Human Popsicle / Literature

Human Popsicles in literature.

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In General

• The protagonists of Philip José Farmer's The Stone God Awakens and Cyril M. Kornbluth's The Marching Morons are turned to a stone-like substance rather than frozen.

By Author

• Roger Zelazny
  • This Mortal Mountain 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 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 cryonically preserved to allow her to survive the disease that killed all the other colonists from the first expedition.
  • "The Graveyard Heart": This story features group of people who spend a year in cryonic preservation, then come out of it for a single day to throw a huge party, and going back into stasis to repeat the cycle.
  • In Doorways in the Sand, Fred Cassidy's uncle Albert had himself frozen to wait until technology improves enough to bring him back and cure his diseases/old age.
• Larry Niven
  • Short stories and novels, including A World Out of Time, involving "corpsicles", his name for Human Popsicles. Most of the time their legal rights are severely curtailed, since they usually have run out of the money that was paying to keep them frozen and lack any kind of relevant work skills. In The Defenseless Dead, there's an attempt to pass a law enabling the Organ Theft of those who can't be revived, as well as a plot to take advantage of the inheritance windfall of the few corpsicles who made more successful investments.
  • A World Out of Time is a development of an earlier short story about a "corpsicle" revived mentally in a contemporary body, for the purpose of reprogramming as a Rammer, or star ship pilot. It’s strongly implied that several previous candidates had already failed the assessment...
  • In his early Known Space short story "Wait It Out", the protagonist achieves a similar effect by stripping naked on the surface of Pluto, although the frozen corpse periodically undergoes periods of consciousness due to cold and conductivity effects.
  • There are also the Slaver Stasis Field and Boxes, basically "space magic" plot devices to transport arbitrary selections of items, and at least one actual alien, from the deep past.
• Beth Revis:
  • Across the Universe (Beth Revis): Amy and her parents were frozen as part of a colonization crew.
  • A Million Suns: Orion was frozen as punishment for trying to overthrow the Eldest of the colony ship.

By Work

• Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl:
  • In The Eternity Code, Artemis uses the refrigerator in a restaurant to preserve a mortally wounded Butler until fairy help can arrive.
  • In The Lost Colony, the demon warlock Quan deliberately petrified himself to survive an accident while casting a time spell. As a statue, he takes The Slow Path to the present, waiting for ten thousand years (apparently fully conscious) to be unpetrified. Astonishingly, he is entirely sane after being revived.
• The novel Black Moon has two characters and an android becoming these during a space battle. They are in hydroponics when the ship is hit, causing them to be doused in water and frozen when the compartment is exposed to space. Decades later, a Corrupt Corporate Executive revives them for use in an experiment. The same novel also has the same executive discover frozen bodies of previously-unknown aquatic aliens, who have been that way for 3 million years. They don't survive the defrosting process.
• Bridesicle, a short story by Will McIntosh. A woman killed in a car accident has her body preserved in suspended animation, only to find that her only help of getting revived is if a man wealthy enough to afford the expensive operation chooses her from among tens of thousands of preserved women as his wife.
• The Centurions Empire: 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's revealed that there's a whole centuries-old secret society who has found the secret of "immortality" by inventing a low-tech cryonic 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.
• Clubland Heroes: One of the characters is a Contemporary Caveman who was found preserved in a glacier somewhere around the year 1900.
• Rob Grant's Colony, an SF satire, involves a man who accidentally gets stuck on board a space-going colony ship. He's knocked out, and awakens several generations later 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.
• Deathlands
  • One of the main characters is Mildred Wyeth, a 20th century doctor of cryonics. She was put into temporary cryonic stasis after falling into a coma, though unlike usual for this trope treatment was readily available—it's just that World War 3 broke out at that time, so she remained there until woken by the protagonists a hundred years later.
  • In "Ice and Fire", the protagonists are exploring a redoubt which has a cyro section. When they try to open them, some malfunction and turn their occupants into goo, one man commits suicide the moment he's revived, a woman is in such pain she begs for a Mercy Kill, and the Sole Survivor isn't happy to be revived in an After the End future where there's no way of curing his disease.
• The short story "Doing Lennon" by Gregory Benford features a man who has himself cryonically frozen in order to impersonate John Lennon in the future.
• The Door into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein starts out being based around this trope. 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 Time Travel.
• In The Downloaded, it turns out that merely freezing a human body for any length of time results in a persistent vegetative state due to quantum decoherence causing the consciousness to "evaporate." As it turns out, the consciousness has to be constantly active to survive. Eventually, they discover a way to keep the body frozen while the mind is uploaded to a quantum computer and kept in a virtual simulation (again, having the mind do nothing results in decoherence) with the clock speed dialed way down, so that only a few days pass for the mind for every year on the outside. Once the body is defrosted (involving replacing the antifreeze in the blood vessels with the previously stored blood followed by defibrillation), the mind is instantly downloaded into the brain through quantum entanglement. This is the plan for the colonization of Proxima Centauri (send a ship on a 500-year trip with only 4 years passing for the frozen crew). Meanwhile, a pilot program for a cryo-prison is proposed, except the clock speed is dialed up, thus the criminal can serve a 20-year sentence in only 10 real months while mentally experiencing all of it (when asked what the government gets out of it, the answer is simple: saving costs; it costs way less to freeze someone for 10 months than to keep them in prison for 20 years). Plus the virtual environment can be tailored to serve as punishment and correction. Things go pear-shaped when a disaster strikes shortly after both groups get iced.
• In the Dumarest of Terra books, a relatively cheap method of travel is as a human Popsicle, called traveling "Low" or "Low Passage". Survival is not guaranteed.
• Empire from the Ashes: Stasis pods play a significant role in how the various mutineers in the first book manage to live, chronologically, through over 50,000 years stuck on Earth.
• The Far Arena features a Roman gladiator coming to the modern day. Among other things, he freaks out about finding crucifixes around people's necks, effortlessly butchers a top fencer in a duel, and reveals a huge amount about Roman life to researchers.
• In Fiasco, the 1986 hard Science Fiction novel by Polish science-fiction writer and philosopher Stanisław Lem, 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.
• In the Alastair Reynolds short story Glacial, a scientist puts himself into cryo-stasis using a (at the story's time) very archaic method, with no way to revive himself and no one else around to revive him. Luckily, he does get discovered and revived.
• In Hammerjack, the Assembly cryonically froze their bodies to avoid death by old age, but their minds are still active and capable of transmitting orders through cyberspace. The sequel Prodigal also features a group of soldiers who were on Mars when the terraforming project collapsed due to an outbreak of a deadly alien virus; they froze themselves in the hope of being rescued after a cure was found.
• Quite a few in The Heroes of Olympus by Rick Riordan, from those in Boreas' fortress and the Hunters for a short time during the battle at the Wolf House. Midas' "house guests" probably count, too.

• The Emperor of the galaxy in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was frozen in a stasis field right before his death (much to his annoyance) meaning that since he never technically died none of his heirs could inherit. As such the government of the galaxy is now effectively an elected republic with the mostly dead Emperor being kept in stasis.
• Rene Barjavel's The Ice People has present-day explorers discovering the frozen remnants of an advanced civilization thousands of feet below the Antarctic ice. Two people are found frozen in a special chamber. The team can revive them, but only one at a time. They decide to begin with the woman because she looks healthier …
• Imperial Radch: Seivarden in Ancillary Justice spent the thousand years before the events of the book as one, after her ship was destroyed and her escape pod was lost and went adrift in space. When she's revived she finds the language has changed to the point she can't understand anyone, all of her implants that could have helped alleviate that problem are so out of date they can't interact with modern computers, and to top it all off she learns that her formerly highly-placed House hasn't existed for the last few centuries.
• 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.
• Also by Allen Steele, A King of Infinite Space plays the Type 3 trope absolutely straight. An obnoxious 1980s rich kid is killed in a car crash. His head is deep-frozen and he is revived into a cloned body centuries in the future, on an asteroid named for Jerry Garcia. He doesn't like the society he finds himself in...
• Kea's Flight: After Draz and Kea become the new Optimizers, Monarch has Brandon put into cryonic sleep.
• In Karl Schroeder's Lockstep an entire civilization freezes itself on a synchronized schedule to conserve robotically gathered resources and serve as a reservoir of technology while the rest of the universe goes through a series of accelerandos and collapses.
• In Laurence Manning's novel The Man Who Awoke a millionaire puts himself into suspended animation (through ridiculously easy means) and awakes in the year 5000. What is amazing about this book — written in 1933 — is that the people of the future are angry at their long distant ancestors who used up all the metal and oil, leaving them nothing. They had to rebuild society on a wood and wood alcohol based technology. The sleeper escapes by going back into suspended animation, reawakening at intervals of thousands of years to find mankind evolving, for better or worse, eventually achieving immortality. Eventually the sleeper joins a movement trying to contact a higher consciousness of which individual humans are cells.
• Mostly used on colony ships in The Night's Dawn Trilogy but there are some non Sleeper Starship examples:
  • Explicitly used as a poor man's time machine by Ashly Hanson, one of the Lady Macbeth's crew; by the events of the trilogy he is chronologically well over two hundred, thanks to spending fifty of every fifty-five years in zero-tau. He averts the "corpsicle" problem thanks to a well-run trust and being very skilled at a necessary job which doesn't change much over the years.
  • On Earth some decide they're going to sleep out the crisis in Zero-Tau, especially elderly people who are hoping to avoid The Nothing After Death which is now revealed to be the fate of anyone who dies. Unfortunately Quinn Dexter finds out where they are being stored and uses this to possess large numbers of people without the authorities realising.
• Garth Nix's Old Kingdom: In Sabriel, Sabriel finds a man who was preserved for two hundred years in the form of a statue, in order to protect him.
• In Project NRI, everyone wakes up from cryonic sleep inside Niege Research Institute.
• Reaper (2016): People are frozen prior to going into Game, and remain that way as long as they're in. Some people come out temporarily for various reasons, e.g. women coming out to have children, or Hawk coming out to investigate the bombing.
• Remembrance of Earth's Past: Hibernation technology features prominently in both sequels, allowing people to step decades or even centuries into the future. It was originally developed to allow people with terminal diseases to sleep until a cure was discovered.
• The short story Revival Meeting has a man revived in the future, cured of the illness he had been suffering from. It transpires that the man's stock investments all failed, so he is penniless, but the visitor who explains this to him has paid for the revival process. It turns out that the visitor needs a heart transplant and the patient is to be the donor.
• Spider Robinson's short story "Rubber Soul" involved John Lennon being placed in suspension literally seconds after Chapman shot him so his body could heal from the bullet wound, and reuniting with his son Julian and bandmate Paul McCartney after being thawed. While the names are never given, enough clues, references and Stealth Puns are given to reveal their identities. One notable stealth pun was the revelation that Lennon was frozen for 24 years. He died at the age of 40. "Will you still need me, will you still feed me..."
• In Runemarks, there are seven of them, the Seven Sleepers, hidden under the mountains of the same name.
• It's revealed in Sacred that the crime boss Trevor Stone hopes to use a cryogenic chamber to stave off his cancer until there's a cure for it. While Patrick thinks that such an idea is ridiculous, he finds out that Trevor's inner circle is plotting against him because they're just that unwilling to risk him living any longer.
  Griffin: Don't laugh. He's crazy. He's not to be taken lightly, though. I don't believe in cryogenics. But what if I'm wrong and he's right, Mr. Kenzie? He'll dance on our graves.
• In James White's Second Ending, a man awakes from cryo sleep post-World War III to discover that he's not just the last human being but the last biological life form apart from a few seeds of grass left on a completely dead Earth, with just a bunch of moderately intelligent robots to keep him company. He then spends millions of years dipping in and out of cryo sleep while his robots work to restore the planet.
• An early example is the H. G. Wells classic The Sleeper Wakes, which has a similar premise. He wakes up just in time to experience a popular revolt against his own business empire.
• The Space Odyssey Series: In 3001: The Final Odyssey, the last sequel to 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 Fish out of Temporal Water plot for the first part of the book.
• Star Wars Expanded Universe: In "The Crimson Corsair and the Lost Treasure of Count Dooku", the treasure turns out to be a person in a cryogenic pod. Namely, the clone trooper Kix, who was being taken to be interrogated by Dooku before the ship was attacked, went off-course and crashed, because he knew too much about the clones' control chips and Order 66.
• "A !Tangled Web (1981)": !Tang popsicle, actually. Part of Navarro's offer is to buy cryofreeze for dying !tang from Immortality Unlimited.
• In Lawrence Block's Tanner on Ice Evan is slipped a Mickey Finn and stuffed into a high-tech freezer in the basement of a house in Union City, New Jersey. He's found and awakened 25 years later when the then-current owner decides to have some renovation done.
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: One of the summoned characters (Chloe) has been stuck in a ~2000 year time loop for eons upon eons. They manage to break the loop in the current cycle, in the process creating their alternate self, known as Chronoa. Years before the main story starts and as the time of their normal summoning in the loop nears they work with several characters to preserve themselves and keep the universe from having two copies of themselves running around at the same time. This culminates in them being put into a cryo-sleep like state of suspended animation in Demon Lord Luminous' basement. Once the seal on the container is breached the version held in animation goes berserk, but the other characters are able to join the two existences into a single entity breaking the loop forever.
• "Through the Gates of the Silver Key": An Alien Popsicle, in this instance. Yaddith is both in the remote past and extremely distant from Earth, so much so that a conventional interstellar journey would exceed even the immense lifespan of a Yaddithian. As such, Carter-in-Zkauba's body returns home by placing himself in suspended animation and remaining quiescent as his vessel crosses the billions of miles of empty space separating the two worlds.
• The Unincorporated Man: The protagonist freezes himself pending the discovery of a cure for his terminal illness, and awakens centuries later in a future where he is the only person who owns all existing shares of stock in himself.
• 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 Mirror Dance in a misplaced cryo-capsule, while his friends search for him.
  • In Cryoburn, Miles is on a planet whose entire culture, and economy revolves around cryonics. Nearly everyone on the planet gets themselves frozen, before they die, in the hope that they can be thawed out once there's a cure for whatever's killing them (including old age). The cryonic corporations get the proxy votes of everyone they've got in storage, so they are now in complete control of the planet (since the frozen outnumber the living by quite a margin).
• In Wings of Fire, Queen Diamond sentences Foeslayer to a particularly cruel version of this; she is encased in ice whenever Diamond kills her, and then can be revived by tapping her with her spear so she can kill her over and over again. It gets to the point where Foeslayer, after 2000 years, says that she'd rather just be killed because she isn't completely frozen in time and is still starving, making it more miserable for her to be alive.
• The Witchlands: Sightwitch reveals that this is the ultimate fate of the Sightwitches. When they are old, they're summoned to an ice cavern deep in the mountain that their convent is built upon, where they sleep with their goddess, Sirmaya, for all eternity. In Bloodwitch, Merik and Kullen end up frozen after Merik tricks Kullen into a spot in the caverns, as it's the only way to stop the enraged Paladin's rampage.
• Being a corpsicle is an important plot device in The World at the End of Time, for good or bad, and thanks to it along with Time Dilation the two main human protagonists become as old as the Universe at the end of the book.

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