History Main / SleeperStarship

* ''Series/TheTwilightZone'' episode "The Long Morrow". An astronaut will be in frozen suspended animation during his forty year trip to a distant star and return.

* In Creator/WilliamShatner's Literature/StarTrekExpandedUniverse novels, this is how Emperor Tiberius I (Kirk's EvilCounterpart in the MirrorUniverse) survives to the post-TNG era, while Kirk is stuck in the Nexus. After leading the Cardassian-Klingon Alliance against his former Terran Empire, he realizes he has [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness outlived his usefulness]] and flees before the Cardassians and the Klingons can dispose of him on a ship with cryopods. Naturally, he only planned to "sleep" for a year before trying to retake his "rightful" place as Emperor, but the wake-up system failed, and the ship was adrift until about a year before the novels take place, when a Mirror!Klingon ship finds him. The Klingons immediately recognize him and plan for him to stand trial and be executed, but Tiberius manages to seduce a female Klingon and (after killing her), escape and enact his plan into motion.

* In ''Webcomic/{{Freefall}}'', cold sleep is necessary for both STL and FTL travel. Largely because the D.A.V.E. drive works by altering time flow so that decades pass on board while weeks pass planetside.

* In ‘’TabletopGame/EclipsePhase’’ Hibernoids were genetically engineered to crew interplanetary ships with the ability to sleep for up to 40 days at a time without food or water. While Titan’s [[spoiler: and Firewall’s]] interstellar colonization projects (without the Pandora Gates) tend to focus on upload ships.

** A simple design adjustment would avoid this: simply make all 4 pods have identical sizes instead of having 3 human-sized ones and one for a monkey (and yes, the monkey ends up stealing the main character's pod both times).

** The ''[[http://livadny.ru/wp-content/themes/livadniy/timthumb.php?src=/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/alfa_bg4.jpg&zc=1&w=710 Alpha]]'', the first extrasolar colony ship (also the largest ship ever built due to the fact that [[SubspaceOrHyperspace hypersphere]] hasn't been discovered yet) was designed to have half its crew in stasis with both shifts alternating every six months. Besides the crew, there were 500,000 colonists in stasis.

See also ResurrectionTeleportation.

* ''Literature/TheWorthingtonSaga'' uses a variant in which people lose all of their memories while in stasis, so their brains need to be scanned in advance, so their personalities can be re-uploaded when they wake. This leads to a situation on which, due to a collision, 111 colonists are technically alive, but only two of them have surviving memories. The remaining colonists are essentially newborns in adult bodies when they wake up, and have to relearn everything in order to function.

* Peter Hamilton's ''Literature/TheNightsDawnTrilogy'' has Zero-Tau pods which are used to keep people in stasis, notably in colony ships. Since thousands of people are transported in each ship, the resources to feed and house the colonists for the voyage (even though it is rather short) would be beyond the ship's capacity. They are put in Zero-Tau pods, along with everything they take with them, namely embryos of farm animals and crop seeds. As added horrors: [[spoiler: the Returned do not go to sleep in a Zero-Tau pod and essentially become conscious prisoners in the frozen body. Few of them can last for very long before they flee back into their dimension, driven half insane by the experience. Zero-Tau pods become the tradition exorcism measure.]]

[[Franchise/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is]]. So big, in fact, that if FasterThanLightTravel (or [[TimeDilation close-to-lightspeedtravel]] ) is impossible it would take multiple human lifetimes to reach another star, and one way around this is you [[HumanPopsicle hibernate]] for most of the trip there. This is the Sleeper Starship.

[[Franchise/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is]]. So big, in fact, that if FasterThanLightTravel (or close-to-lightspeed travel) is impossible it would take multiple human lifetimes to reach another star, and one way around this is you [[HumanPopsicle hibernate]] for most of the trip there. This is the Sleeper Starship.

[[Franchise/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy Space is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is]]. So big, in fact, that if FasterThanLightTravel is impossible it would take multiple human lifetimes to reach another star, and one way around this is you [[HumanPopsicle hibernate]] for most of the trip there. This is the Sleeper Starship.

* ''VideoGame/MassEffectAndromeda'' stars the crew of one, arriving in the Andromeda galaxy after a generations-long trip. The original trilogy never needed this, as mass relays allow rapid intragalactic transportation but don't exist outside the Milky Way. In fact, the player arrives on one of four such ships, one from each major Citadel Council race: asari, salarian, turian, human, with an occasional minor race representative thrown in (there's a krogan crew member). The ships were sent out shortly after ''Mass Effect 2'' (i.e. prior to the [[spoiler:Reaper invasion]]) and have traveled for 600 years. Upon arriving, the crew finds that their ship has been thrown off-course and must now try to locate the other three ships and the Nexus, a Citadel-like hub station sent ahead of the ships. The ending of the original trilogy remains deliberately unknown, separated from the new setting in both time (600 years) and space (over 2 million light-years).

* The ''Series/RedDwarf'' became an unintentional one when Lister was sentenced to spend the remainder of the intra-stellar voyage in stasis and ended up in there for three million years as Holly wandered into deep space waiting for the radiation leak to die down. Later the stasis booths on the Star Bug are used for two centuries at a time while chasing down the stolen Dwarf.

* Despite having warp drive the four colony ships that brought the original Terran colonists to the Koprulu sector in ''VideoGame/StarCraft'' used cryo. Just as well since a computer error led to them being in warp for thirty years. The UED Expeditionary force in "Brood War" did as well despite making the trip in a year or less.

''Literature/TheWorthingtonSaga'' uses a variant in which people lose all of their memories while in stasis, so their brains need to be scanned in advance, so their personalities can be re-uploaded when they wake. This leads to a situation on which, due to a collision, 111 colonists are technically alive, but only two of them have surviving memories. The remaining colonists are essentially newborns in adult bodies when they wake up, and have to relearn everything in order to function.

Often overlaps with ColonyShip. Sleeper starships seem even more prone to CryonicsFailure than normal cryonics. If they do arrive safely, they may find that they've fallen victim to the [[LivingRelic problem]] of LightspeedLeapfrog.

** The ships of the Chanel Guard Chapter of [[SuperSoldier Adeptus Astartes]] from ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'' contain vast stasis crypts where the battle-brothers of the Chapter [[HumanPopsicle sleep in suspended animation]] between campaigns.