The daily prompt for today for Sci-fi Month is “Sweet dreams #TropeTuesday (cryosleep / suspended animation)”. Cryosleep isn’t as widespread trope as, for example time travel, but I did remember quite a few characters in hibernation. Many times, cryosleep is just a way to take character(s) to the start of the story. Bujold perhaps explores best what a cryosleep society could look like.
1, Mur Lafferty: Six Wakes
Cryosleep is essential to this murder mystery in space -book. The generation ship Dormire has a crew of six clones. They all wake in new bodies at the start of the story. Someone has murdered them all. One of them.
2, Lois McMaster Bujold: Cryoburn
The setting is a planet called Kibou-Daini where the most notable industry is cryotechnology. The wealthiest people freeze themselves when they’re near death or if they have life-threatening diseases. So, cryosleep is a very prominent part of the plot.
3, Marvel Comics: Captain America and Winter Soldier
Steve Rogers agreed to become a super soldier to fight the Nazis. He was accidentally frozen in ice until modern times. His partner, Bucky Barnes, was also put under suspended animation by Russians who were using him as an assassin.
4, Alien
When “Alien” starts, the crew is just waking up from a long hibernation after their work. But they’re dismayed to realize that they aren’t back on Earthy but near a remote planet.
5, Star Trek: TNG episode “The Neutral Zone”
The Enterprise finds three people from 20th century Earth who have been put under crysleep because they have diseases that which weren’t curable back then.
6, Mass Effect: Andromeda
The game starts with the main character waking up from crysleep to their destination.
7, Underworld the movie and sequels
In these movies about a war between vampires and werewolves, the three vampire elders enter centuries-long hibernation so that they get rest from their immortal lives.
8, Demolition Man
In this rather cheesy SF film, both a cop (Sylvester Stallone) and a criminal (Wesley Snipes) are sentenced to cryosleep in 1996. But the criminal escapes from his parole hearing and so the cop must be revived, too. The world of 2032 is a peaceful, if sterile, utopia that can’t handle violent criminals anymore.
9, Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back
Han Solo is frozen in carbonite.
10, Futurama
Filip Fry is a pizza delivery man who is accidentally shoved to a cryosleep tube and wakes up again a thousand years in the future.
November 10, 2021 at 2:20 am
I loved Six Wakes and cryosleep/ generation ships are a favorite SF trope of mine.
November 14, 2021 at 2:27 pm
Thanks!
November 21, 2021 at 2:28 am
I enjoyed Cryoburn. Bujold is one of my favorite authors.
November 21, 2021 at 4:43 pm
I also like her fantasy work. Havey you read them?