http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/frozen_man.jpg

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

-->''"I am a meat popsicle."''\\
-- Korben Dallas (Bruce Willis), ''TheFifthElement''

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

Cryonics, as AppliedPhlebotinum, is a mechanism by which a person can be frozen, halting the aging process and giving them a non-stop ticket on the SuspendedAnimation Express to the future. Once they ''get'' to the future, they can be thawed out and reanimated.

The result is that we get a FishOutOfWater setup wherein a human -- usually the audience's approximate contemporary -- is thrust into TheFuture and has to deal.

It also works with the past, as just about every cartoon and even some serious shows have played with the idea of turning a caveman or a viking loose in modern society.

The PopsicleSplat, where something goes horribly wrong that kills some or all sleepers, is a potential danger.

'''The HumanPopsicle usually takes one of three forms:'''
* Some mysterious phenomenon unexpectedly freezes our hero until he is found centuries later. Sometimes it's the fault of GreenRocks or overt magic, other times it's just because they got frozen inside a block of normal ice.
* Our hero uses a "sleeper ship" -- a (typically) slower-than-light spacecraft which puts the occupants "on ice" to allow them to survive the travel times between stars. The ship gets knocked off course, or encounters a NegativeSpaceWedgie, and isn't found again until far into the future. Alternatively, in the hundreds of years the trip takes, humans manage to invent [[{{FTL}} faster-than-light travel,]] and colonize the destination world long before the sleeper ship arrives. Bonus points if they flat out forget about the sleeper ship. Cue the proud colonists coming out of cryosleep only to find themselves snarled in space traffic. This is a use of cryonics that real scientists are actually interested in, but wouldn't dare take a stab at until all the kinks are worked out.
**A variation on the sleeper ship, in more realistic SpeculativeFiction settings, is to put the hibernators on a spaceship and accelerate it to close to light-speed, letting Einsteinian physics slow down their personal timeframe with respect to the rest of us. The ship can thus reach faraway planets within ''the crew's'' lifetime, though the crew will still experience it as a one-way trip to the future. This and the above are often used to FlingALightIntoTheFuture.
* Our hero is frozen at or about the moment of death, in the hope that future generations will discover a cure for whatever killed them. Real companies exist today which offer this service, despite the fact that, currently, the whole "thawing you out and bringing you back to life" is an unsolved problem.

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. Also, for legal reasons, people cannot currently be cryonically suspended until they are pronounced clinically dead, 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.

If you happen upon someone else who has been frozen, read all the manuals before thawing them out: nine times out of ten, [[SealedEvilInACan they will turn out to be psychopathic murderers]] (just ask the crew of ''RedDwarf'').

There is an even cheaper version where, rather than actual freezing, the subject is placed in a state of [[ConvenientComa induced hibernation]]-- this will often slow but not stop the aging process, but whether or not this is relevant is up to the author.
----
!!Examples

[[foldercontrol]]

[[folder: Anime and Manga ]]

* ''CowboyBebop'': Having been frozen fifty years or so ago is part of [[spoiler:Faye's]] BackStory.
* Aeka and Sasami from ''TenchiMuyo'' put themselves in suspended animation in the OVA universe while searching for Yosho, despite [[ReallySevenHundredYearsOld not needing to worry about dying of old age on the trip]].
** According to Word of God, Aeka did it because she's a bit beauty-obsessed. Sasami...Did it because the trip is boring. (Did it confirm Sasami just woke up? I was unsure if she wasn't busy playing cards with the computer.)
* Yagyu Freesia in ''{{Jubei-chan}}'' fell into a glacier during a fight in Russia. Centuries later, Global Warming frees her. It's implied that she has an elemental affinity to ice, which explains how she survived.
* The end of ''MermaidMelodyPichiPichiPitch'' reveals that [[spoiler:Michel is not only a FakeBoss, but a [[ReplacementGoldfish replica]] of the real Michel, who had been frozen with Fuku, the [[TheManBehindTheMan real]] villain behind it all -- yes, even behind the Great One.]]
* In ''{{Trigun}}'', flashback sequences show a fleet of ships that left Earth looking for a new planet with a healthy sample of the human population frozen on board. These people eventually reproduce to colonize the entire old-west-style setting of the series.
* "Iceman" in ''{{Utawarerumono}}''. Frozen by a god, so don't try this at home.
* In ''SaintSeiya'', Aquarius Camus defeat his pupil (or student's pupil, in the anime) Cygnus Hyoga and literally creates an ice coffin for him so he can preserve the body for years, until Hyoga is ready to fight again. It takes a Golden Cloth's weapons and Shun almost dying to de-frost him and bring him back to the Sanctuary arc.
** And before that, [[spoiler: said pupil of Camus, the Crystal Saint, was buried in an ice tomb by Hyoga himself after their fight, which ended up with Crystal's TearJerker of a death scene.]] Also, Hyoga's HotMom Natasha has been "sorta" buried in a similar environment aka a sunk ship under heavy ice layers and incredibly cold water placed in Siberia.
* Visual Novel ''{{Ever 17}}'' does this, involving an extremely elaborate plan to give the game a happy ending. [[spoiler:The main character ends up waking up from Cryogenic storage to find he has two teenaged children almost as old as him, the result of a brief fling he had just before he got frozen. He takes this surprisingly well considering (They are very cute kids) He's also in denial.]]
* [[spoiler: Satella and Fiore]] in the ''ChronoCrusade'' manga both wake up over seventy years after the events of the series after [[spoiler: Satella freezes them both during their battle]]. Many years later, Azumaria's grandson is helping [[spoiler: Satella]] adjust to it all while [[spoiler: Fiore]] [[HoYay rode off with Shader into the sunset on a motorcycle]].
* In ''GGundam'', a MadScientist who's about to be executed for treason is actually put into this state to have his HotBlooded younger son and said son's HotScientist partner capture the Devil Gundam that he created. [[spoiler: In reality, it's all a lie. The scientist ''never'' was a madman, but was framed by the son's boss ''and'' was frozen both to keep him from spilling the beans and use the old man to force his kid to work for the government.]]
* Used in the 2001 version of ''{{Cyborg 009}}'' on the first four cyborgs, in order to keep Albert Heinrich/004's attempt to cross the BerlinWall intact. While logically all four of them should have suffered considerable culture shock, [[GermanicDepressives Albert]] gets the most specific and frequent comments on how much has changed in forty years.
*Implied in The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya episode "The Bamboo Leaf Rhapsody".
*Yuji Kaido from ''{{Blue Gender}}'' was frozen due to his having an incurable virus, with promises to be unfrozen when a cure was found. Yes, he gets unfrozen, but ends up in a none too bright future...
* [[spoiler: Beruche]] from the SailorMoon anime tries to commit suicide by encasing herself in ice after losing to Sailor Mercury. [[spoiler: Her {{Heel Face Turn}}ed sister Cooan talks her out of it, though]]
* In ''KatekyoHitmanReborn'' the EvilPrince Xanxus spends eight years as a HumanPopsicle after trying to murder his foster father, who used a secret technique to freeze him. He is eventually thawed out, however he has not aged at all and is left with terrible burn scars.
* In ''KingOfThorn'', 160 people infected with a deadly virus are put into suspended animation until a cure can be found. But when they wake up an unknown amount of time later, the facility has been overgrown by thorny vines and overrun with monsters... and there's no sign a cure was ever discovered.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Comic Books ]]

* Comic book example: CaptainAmerica fell into the Arctic Ocean at the end of WWII and was miraculously preserved until the present day (originally, the early 1960s). His lack of death was attributed to the Super-Soldier Serum that gave him his powers.
* The science fiction comic ''{{Transmetropolitan}}'' did a DoubleSubversion of this trope in one issue: a 20th-century woman had her head frozen to escape a disease, but the container thawed once the company she used went under. Later, in the future, {{Nanomachines}} were used to reconstruct her, memories and all, from the remains left in the canister. In another issue, the protagonist discovers that his last ex-wife has had her head frozen with orders not to revive her until he's confirmed dead.
** ''{{Transmetropolitan}}'' deconstructs the trope most of the time, though. Although they have the resources to defrost and restore anyone frozen, the sad fact is no one has any need of people from the past, and they are mentally unequipped to deal with future life, which means that they become yet another underprivileged minority who spend most of their time staring in horror at everything.
* The PhantomZone in ''Comicbook/{{Superman}}'' comics prevents aging for those inside. One character, Mon-El, was put in there in the PresentDay after he got lead poisoning, and survived until the 30th century, when a cure could be found.
* In ''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.
* The ''Guardians of the Galaxy'' 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. 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.
* In ''Series/GoldDigger'', the character of Ancient Gina has used stasis and similar methods to survive since before the current universe started! She looks pretty good for her age.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Film ]]

* Space travel in the ''[[ChroniclesOfRiddick Riddick]]'' setting requires suspended animation, seemingly induced by replacing the blood with blue slime.
** Well, [[ForScience science!]] states that one of the big problems with cryogenic freezing is ice crystals forming in the blood and tearing stuff up. Some sort of natural anti-freeze or, well, blood replacement, is going to be necessary.
* ''[=~2001: A Space Odyssey~=]'', the ''Movies/{{Alien}}'' [[strike:quadrilogy]] tetralogy -- suspended animation for space travel (in both cases, the trip is one of months, not centuries, but suspended animation is used to avoid the problem of having to pack several months' worth of food)
* ''StarWars'', ''DemolitionMan'' -- suspended animation as a method of incarceration
* ''EncinoMan'' -- accidental suspended animation
* Played straight in ''{{Iceman}}''
* ''AustinPowers: International Man of Mystery'' -- suspended animation as TimeTravel.
** But look what it did to Mr. Bigglesworth!
* ''{{Alien}}'' and ''{{Aliens}}'' both use suspended animation; Ripley enters "hypersleep" for the trip home, and both she and the SpaceMarines return to the planet in ''Aliens'' via hypersleep; Ripley and Newt then go back into hypersleep for the trip home.
* In the film version of ''MinorityReport'', it appears that potential murderers are kept in some form of suspended animation, although this is never made explicit.
* ''ForeverYoung'' -- the protagonist volunteers for a suspended animation experiment that's supposed to last a year, but is forgotten about until 53 years later. Upon revival he is still young, but ages rapidly to his "real" age by the end of the film. (And that's supposed to be a happy ending?)
* ''JasonX'' - Having failed to execute Jason Voorhees, near-future humans simply freeze him, leaving the problem for far-future humans to solve.
* ''{{Idiocracy}}'' - military suspended animation experiment, supposed to only last a year, takes two totally average people 500 years into the future, where they find they're anything but average....
* The Disney version of ''[[DisneyAnimatedCanon Sleeping Beauty]]'' did a variation on this - the three good fairies put everyone in the kingdom to sleep while trying to free Sleeping Beauty, and Maleficent presented a vision of a washed-up old Prince finally going in to save her decades later.
** It wasn't as long as decades later in the Disney version--the prince that wakes her is first seen as a little boy standing over newborn Sleeping Beauty's cradle.
* ''GenesisII'' (1973), in which a NASA scientist taking part in an suspended animation experiment ends up sleeping a lot longer than he expected.
* SherlockHolmes in ''The Return of Sherlock Holmes'' (1987) and ''Sherlock Holmes Returns'' (1993).
* The four astronauts in ''PlanetOfTheApes'' (1968).
* WoodyAllen's character Miles Monroe in ''{{Sleeper}}''. He gets frozen in the 20th century, and thawed 200 years later - wrapped in tin foil for freshness.
* [[RockyHorrorPictureShow Eddie!]]
* [[TransformersFilmSeries Project Iceman]].
* IceAge and the sequel several times: once with the creatures (dinosaur, sloth-creatures, flying saucer) in the wall of the cave, and the other with [[spoiler:Scrat]] right at the end. In the second film, two carnivorous water-dwelling creatures are unthawed from the melting ice.
* This becomes an important plot convenience in the strange French movie ''{{Immortel}}''; Horus (from ancient Egyptian mythology) is condemned to death by his peers, but is given seven days of parole on Earth before the sentence, and seeks to sire an heir with one of the few women capable of procreating with gods, who happens to have just arrived to New York. In order to do that, he needs to [[DemonicPossession possess]] someone, but learns too late that in the future, [[GeneticEngineeringIsTheNewNuke gene splicing is all the rage]], and most of the humans he's able to find are too "altered" to properly hold his essence (read: they ''spontaneously combust''). The plot convenience comes in when he finds a cryogenically-frozen convict that was accidentally unthawed before his sentence was up; since the HumanPopsicle was put into cold storage before genetic engineering became a fad, his body is unaltered and. thus, the perfect host for the god.
** That has to be the worst pick-up line in the history of civilization.
* In the French comedy ''{{Hibernatus}}'', starring Louis de Funès, a major character is frozen in ice and glycine ([[HandWave allowing him not to die]]) when on a scientific mission in Antartica in the early twenties. He is discovered in present time (TheEighties). A small town is changed back to what it was in the twenties in order to preserve him from the shock of discovering his hibernation... HilarityEnsues.
* ''{{Outland}}''. It takes a year to travel from the mining colony on Io (a moon of Jupiter) back to Earth, so the travellers are put into cold sleep. At the end of the movie the hero tells his wife that he's looking forward to sleeping with her for an entire year.
* This is how the creatures from ''TheThing'' were found by human explorers, both in the films and the original short story. One character in John Carpenter's version speculates that, facing defeat, the Thing might simply return to the ice and await the next group of suckers to uncover it.
* In A.I., The Swintons' son Martin has been placed in suspended animation until a cure can be found for his rare disease.
* ''Eegah!'' - Richard Kiel IS Eegah.
* In ''MonstersVsAliens'', the Missing Link is a half-ape half-fish that was found frozen and was thawed out by scientists and went on a rampage when he was unfrozen.
* In EventHorizon, the crew of the rescue ships are kept in pods during the trip. Par for the course for this CrapsackWorld: it isn't a pleasant experience.
* In ''Vanilla Sky'' the main character is horribly disfigured in a car crash. After that, things get weird. [[spoiler: It turns out that after the accident he committed suidice and had himself frozen until they had the technology to revive him and fix his face. While he was "sleeping", he was supposed to be in a state of lucid dreaming where his life was perfect. But his subconcious felt guilty so instead he was living in his own personal hell]].
-->"Tech Support!"
* ''Moon'' (2009). A hibernation chamber is used by the solitary moonbase operator for the three day trip back to Earth. [[spoiler:It turns out to be an incineration chamber, as each operator is a clone who gets destroyed after CloneDegeneration sets in, and replaced by another clone with FakeMemories.]]

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Literature ]]

* In Arthur C. Clarke's ''RendezvousWithRama'', the titular vessel is assumed by some characters to be a sleeper ship, though later novels reveal it to be something entirely different.
** In ''3001: The Final Odyssey,'' the last sequel to Clarke's ''[[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.
* ''TheDoorIntoSummer'' by Robert A. Heinlein starts out being based around this trope. [[spoiler:Until the protagonist sees a bunch of things in the future he woke up in that can only be explained by his eventually gaining access to conventional TimeTravel.]]
* The short story ''Doing Lennon'' by Gregory Benford features a man who has himself cryogenically frozen in order to impersonate John Lennon in the future.
* In ''{{Fiasko}}'', the 1986 hard ScienceFiction novel by Polish science-fiction writer and philosopher StanislawLem, the novel opens with a young mecha pilot on the Saturn moon Titan who is part of a group of groundwalker pilots who suffer a disastrous accident. Stuck in their damaged giant robotical suits without hope for help arriving in time, the pilots choose to activate the emergency Vitrification procedure instead of waiting to die from lack of oxygen or being crushed alive by ice, in the hope that they'll be found eventually and revived later. At the time of their death, there is no medical procedure to reverse the side-effects of Vitrification. The automated procedure means they must open their space suits to make sure no body heat is retained unevenly, then preserving fluid is injected into their skulls while the cockpit opens and their bodies are instantly shock-frozen. - Many decades later, re-opened mining operations on Titan find the remains of the walkers and their pilots. Medicine has progressed sufficiently for doctors to repair most cellular damage done by shock-freezing of tissue, but the three recovered corpses are so damaged and crushed that the doctors are forced to use all three bodies and cloned tissue to reconstruct one person from three, as only one brain could be revived at all. The resulting survivor has no memories of who he is, and all available identification records from the past are sketchy at best.
* The science-fiction novel ''TheCenturionsEmpire'' is unusual in that the narration starts in Roman times and later progresses through several centuries into the high-tech future of the late 21st century. A Roman soldier dies in winter in the Alps and is frozen inside a glacier and preserved. In the course of the novel, he wakes up several times and goes into "sleep" again. It is revealed that there's a whole centuries-old secret society who has found the secret of "immortality" by inventing a low-tech cryogenic suspension, using only natural ice and drugs. At least one character in the novel does not survive, because he selected a part of a glacier that was still flowing, and his sleeping body was crushed by the moving ice masses.
* Nancy Etchemendy's collection of short stories, titled ''Cat in Glass'', includes ''Shore Leave Blacks'' (?), the tale of a woman who left her family to join a crew that makes long space voyages to and from Earth. The resulting time dilation leaves her [[CompetenceZone completely out of synch with the culture on Earth]] -- a woman physically and mentally in her thirties who culturally is in her nineties. As she gets laughed at and stared at and even shunned for not knowing basic technologies, you get a good idea of why these spacefarers don't like shore leave. But she's steeled herself to get through the pain in order to attend a family reunion and possibly meet her son, who is likely in his seventies. Or possibly dead. And even if he's alive, he's not likely to appreciate the factors that led her to abandon him and head for the stars. She finally makes it to her old hometown, in the middle of nowhere, only to discover that [[spoiler:her son is still relative to her in age, having joined a similar space program as soon as he was old enough -- and so he ''completely'' understands what she's been going through.]]
* LarryNiven:
** Short stories and novels involving "corpsicles", his name for {{Human Popsicle}}s.
** ''The Legacy of Heorot'' and ''Beowulf's Children'' (co-written with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes), with a crew of interstellar colonists who discover too late the drawbacks of the freezing process they used.
* Lisanne Norman's human colonists travel in cryonics to get to their first extra-solar colony world. It performs poorly with a large number of colonists dying before planetfall.
* The ''RevelationSpace'' 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.
* ''EndersGame'': The relativistic version was used several times, most notably to bring Mazer Rackham forward decades so he could teach the one who would command the IF's fleet. Oh, and Ender's quip at the end of the first book that he wants to live "forever" and so decides to travel the stars. (Though as Valentine points out, physics don't work that way.)
** OrsonScottCard does more with the idea in another book, ''The Worthing Saga,'' where he projects the decay of a society through the fact that the richest people can afford to undergo routine stasis and "live" practically forever while poorer people live regular lives that are literally a fraction as long.
* Rob Grant's ''{{Colony}}'', an SF satire, involves a man who accidentally gets stuck onboard a space-going colony ship. He's knocked out, and awakens several generations later [[spoiler:as a disembodied head in liquid, given a mechanical body which works very badly, and is subject to the horrifying revelation that the subsequent generations have resulted in a set of humanity almost entirely populated by morons.]]
* Played straight in the backstory to the [[HonorHarrington Honorverse]]. The original Manticoran colonists put all their life savings in a series of Swiss bank accounts and traveled to their new homeworld on a slower-than-light sleeper ship, knowing that within the 600 years or so it would take for them to get there, A) someone probably would have invented a safer form of FTL travel, and B) they'd be filthy rich from 600 years' worth of accrued compound interest.
* RogerZelazny:
** ''ThisMortalMountain'' is about a party of mountain climbers attempting to climb a forty-mile-high mountain on a colonized planet. Their progress is impeded by a series of what appear to be glowing creatures (an angel, a bird, snakes, a bull, a dragon) telling them to "go back" and trying to make them fall. It turns out that these are [[spoiler:holographic projections generated by a computer programmed to prevent anyone from entering a cave in the mountain. In the cave is the last survivor of the first expedition to colonize the planet, who has been cryogenically preserved to allow her to survive the disease that killed all the other colonists from the first expedition.]]
** ''TheGraveyardHeart'' is about a group of people who spend a year in cryogenic preservation, then come out of it for a single day, and keep repeating this cycle.
* ''TheFarArena'' features a Roman Gladiator coming to the modern day. Among other things he freaks out about finding crucifixes around people necks, effortlessly butchers a top fencer in a duel, and reveals a huge amount about roman life to researchers.
* JoeHaldeman used The relativistic version in order to create a allegory for how the returnees from war (or in his case, ''the Vietnam War'') was alienated from everyone else back home (His soldiers was transported several lightyears off in order to fight, therefore having travelling decades into the future when they returnes)
* In ''{{Hyperion}}'', Martin Silenus is frozen and put on a spaceship by his parents so he won't have to face the family's collapse. When he wakes up Martin's mind still works but he can only voice six words due to brain damage ([[SevenDirtyWords all of them offensive]]) and is faced with several generations' worth of debt.
** Too bad when your career of choice is "poet" - though it turns out that this and his life on a CrapsackWorld were needed to teach him to be a proper genius.
* In {{Lois McMaster Bujold}}'s Vorkosigan Saga, cryo-freeze is often used for badly wounded soldiers, until they can reach the high grade medical help needed to restore them. Miles spends much of one book in a misplaced cryo-capsule, while his friends search for him.
* The protagonist of ''The Unincorporated Man'' freezes himself pending the discovery of a cure for his terminal illness, and awakens centuries later in a future where he is [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin the only person who owns all existing shares of stock in himself]].
* 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 PopsicleSplat. 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 (this troper vaguely recalls it being sort of like a mental TouchedByVorlons type of thing, but doesn't remember precisely what happened) 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.
* In the {{Honorverse}}, for the first millennium or so of space travel, sleeper ships are the only safe way to move around between the stars, at sublight speeds, with {{hyperspace}} used almost entirely by high-risk scouting missions with correspondingly high fatality rates. Later advances in {{hyperspace}} travel make running into [[NegativeSpaceWedgie grav waves]] much less likely, making it safe enough for use in colonization efforts.
* TekWars uses it as a form of punishment; this carried over into the TV series.
* Sleeper units in [[VernorVinge Vernor Vinge's]] A Deepness In The Sky 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.
* In ''I Was A Teenage Popsicle'' by Bev Katz Rosenbaum, the main character, Floe, is defrosted 10 years after she was frozen. She was frozen at the age of 16 because of an incurable disease that killed her. When she wakes up, she finds out everything has changed. Her parents were frozen shortly after she was, so she is forced to live with her sister, who was younger than her.
* 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.]]
* Peter Hamilton's ''NightsDawn'' trilogy has Zero-Tau pods which are used to keep people in statis, notably in colony ships. Since thousands of perople 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 enbryos of farm animals and crop seeds. As added HighOctaneNightmareFuel: [[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.]]

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Live Action TV ]]

* ''StarTrek'': Khan, one of the best remembered villains from the original series, was found aboard a 20th century sleeper ship in the episode "Space Seed". A Klingon sleeper ship also appeared in a ''Next Generation'' episode (here, unusually, the goal seemed to be not to allow a long trip, but to ensure there would still be Klingons around in case a war went badly).
** Humans from the 20th century who were cryogenically frozen to survive illness appeared in the episode "The Neutral Zone" (Season 1 finale).
** Similarly, ''StarTrekVoyager'': "The 37s" features characters from the early twentieth century in suspended animation (this time by the aliens who'd abducted them, rather than human technology). One of them turns out to be [[HistoricalInJoke Amelia Earhart]].
* ''{{Stargate SG-1}}'': A number of races possess stasis pods, which can preserve a humanoid (with very slow aging) for many thousands of years. ''StargateAtlantis'' twice touched on the fact that this form of stasis does not completely halt aging, as all the frozen characters they encounter, having spent 10,000 years in statis, have aged well past their natural lifespan and would die of old age within hours (at best) of defrosting.
** Subverted in one two parter episode of [[StargateSG1 SG1]], when the team wake up and are told they have been in stasis, only to find it was [[spoiler: a trick by Hathor to learn the secrets of the SGC.]]
** Another episode has them finding a women frozen in ice in Antarctica, supposedly predating humans on Earth. She woke up when thawed.
***She was an [[AncientAstronauts ancient]] not a human, which discounts time-travel.
* ''PowerRangersInSpace'': Zhane was preserved in a stasis pod for several years while his injuries healed.
** ''PowerRangersTimeForce'': In the year 3000, mutant criminals are frozen and ''miniaturized'' for storage.
* ''[[SuperSentai Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger]]'': The Zyuranger were frozen in their native time to come back in the present.
* ''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.
* ''RedDwarf'': Lister is transported three million years into the future while in a "stasis booth" (a bit more complicated, as it actually froze him in ''time''). Stasis units are used or mentioned several more times in the series, along with "Deep Sleep" units, which appear to induce some form of hibernation. In series seven, a body is found literally encased in ice, although this is apparently done by a virus in the body, with no technological assistance (no explanation is given as to how the virus does this).
** In another, they find a genuinely frozen corpsicle that originated from a prison facility. The odds of the contents are split evenly between an attractive female warden or an omnicidal mass-murderer.
* ''KnightRider'': "Knight Rider 2000"'s central premise was that, [[SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale by the year 2000]], criminals would be cryogenically suspended for the duration of their prison terms.
* ''DoctorWho'': Humanity froze itself to wait out an environmental catastrophe in "The Ark In Space", the Cybermen froze themselves to conserve resources in "Tombs of the Cybermen", and a number of other stories featured cold preservation.
**One other example includes [[spoiler: Davros in 'Destiny of the Daleks', where he is cryogenically frozen by the Doctor until the next Dalek story.]].
*Various characters are frozen/unfrozen in ''{{Torchwood}}''.
* ''{{Farscape}}'' once featured a stasis process which turned Crichton into a metal statue.
* ''{{Firefly}}'': When we first meet River, she appears to have been preserved in this way. However, that was for medical purposes, and she was presumably only frozen for a short period of time.
* ''The TwilightZone'' episodes:
** In "The Rip Van Winkle Caper", a criminal gang steals a million dollars in gold bars, then go into suspended animation for 100 years so they can spend the loot after the statute of limitations runs out.
** In "The Long Morrow", an astronaut is placed in suspended animation for a long trip to another star system.
* In the pilot episode of ''LostInSpace'', the Robinson family are in suspended animation for their journey to Alpha Centauri.
* ''AdamAdamantLives!'': the title character is frozen in a block of ice in 1902 and thawed in 1966. Not only does an ordinary London hospital manage to thaw him with complete success, but his clothes don't even get wet in the process. Even the matches in his pocket still work just fine.
* In ''Cleopatra 2525'', the main character is a stripper put in suspended animation for 500 years after a failed boob job (yes, really). And in the final CliffHanger episode, it was revealed that [[spoiler:so was the BigBad. Well, minus the boob job. It wouldn't look good on him.]]
* The 1960s British kids' puppet show ''SpacePatrol'' (known as ''Planet Patrol'' in the US) had spaceships with "freezer cabinets" because, realistically, journeying around the Solar System took weeks or months.
* The titular character of ''BuckRogersInThe25thCentury'' gets a one-way ticket to the future when his life support systems are frozen as well.
* The 1967 show TheSecondHundredYears'' starring Monte Markham as the prospector who had been frozen in a glacier for decades.. AND ALSO his identical-looking, identical-age grandson. This trope was the entire concept of the show.
* ''{{VR5}}'': We learn in one of the final episodes that a character killed early on was cryonically preserved.
* Played straight in an episode of ''[[SeaQuestDSV seaQuest DSV]],'' "Games," where a notorious war criminal is kept in a cryogenic freezer - until the freezer malfunctions, at which point everyone realizes that the killer pulled a DeadPersonImpersonation by killing the prison warden and putting him in the freezer instead.
* The NewsRadio 'what if' episode "Space" takes place in the far future and Joe has to be revived from suspended animation to fix the reactor core. When he can't, the staff has to go into stasis (except Matthew and Bill) until the problem can be solved. Unfortunately, [[spoiler:Matthew kicks out the plug on the stasis machines and kills them instantly]].
* Used in ''{{Babylon 5}}'' to hold injured or ill individuals until they could reach more advanced medical help. [[spoiler: This includes a few dozen Shadow-modified telepaths the crew recovers. The cryo tech is later used to sneak the telepaths past bioscanners.]]
* ''{{Wiseguy}}''. Mark Volchek runs the town of Lynchboro, Seattle as a personal fiefdom. The OCB is sent in to investigate him, only to find that his big plan is merely to build a [[HumanPopsicle cyrogenic storage hospital]] for the entire town in order to sate his own phobia of death.
* Barnabas Collins, on both versions of ''Dark Shadows'', spent well over a century chained up in his coffin. Granted, as a vampire he could've lasted that long anyway, but due to this long siesta he had to play catch-up when freed, much like a regular HumanPopsicle.
* ''SaturdayNightLive'' - the "Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer" character plays to the jury's sympathies by claiming this or that modern phenomenon 'frightens and confuses' him.
* In [[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Eureka Eureka]] Fargo's grandfather is woken from (accidental) cryogenic freezing. For the entire episode he's trying to figure out the 'new world' as 50 years have gone past.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Music ]]

* AliceCooper's ''Refrigerator Heaven'', wherein the POV character gets frozen until they find a cure for cancer.
-->I'm freezing, I'm frozen, I'm icicle blue
-->So-o-o cold!
** The song was referenced by name in Alice's later song ''[[LastDanceWithMaryJane Cold Ethyl]]'':
--->If I live till 97
--->You'll still be waiting in refrigerator heaven...
* The narrator of James Taylor's ''The Frozen Man'' was subjected to an accidental version of this when he fell oveboard.
--->My brothers and the others were lost at sea.
--->I alone am returned to tell thee.
--->Hidden in ice for a century
--->To walk the world again.
* In the filksong "Compound Interest" by Duane Elms and Bill Roper, the singer and his fellow astronauts not only put money away for the future like the Manticoran colonists above, but arranged for the interest after 500 years to be applied to developing FTL -- '''as ''their'' sole property''' -- making them richer than filthy rich when they came out of freeze 500 years after '''that'''.
-->Ten years from when we set the quest they found the hyperdrive,\\
And man spread to a million worlds, and ''we own all but five''; [italics added]\\
For we control all commerce, any trade must be our trust,\\
And any ship that moves must lease the hyperdrive from us!
* 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]].

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Professional Wrestling ]]

* The original plan for WWE wrestler John Heidenreich's character was that he was a Nazi supersoldier who had been frozen since 1939. This idea was nixed in favor of making him a psychopath who wrote dreadful angsty poetry, talked to his "inner child" known as Little Johnny, tried to make friends with audience members, and supposedly kidnapped and anally violated announcer Michael Cole. Only in wrestling could the Nazi thing be more tasteful than the things they actually had him do.
* 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.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Video Games ]]

* The two main characters in ''{{Crystalis}}'' emerge from suspended animation.
* A lot of futuristic videogames use this trope. Some examples:
** The opening sequence in ''{{Freelancer}}'' shows four "Sleeper Ships" pounding their way through the Coalition blockade and heading towards the Sirius sector.
** In ''SidMeiersAlphaCentauri'', the Human colonies in Planet come from a big spaceship, the ''U.N.S. Unity'', sent by the United Nations to build a colony in another planet, filled with thousands of cryogenically frozen people.
** Crew for new ships in ''{{Homeworld}}'' are awakened from the massive bays of frozen colonists onboard the mothership. How many there are in total depends on how many you save in the second mission, up to 600,000.
* Master Chief becomes a human popsicle at the end of ''{{Halo}} 3''. Wonder what will happen when he awakens, if Microsoft ever does a future game featuring him(not neccessarily with the ''Halo'' title).
* In the ''HalfLife'' series, [[spoiler: stasis used as a plot device when long passage of time is needed, as the game follows the philosophy that everything the main character experiences must also be experienced by the player, and it wouldn't be too popular with either gamers or programmers if they had to go through several years of mundane experiences. So far, stasis has been used three times throughout the series: Once in the twenty-or so years between ''Half-Life 1'' and ''Half-Life 2'', once to depict the passage of a week in the middle of Half-Life 2, and a much shorter stay of less than a day between ''Half-Life 2'' and Episode One.]]
** The "week" example was half stasis, half TimeTravel.
* Many SciFi-Games tend to use the more advanced and less explained variant called Stasis. In ''{{Starcraft}}'' for example it is used as a prison and offensive/defensive technique. Interestingly enough: ships in a stasis field are still able to float.
** In ''{{Starcraft}}'', the four prison/colony ships carrying the Terrans held them in cryo until landing. It's implied that the UED fleet that follows in Brood Wars used the same tech.
* In ''MassEffect'', the Proteans use pods in order to [[spoiler: survive the Reaper invasion]]. Alas, they forgot to stock on batteries.
* In RomancingSaGa this is how the Heroes encounter [[spoiler: Freilei, the guardian of the [[CosmicKeystone Obsidian Sword]]]]
* In ''DayOfTheTentacle'', the Chron-O-Johns are incapable of transporting organic matter, which means that a ''hamster'' from the present day gets the popsicle treatment to be used in the future. Restoring the hamster requires nothing more than a microwave and a sweater that's been forced to take TheSlowPath by spending two hundred years in a tumble dryer.
** Although the microwave is of (presumably) more advanced tentacle manufacture, and may operate differently. Laverne even lampshades this, pointing out that under normal circumstances, putting a hamster in the microwave leads to horrible consequences, and children who do that are taken away.
*** Her monologue is also a reference to the game's predecessor, ''Maniac Mansion'', where putting a hamster in the microwave causes it to explode. No cryogenics involved in that game, though.
* Play straight with Jean Bison in the second ''SlyCooper'' game.
* Nina and Anna Williams from the ''{{Tekken}}'' series were frozen for the twenty years between Tekken 2 and Tekken 3. Nina's resulting amnesia has since been a consistent part of her character, but neither woman is portrayed as ever having any trouble adjusting to having missed the past twenty years. Indeed, the real point was presumably to preserve these two characters in their early twenties while introducing adult children of characters from the previous games.
* In ''ProjectEden'' has a character frozen in time for 15 years, he manages to get though the situation (His release) with apparently minimum confusion and headaches despite the fact [[spoiler:that one of his daughters is now an adult (and part of a futuristic police force)and the other daughter has gone mad and started making monstrous freaks and selling drugs.]]
* In StreetFighter III, Remy's ending shows him checking on his [[DeadLittleSister deceased older sister]], who is encased in ice.
* Samus' gunship in ''[[{{Metroid}} Metroid Prime 3: Corruption]]'' includes a cryostasis pod built into the pilot's chair, presumably because of space restrictions on the amount of oxygen, food, water, etc. the ship can carry. The Federation also uses cold stasis to transport nasties like Metroids, Phazon and the like, [[SealedEvilInACan with predictable results.]]
* In a late part of the game ''SpaceQuest 5'', Roger Wilco is forced to freeze his love interest to protect her from a... mutagen that is slowly turning everyone in the story into melty-faced mutants. He puts her into a stasis pod that actually has a very major hint for the puzzle on the instruction panel. ("Freeze Minister of ... 30 seconds" Anything else kills you, or her. If you take too short, she wakes up as a shambling blob and kills you, any more and you can't possibly bring her out of hibernation)
* In a SideQuest of [[MarioAndLuigiSuperstarSaga Mario and Luigi RPG 3]] [[SuperMarioBros the Mario brothers]] discover in Bowser's castle beings frozen in ice. Unfreezing them reveal the beings to be remnants of the Shroob invasion force of the previous game.
* The entire world gets popsicle'd during the grand finale of ''Ouendan 2''. The bad ending has the eponymous cheerleaders encased in ice...and looking cheerful for the first and only time in the entire game...for some reason.
* Used in the space horror chapter of LiveALive as a GoodMorningCrono for the main characters. The cryo pods are used later on in the story to freeze the wounded crew members until they can get to an earth hospital. Unsurprisingly, things go Very Wrong.
* In ''Secret Files: Tunguska'', the bad guys tried to get rid of Nina by this way. [[KarmicDeath Then they receive it themselves]].
* {{Descent}} 3 features an 'emergency stasis' system in the intro video which appears to freeze the pilot.
* FinalFantasyVIII features the sorceress Adel, who was frozen and put into space years before the game began.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Web Comics ]]

* In ''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.
* For fun in [[http://bukucomics.com/loserz/go/455 this]] ''{{Loserz}}'' strip.
* In ''{{Freefall}}'', long-faring space travel is done in "cold sleep".
**Not just the long-faring stuff either, even their FTL ships use cold-sleep.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Western Animation ]]

* ''{{Futurama}}'': Fry is thrust into the year 3000 when he falls into a cryonic pod. We later find that his girlfriend, Pauly Shore, and That Guy had all undertaken the same process (the last of which was frozen to survive terminal boneitis).
* Demona in ''{{Gargoyles}}''. Though in her case, she was not frozen, but was instead made immortal nearly a millennium ago when her soul was magically linked to MacBeth's.
** The other survivors of Clan Wyvern (including her then-lover Goliath) fit this trope far more closely, having been placed into stone sleep "Until the castle rises above the clouds." and reviving atop the tallest skyscraper in the world about 1000 years later.
* ''BatmanTheAnimatedSeries'': Mr. Freeze himself was not cryonically preserved, but his condition and powers resulted from an accident while cryonically preserving his wife.
**A TearJerker in and of itself, the story became so popular that it was added into Batman canon, even spawning an animated film from the episode where you meet Victor and Nora Fries (pronounced "freeze", obviously), and the storyline was also included in the horrible ''Batman and Robin'' film. Thank you, Paul Dini.
* Parodied in the ''SouthPark'' episode "Prehistoric Ice Man", in which a man is discovered frozen in ice, is successfully thawed... and turns out to be from 1996. Later, in the tenth season episode "Go God Go", Cartman tries to freeze himself in the snow on a mountain top to avoid having to wait the last three weeks for a new video game console. An avalanche covers him and he isn't found and unfrozen for 500 years, awakening in a Buck Rogers parody.
* Avoided in an episode of ''JusticeLeagueUnlimited'', where the ship and body of The Viking Prince, frozen in a glacier for a thousand years, were the {{MacGuffin}}... but it was the genetic material of the dead body they were interested in, with the possibility of the Prince's survival never even being raised.
** ''JusticeLeague'', however, is the show that gave us the one and only Hitlercicle. [[http://worldsfinestonline.com/WF/jl/episodes/thesavagetime/p1/26.jpg Yes, we're serious.]]
*** Untrue. ''TheNewAvengers'' did it in live action.
*** As did ''TheTomorrowPeople'', with a frozen '''and''' [[BeethovenWasAnAlienSpy secretly alien]] Hitler.
* Similarly, in ''AvatarTheLastAirbender'', Aang gets frozen into an iceberg for a hundred years. WordOfGod says he survived because of the Avatar Spirit.
** A [[LampshadeHanging lampshade is hung]] on this when he comes out of the iceberg:
--->'''Sokka:''' "How are you not frozen?!"
** Ruthlessly parodied on ''AvatarTheAbridgedSeries'', where Aang's instructor specifically tells him ''not'' to do this if he ever gets caught in a storm.
--->'''Aang:''' "I'll freeze myself inside a block of ice! Yeah, best plan ever!"
* Parodically referenced by ''TheSimpsons'' in the episode where Bart uses a walkie-talkie to imitate a child trapped in the bottom of a well. Prof. Frink suggests that the town use cryonics to freeze the boy so he can be rescued in the future. Poking fun at the trope while combining it with patented ''Simpsons'' SomebodyElsesProblem humor. Also used straight in the episode Jasper Beardley tries to cryonically freeze himself to see the future in the Kwik-E-Mart's freezer section, except that he woke up after just a couple days.
* ''SpongebobSquarepants'' had an episode with Squidward being locked in the Krusty Krab freezer and not let out for 2000 years; he ended up in a parody of the [[ShinyLookingSpaceships Shiny Future]] (literally ''everything'' was chrome) filled with Spongebob clones, and ended up in a fetal position screaming "Future!"
* Narrowly avoided in ''SherlockHolmesInTheTwentySecondCentury'': Lestrade is convinced that Moriarty somehow survived his "death" at Reichenbach Falls as a HumanPopsicle, but Holmes eventually finds a very dead Moriarty still entombed in the ice -- but a tiny drill-hole into the ice prompts Holmes to deduce that their adversary is actually a ''clone'' of Moriarty. Of course, Holmes's insistence that the new Moriarty could not have been the same man, reanimated, is [[ArbitrarySkepticism a bit odd]] in light of the fact that Holmes himself was transported to the world of the future when his own well-preserved corpse, which had been ''packed in honey'' (a reference to Holmes's retirement as a beekeeper) after his eventual death, was reanimated and rejuvenated by a bunch of AppliedPhlebotinum.
** Probably because he was THERE, to make very, very sure Moriarty was Deader then Dead, not Mostly Dead. (And did the deed himself.)
* Omi uses the "Orb of Tornami" with his particular ice incantation to freeze himself into the future ''twice'' in ''XiaolinShowdown''. This makes him, technically speaking, the oldest character to appear in the series, and also the youngest looking. In a show where the most powerful goodies and baddies never age, that's an achievement.
* ''DuckDodgers''' titular hero, according to the [[ExpositoryThemeTune theme song]] and certain episodes, was one of these. The members of Megadeth were apparently frozen as well.
* ''{{Thundercats}}'': The Thundercats used a hibernation system to make the long trip to Third Earth. Though we are told that this slowed but did not stop their aging, only Lion-O showed any signs of aging (presumably because he was at an age where four or five years made a big difference).
** Lion-o's capsule actually malfunctioned, and didn't inhibit his aging physically.
** Which would have meant that the trip was about 10 years long, Or that Thundercats have a looong childhood.
* Skyfire in the cartoon version of ''[[TransformersGeneration1 The Transformers]]''. Well, except the human part.
* [[CaptainCavemanAndTheTeenAngels Captain Caveman]] was frozen in a block of ice in the Stone Age, and found/unthawed in the present by the Teen Angels.
* The stories from ''Cro'' are told by a former Mammoth popsicle, who is somehow able to not only talk, but talk perfect late-20th-century American English.
* The premise of ''Yvon of the Yukon'' is that Yvon was a French explorer of the new world, who got lost and ended up in the Yukon, where he fell overboard and was frozen for 300 years, to be released when a dog pees on him.

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Other ]]

* The original, earliest versions of ''{{Buck Rogers}} in the 25th Century'' got Buck into said century via the device of strange gasses in an abandoned mine which put him into suspended animation for nearly five hundred years. The Buster Crabbe serial used an experimental gas aboard his airship. The 1970s TV show froze him solid in space.
* ''{{Transformers}}'' played around with this trope, a bit; thanks to their [[WeAreAsMayflies millennia-long lifespans]], the Ark and Nemesis crews were knocked into a coma-like stasis lock after both ships crashed...and didn't awaken until the volcano the Autobot ship crashed into erupted and jarred the ship's computer active, ''four million years later''. This is also an example of the trope working in reverse, as the crash happened shortly before Earth's post-dinosaur Ice Age.
** Skyfire is a closer example of the trope, having been buried in ice for millions of years before the Autobot/Decepticon war reawakens him.
* ''[=~The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy~=]'': The passengers on the last live ship on (Brontitall in the radio series; Frogstar B in the novels) are put in suspended animation because the ship's robot crew refuse to take off without a supply of lemon-soaked paper napkins. The planet is dead and no napkins are coming, so nine hundred years later the passengers are still waiting.
** And also regularly woken up so they can be served coffee. And aging noticeably from their brief periods awake.
*** Don't forget, insane from horror.
** The Golgafrinchan ship heading toward prehistoric Earth that Arthur and Ford end up on carry millions of frozen marketing execs, hair specialists, telephone sanitisers and the like. Apparently they're regularly taken out of stasis for exercise routines - perhaps being frozen for too long is bad for health? Also, the crew isn't frozen - the Captain has been in his bath since takeoff.
* This Troper recalls reading one of his stepfathers old comics as a kid. It started with Hitler having a man with wild long hair and dirty torn clothes raving about how it was all happening again, and how Hitler need to stop it. Hitler had him executed, and somewhat casually wondered where he had come from. His aides told him the Allies were nearly there, so he went down into his bunker, where a scientist was finishing work on a stasis chamber. Hitler killed the scientist so that [[DeadMenTellNoTales he would not speak of the project]] and entered the chamber. Several hundred years later, he awakens with tattered clothes and wild unkempt hair. After making his way through the fortress, he finds a Hitleresque man, and the same scene from the beginning repeats almost exactly.
* 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 Antartica instead for revenge.]]
* {{WWE}} example -- being tall, blond haired, and blue eyed, an original plan for Jon Heidenreich was that he would have been an [[StupidJetpackHitler unfrozen Nazi super-soldier]].
* Parodied in one Australian play where the crew of a GenerationShip fall into barbarity and think that the Human Popsicles are the equivilent of frozen food. When the last remaining colonist wakes up early, he's not too impressed.
-->"You mean to tell me you've eaten all the great scientists and engineers who were going to build this new world? Didn't anyone protest?"
-->"Of course they did. But we ate them anyway!"

[[/folder]]

[[folder: Real Life ]]

* The [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wood_Frog common wood frog]] has ''freeze tolerance'': it survives freezing temperatures with ice nucleators regulating ice formation as well as massive amounts of glucose as a natural anti-freeze. Though the frog ''is'' frozen, the glucose helps prevent "freezer burn"—cellular damage caused by ice—that would essentially kill anything. When warm weather returns, it is dependent on a chemical reaction that should restart its heart, thus recirculating fluids and returning the frog to life.
* [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tardigrades Tardigrades]].
** To clarify: Tardigrades, small invertebrates approximately one millimeter in length, can enter a dehydrated state and survive without food or water for over ten years. As for the "frozen" half of being a popsicle, they can be chilled to 1 Kelvin (that is, one degree above absolute zero) for a few minutes and survive. And this doesn't even touch on their other abilities, such as ''surviving being put in the vacuum of space and directly exposed to the Sun.''
* They're working on it. Recent successful transplant of frozen pig's liver means that some major breakthrough apparently has been achieved.
* Related: a number of ocean fish which live in the Antarctic region have a natural antifreeze in their cells. The fish themselves remain conscious (at least, as conscious as normal fish), but the antifreeze they use is both the subject of actual research for coldsleep and a frequent explanation for it in science fiction.
* Cryonic suspension exists, but there are various drawbacks:
** You have to be legally dead before they can drain your bodily fluids and replace them with the rather-toxic-but-non-crystal-forming Cryonic suspension fluids.
** You will have paid a fortune for the storage of your body. If you can't afford the full body fee, you can opt to have just your head frozen.
** If you opt for full-body preservation, you will be wrapped in tinfoil and then suspended head-down in a Dewar flask, surrounded by liquid nitrogen and with your head in a bucket. Why the last bit? Because then, if the power goes out and you start defrosting, your head will stay frozen the longest.
** Because your body has frozen solid, it's created a supercooled solid under tension (the outside freezes before the inside so as the inside freezes and expands, it causes a lot of tension). The name of this in the trade is ''meatglass'', and it's as fragile as glass too. A tap on your head the wrong way and it will crack. Apparently this is what's happened to Ted William's head.

----
<<|AppliedPhlebotinum|>>
<<|SpeculativeFictionTropes|>>
<<|TruthInTelevision|>>
<<|CharacterizationTropes|>>