [[spoiler:But it's still the present day. It was just Katse's overly-elaborate plot to get the scientist's equations for a new procedure that can either be used to provide a renewable energy source -or cause an extinction-event-level kaboom.]]

* ''Eegah!'' -- Richard Kiel IS Eegah.

* In ''3001: The Final Odyssey,'' the last sequel to Clarke's ''[[Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey 2001]]'', an astronaut who seemed to have been killed by HAL in the original novel is found and revived after floating frozen in space in a damaged suit for a thousand years. This leads to a FishOutOfTemporalWater plot for the first part of the book.

** ... and his early short story ''[[HarmlessFreezing Wait It Out]]'', where the protagonist achieves the same effect by stripping naked on the surface of Pluto.

* Found in the ''Remnants'' series by K.A. Applegate. In an attempt to survive the impending destruction of Earth, people get onto a large spaceship and shoot blindly into space. In order to live as long as it takes to find a habitable planet, they enter a stasis of some sort. However, in a few characters' cases, it doesn't work out as planned. Specifically: Two-thirds of the passengers die outright from CryonicsFailure. One character remains conscious while frozen, thus being paralyzed and deprived of sensory input for five hundred years, which causes temporary catatonia and permanent brain-rearrangement upon revival. Another character, who was pregnant, gestates extremely slowly and gives birth, while still in stasis, to a terrifying mutant baby with no eyes and a PsychicLink to its mother, among other things. It, too, grows extremely slowly while in stasis, ending up around two-ish physically when everyone gets unfrozen.

* HarryTurtledove's ''Worldwar'' series has the Race (and, once they master space flight) humans using cold sleep to travel between their respective homeworlds due to the distances involved. For humans, the process hasn't been perfected, and in the final book their ambassador (Henry Kissinger) dies sometime during the trip and this is only learned when they try and fail to revive him. [[spoiler:Of course, it becomes a moot point when humans develop FTL travel near the end of the novel.]]

* In Jack Campbell's ''Lost Fleet'' series, protagonist John Geary's ship is sneak-attacked by Syndicate Worlds warships and destroyed after a desperate battle. His hibernation escape pod's beacon is damaged, leaving him stranded among the ship's debris for over a century. When he's finally picked up, he discovers that the war started by the sneak attack has run continuously ever since. Worse yet, his heroic last stand has become the stuff of legends, and "Black Jack" Geary is now something of a semi-mythical folk hero. Worst of all, the terrible casualty rate has killed off skilled fleet officers faster than they could train the next generation, and as a result the tactics of the day mainly consist of charging wildly at the enemy and relying on HeroicSpirit. Enter John Geary, a fairly average fleet officer from 100 years ago, which makes him effectively a tactical genius now...

* Used in '''Dragonsdawn'', with necessary crew rotating in five-year shifts.

* In ''Secret Files: Tunguska'', the bad guys tried to get rid of Nina by this way. [[KarmicDeath Then they receive it themselves]].

* In the first ''Rooster Teeth'' Short, Burnie and Geoff attempt to send Shannon to the future via this method. [[spoiler:In the last episode, Shannon returned and convinced them, as well as Matt and Joel, to travel to the future via the same method to help save the human race by adding to the gene pool. Although it actually turns out Shannon's planning to send them to Antarctica instead for revenge.]]

* In ''Robotix,'' the inhabitants of the planet Skalorr froze themselves underground to survive a catastrophe. Afterward, their central computer determined the world had been rendered uninhabitable. Rather than leave them all frozen forever, it [[BrainUploading transferred the minds of a few of them into the titular giant robots.]] They weren't expecting this, and were not pleased when the woke up in their new bodies.

This is not to be [[IThoughtItMeant confused]] with [[Film/TheWarriors Ajax's]] [[ImpaledWithExtremePrejudice plans]] for you with a bat. Or [[TheFifthElement meat popsicles]]. Often overlaps with Really700YearsOld, but the people from this trope rarely experience the time in-between freezing and thawing.

* Another wrestling example is Wrestling Society X's Matt Classic, a wrestler who was supposedly in a coma (without aging!) for 40 years and uses old-fashioned, 1960s style moves such as the airplane spin, judo chop, and full body slam.

* ''VideoGame/{{Bug}}!'' has the [[AbominableSnowman Abominable Snowbug]] boss, first seen trapped in a large block of ice (presumably frozen during the ice age). He breaks out as soon as Bug walks a few steps.

* ''The Morrow Project''. The members of the title organization had their temperatures lowered to the freezing point and put in "freeze tubes" so they'd survive an expected nuclear war. The personnel of their main base were killed shortly after the war and the frozen team members remained in that state for 150 years until a malfunctioning computer finally sent the revival code.

This is not to be [[IThoughtItMeant confused]] with [[Film/TheWarriors Ajax's]] [[ImpaledWithExtremePrejudice plans]] for you with a bat. Often overlaps with Really700YearsOld, but the people from this trope rarely experience the time in-between freezing and thawing.

* ''AlienLegacy'' starts with the seedship UNS ''Calypso'' arriving to the Beta Caeli system after traveling for many thousands of years (according to some calculations). The crew has been on ice this whole time. You start with only a small portion of the colonists with the remaining ones still frozen due to lack of livable space and resources. As you build up your planetside colonies and ship colonists from the ''Calypso'', more are awoken. A random even may happen that will kill the still-frozen colonists due to a malfunction if you're too slow in waking them up. Imagine the colonists' surprise when they found out that another seedship (launched 16 years later) beat them to the punch by 21 years thanks to advances in fusion.

* ''SoWeird'': "James Garr": the titular character had been frozen years earlier, and was revived. This story touched on the possibility that such preservation might not preserve the human soul.

* Queen's filk-song "'39" is about a group of colonists who set out on a spaceship to find a new Earth-type world, and return after a year of ship time [[spoiler: to find that a hundred years have passed on Earth]].

* Twice in the music video for Harmony by Erasure.

The poor man's TimeTravel -- unfortunately, it's [[TheSlowPath one-way]].

* Found in the ''Remnants'' series by K.A. Applegate. In an attempt to survive the impending destruction of Earth, people get onto a large spaceship and shoot blindly into space. In order to live as long as it takes to find a habitable planet, they enter a stasis of some sort. However, in a few characters' cases, it doesn't work out as planned. Specifically: Two-thirds of the passengers die outright from CryonicsFailure. One character remains conscious while frozen, thus being paralyzed and deprived of sensory input for five hundred years, which causes temporary catatonia and permanent brain-rearrangement upon revival. Another character, who was pregnant, gestates extremely slowly and gives birth, while still in stasis, to a NightmareFuel mutant baby with no eyes and a PsychicLink to its mother, among other things. It, too, grows extremely slowly while in stasis, ending up around two-ish physically when everyone gets unfrozen.