Human Popsicle



""You can freeze/Like a 30 century man/Like a 30 century man""

- Scott Walker, "30 Century Man"

The poor man's Time Travel—unfortunately, it's one-way.

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

The result is that we get a Fish Out of Temporal Water setup wherein a human—usually the audience's approximate contemporary—is thrust into The Future and has to deal. This can get especially thorny if their home or civilization has since been destroyed and forgotten, or changed beyond recognition, making them a Living Relic.

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

Invariably, cryonics, the study of preserving humans or other organisms at low temperature, is confused with cryogenics, the creation of very low temperatures and the study of how materials work in those conditions. Honestly, just because a word has '-gen-' in it doesn't mean it has anything to do with biology....

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

The Human Popsicle 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 Green Rocks or overt magic (or both!), 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" (either literally or a Convenient Coma that slows aging) to allow them to survive the travel times between stars. The ship gets knocked off course, or encounters a Negative Space Wedgie, and isn't found again until far into the future. Alternatively, in the hundreds of years the trip takes, humans manage to invent 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 Speculative Fiction 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 Fling a Light Into the Future.
 * 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" bit is an unsolved problem. As is the fact that current laws allow the freezing process to begin only after whatever was killing you has already finished the job once, so your future saviours would have to know how to unfreeze you, cure what you had, and bring you back to life.

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. And as mentioned above, people cannot legally be cryonically suspended until they are pronounced clinically dead (or aren't legally alive yet, like the aforementioned embryos), which could cause problems if brain damage occurs due to anoxia. For the sake of television, we just assume that whoever does the thawing has the technology to overcome this. Sometimes this problem is Handwaved by claiming that what's actually going on is some sort of localized time stop (Time Stands Still, 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, they will turn out to be psychopathic murderers (just ask the crew of Red Dwarf).

This is not to be confused with Ajax's plans for you with a bat.

Anime and Manga

 * In One Piece, Nico Robin and Monkey D. Luffy were shockfrozen solid by Marine Admiral Akoiji. Although their conditions were treated seriously, and there was some panic on how they were de-frosted.
 * Cowboy Bebop: Having been frozen fifty years or so ago is part of Backstory.
 * Aeka and Sasami from Tenchi Muyo! put themselves in suspended animation in the OVA universe while searching for Yosho, despite 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?)
 * 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 Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch reveals that
 * 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 Saint Seiya, 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,  Also, Hyoga's Hot Mom Natasha has been "sorta" buried in a similar environment aka a sunk ship under heavy ice layers and incredibly cold water placed in Siberia.
 * In Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas and its anecdotes, there are . None of them are going to wake up though.
 * in the Chrono Crusade manga both wake up over seventy years after the events of the series after . Many years later, Azumaria's grandson is helping   adjust to it all while   rode off with Shader into the sunset on a motorcycle.
 * In G Gundam, a Mad Scientist who's about to be executed for treason is actually put into this state to have his Hot-Blooded younger son and said son's Hot Scientist partner capture the Devil Gundam that he created.
 * The Gundam Wing sequel novel Frozen Teardrop introduces cryogenic stasis pods invented by Doctor J (the creator of Wing Gundam). They also have the side-effect of causing memory damage, which means the subject must have data fed into their brains to fill in the gaps.
 * 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 Berlin Wall intact. While logically all four of them should have suffered considerable culture shock, Albert gets the most specific and frequent comments on how much has changed in forty years.
 * 001 was an infant before being placed in suspended animation, and was still an infant going out. He wasn't old enough to know what the world was like before he became a cyborg to be able to make such comments after becoming a cyborg.
 * 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...
 * from the Sailor Moon anime tries to commit suicide by encasing herself in ice after losing to Sailor Mercury.
 * A straighter example is that the entire planet was frozen for several decades before the formation of Crystal Tokyo. Who or what did the freezing wasn't really explained.
 * In Katekyo Hitman Reborn the Evil Prince Xanxus spends eight years as a Human Popsicle 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 King of Thorn, 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.
 * In Fullmetal Alchemist, the Briggs Corp temporarily incapacitate the homunculus Sloth by getting it into the cold outside of the fortress, and dousing it with the fuel they use for their tanks. The fuel has a very low melting and boiling point, to keep it from freezing up in the frigid conditions, so when it's poured on Sloth, it quickly evaporates, robbing his body of heat. So it's kind of like the reverse of the usual method (encased in a block of ice) but with the usual result (total bodily shutdown).
 * It should be noted that the only reason he came back, as well as why the heroes resorted to freezing him, is that homunculi are nigh invulnerable.
 * In F-Zero Falcon Densetsu, this was the backstory to Ryu - a policeman from the present, horribly wounded in a car chase against Zoda (yes that Zoda, and it is just to give him a reason to race), frozen and restored to health in the future to race in F-Zero.
 * Broly, due to his injuries from his defeat against Goku in Movie 10, went into a seven year coma. Consequentally, the crater from his arrival on Earth became a lake and froze during this time.
 * Lorelei from Pokémon Special can turn anyone into a popsicle via the voodoo dolls formed from her Jynx's Ice Beam. Red was frozen for two months and when he escaped, he suffered painful frostbite for a year before finding a cure.
 * One of the immortals of Baccano! spent around 250 years, from the early 1700s to sometime during the Cold War, trapped in a crevasse in the Arctic Circle.
 * Yakumo from Shinzo spends 300 years in Cold Sleep.

Comic Books
"Spider: [Mary] could have told the future what it'd be like to meet Che Guevara in that old Cuban schoolhouse. She could have told them about the last Queen and Albert Einstein and a million other true stories besides. But the future didn't want to know. It honored the contracts with the past; revived them, gave them their money back, gave them the hostels. Put them away with a new, unspoken, contract: Don't bother us. We're not interested."
 * Captain America (comics) 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 Serum that gave him his powers.
 * The science fiction comic Transmetropolitan deconstructs this trope with the concept of "revivals"; people from the 20th century and beyond who had their bodies cryogenically frozen shortly after death in the hopes they would be revived with new bodies later on. In the current day of the comic (whenever that is), 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. Revivals 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, and nobody cares about them.


 * The Phantom Zone in Superman comics prevents aging for those inside. One character, Mon-El, was put in there in the Present Day after he got lead poisoning, and survived until the 30th century, when a cure could be found.
 * In Elf Quest 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 Gold Digger, 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.
 * In the original Squadron Supreme limited series, the Squadron creates hibernaculums as an alternative to eliminating disease. People near death would be kept in suspended animation, presumably to be revived in the future once a cure to their ailment is found.
 * According to his self-titled comic book, Jon Juan was frozen in ice for centuries.
 * After suffering massive neurological damage, Tony Stark faked his death and preserved his body via cryogenics.
 * An old comic 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 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 Garfield: His 9 Lives, a comic exploring Garfield's other 8 lives, his second life was as a Viking cat who got frozen in a block of ice with the rest of his Viking crew. They eventually drifted down to modern St. Paul, Minnesota and wreak havoc.
 * X-Men villain Omega Red, who was cryogenically frozen after his superiors decided he was too dangerous to control.
 * In the story "Cave Man", in issue #19 of Tales from the Crypt, a museum sub-curator who was jealous that his own exhibit was being ignored in favor of a recently-discovered frozen specimen of Neanderthal Man thawed out the body, with fairly predictable results.

Comic Strips

 * In Frank and Ernest, Frank wanted this once—not long—to sleep through election years.

Film
""Tech Support!""
 * Alien: A plot point that shows up several times. Most ships freeze their human crew/cargo, with the ships being run by artificial persons (aka androids). In the first movie, the stasis effect was how the android planned to get a crewmember infected with an alien larva back home: the alien won't hatch in stasis, and the other cryopods can easily be sabotaged to eliminate all other witnesses. In the second, we find that Ripley's escape crypod had been drifting for over half a century: she is now a woman without a place, as her family has all died of old age long before (setting up her 'adoption' of Newt). In the third, the Sulaco is attempting to return home via autopilot (as the few surviving humans are in the freezer and the AP, Bishop, is damaged): thus, nobody is available to kill a facehugger that managed to get aboard and causes more damage.
 * Space travel in the Riddick setting requires suspended animation, seemingly induced by replacing the blood with blue slime.
 * Well, science! states that one of the big problems with cryogenic freezing is ice crystals forming in the cells and tearing stuff up. Some sort of natural anti-freeze or, well, blood replacement, is going to be necessary.
 * Which is also why it's illegal to freeze people before death: Because one needs to be completely exsanguinated and their blood replaced that way in order to be 'safely' frozen. You can't technically freeze a live person without 'murdering' them first (by replacing their blood so they have a hope of revival) even if you don't consider the frozen person to be technically dead.
 * 2001: A Space Odyssey—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. In 2010: The Year We Make Contact, Floyd tells his son it's "so we won't go cuckoo."
 * Star Wars features Han Solo frozen in carbonite as a method of incarceration. And decoration!
 * Though as a slight variation, the characters make it clear that they aren't entirely sure the carbonite freezing is something a human can survive. Darth Vader was essentially using Han as a guinea pig to see if it would work later for Luke.
 * Similarly, both the hero and villain of Demolition Man are freeze-incarcerated, because they are too violent and a threat to society.
 * Pretty much the entire plot of Encino Man, starring Pauly Shore and Brendan Fraser. Fraser's character is a caveman thawed in modern times by two high school students.
 * Played straight in Iceman
 * Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery—suspended animation as a kind of Time Travel - Dr. Evil only wanted to survive his space exile, and Powers, to be there when his nemesis returned.
 * But look what it did to Mr. Bigglesworth!
 * In the film version of Minority Report, it appears that potential murderers are kept in some form of suspended animation, although this is never made explicit.
 * Forever Young—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?)
 * Call it bittersweet: He did it because his girlfriend was in a coma and believed to be as good as dead from being hit by a car.
 * Friday the 13th (film) - 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....
 * Genesis II (1973), in which a NASA scientist taking part in an suspended animation experiment ends up sleeping a lot longer than he expected.
 * Sherlock Holmes in The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1987) and Sherlock Holmes Returns (1993).
 * The four astronauts in Planet of the Apes (1968).
 * Woody Allen's character Miles Monroe in Sleeper. He gets frozen in the 20th century, and thawed 200 years later - wrapped in tin foil for freshness.
 * Eddie!
 * Who later becomes.
 * Project Iceman.
 * Ice Age and the sequel several times: once with the creatures (dinosaur, sloth-creatures, flying saucer) in the wall of the cave, and the other with right at the end. In the second film, two carnivorous water-dwelling creatures are thawed 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 possess someone, but learns too late that in the future, 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 Human Popsicle 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.
 * It's worse. He doesn't care for pickup lines, and rapes her. And then leaves the then-unpossessed guy behind with her. And if you think that's bad, he comes back and repeats it all until he's fairly sure she's impregnated.
 * In the French comedy Hibernatus, starring Louis de Funès, a major character is frozen in ice and glycerin (allowing him not to die) when on a scientific mission in Antarctica in the early 20th century. He is discovered in present time (The Seventies). A small town is changed back to what it was in 1905 in order to preserve him from the shock of discovering his hibernation... Hilarity Ensues.
 * A version was done for television ("Adorable Snow's Woman"). Pilot lady Lucie de Saint Pierre has an airplane crash in mountains in the Roaring Twenties, and woke up in 2002. The family that is in her house by now have to act as they were her new servants.
 * 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 The Thing 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.: Artificial Intelligence, 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 Monsters vs. Aliens, 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 Event Horizon, the crew of the rescue ships are kept in pods during the trip. Par for the course for this Crapsack World: it isn't a pleasant experience.
 * In Vanilla Sky the main character is horribly disfigured in a car crash. After that, things get weird..

"Moe: Twenty minutes to a pound. [chuckles] We'll be here a month!"
 * Moon (2009). A hibernation chamber is used by the solitary moonbase operator for the three day trip back to Earth.
 * In Avatar, this is used for everyone going to Pandora, because it is a six-year trip. Ships carry three flight crews, each on ice for four years to avoid Space Madness.
 * According to the Avatar Wiki, it's also done to conserve consumables like air and food. If the cryogenic system fails in mid-flight, the passengers are euthanized so that they don't starve to death.
 * A Walt Disney-esque character in Able Edwards (the first feature film shot entirely in front of a greenscreen) is unfrozen in the future...only to be unsalvageable because of damage sustained by being frozen. They can clone him though.
 * Pandorum. The crew of a colony ship wake up to find everything has gone to hell while they were asleep (or are they?) just suffering from the Space Madness which is a known side-effect of hypersleep?
 * In a very early and short-term example, the Three Stooges flee trouble in an ice cream truck - a couple of hours later Moe and Larry pull Curly from the back, who is frozen solid. They thaw him out over an open fire on a rotating spit.


 * Not a part of this trope but the name is mentioned in Mr. Deeds by a reporter in reference to Preston Blake freezing atop a mountain.
 * Late For Dinner is about a man and his mentally challenged friend from the sixties accidentally being cryogenically frozen and waking up in the nineties. Played pretty seriously.
 * A fundamental part of deep-space travel in Alien Cargo.
 * In Rocket Man chambers are again used to conserve food and air on both the trip to Mars and the return trip. However, the protagonist is impeded from entering his both times.
 * In Captain America: The First Avenger, Captain America is heavily implied, although never outright stated, to have underwent this trope.
 * Later on, in The Avengers, Iron Man refers to him as a "Capsicle". A brief flashback sequence also shows a clearly-frozen Cap being examined on by scientists.

Folklore

 * A famously bizarre Urban Legend states that Walt Disney was frozen and placed under the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. He was actually cremated.
 * That's what they want you to believe.

Literature

 * In Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous With Rama, 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 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.
 * The Door Into Summer by Robert A. Heinlein starts out being based around this trope.
 * Undertow by Elizabeth Bear had galactic society that used Schrodinger's Uncertainty Principle to teleport goods and information instantly between planets. However, living creatures like humans that went through the process wound up dead on the other side due to collapsing the wave function. As such, transporting people from planet to planet requires slower-than-light ships and cryogenics.
 * 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 Fiasco, the 1986 hard Science Fiction novel by Polish science-fiction writer and philosopher Stanislaw 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.
 * The science-fiction novel The Centurions Empire 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 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
 * Larry Niven:
 * Short stories and novels involving "corpsicles", his name for Human Popsicles.
 * ... and his early short story Wait It Out, where the protagonist achieves the same effect by stripping naked on the surface of Pluto.
 * 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 Revelation Space novels by Alastair Reynolds are full of Human Popsicles, 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.
 * Ender's Game: 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.)
 * Orson Scott Card 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.
 * The other books in the extended Enderverse also continue this theme, sometimes with interesting results. For example, in the beginning of the sequel, Speaker for the Dead, Ender moves on to another planet while his older sister, Valentine, stays behind. The result is a trip that takes only about two weeks for Ender, but takes over twenty years real-time. Which means that once he arrives, Ender is still in his late twenties, while "Val" is in her early fifties.
 * 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
 * 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 grav waves much less likely, making it safe enough for use in colonization efforts. The original Manticoran colonists put all their life savings in a series of trust funds 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) the managed trust would make it so they could buy what else they may need. The trust managers invested well over the years and when they arrived there was a small colony full of technical experts waiting for them, including the bare bones of what would be their space navy.
 * 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
 * The Graveyard Heart 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.
 * Isle Of The Dead is about a 20th-century Earthman who signs up as one of the first space explorers before humans have light speed. Everything has to be in sleeper ships and it takes 40–80 years to get to the planet. He does this several times. When FTL travel is made practical, it causes colossal changes throughout the galaxy, let alone Earth. Our hero is now the oldest living human, feels he doesn't belong anywhere, and goes to the longest-lived race in the galaxy to see how they live their thousand-year lives—and thereby hangs the tale.
 * 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.
 * The Far Arena 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.
 * Joe Haldeman used the relativistic version in The Forever War in order to create an allegory for how the returnees from war (in his case, The Vietnam War) were alienated from everyone else back home when they returned. In the end
 * 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 (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 Crapsack World 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.
 * In the latest novel, Cryoburn Miles is on a planet whose entire culture, and economy revolves around cryogenics. 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 cryogenic 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.)
 * 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 the only person who owns all existing shares of stock in himself.
 * Probably based on 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.
 * 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 Cryonics Failure. One character remains conscious while frozen, thus being paralyzed and deprived of sensory input for five hundred years, which causes temporary catatonia and permanent brain-rearrangement upon revival. Another character, who was pregnant, gestates extremely slowly and gives birth, while still in stasis, to a Nightmare Fuel mutant baby with no eyes and a Psychic Link to its mother, among other things. It, too, grows extremely slowly while in stasis, ending up around two-ish physically when everyone gets unfrozen.
 * Tek Wars uses it as a form of punishment; this carried over into the TV series.
 * Sleeper units in 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.
 * Harry Turtledove'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.
 * Peter Hamilton's The Night's Dawn Trilogy 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:
 * In Jack Campbell's Lost Fleet series, protagonist John Geary's ship is sneak-attacked by Syndicate Worlds warships and destroyed after a desperate battle. His hibernation escape pod's beacon is damaged, leaving him stranded among the ship's debris for over a century. When he's finally picked up, he discovers that the war started by the sneak attack has run continuously ever since. Worse yet, his heroic last stand has become the stuff of legends, and "Black Jack" Geary is now something of a semi-mythical folk hero. Worst of all, the terrible casualty rate has killed off skilled fleet officers faster than they could train the next generation, and as a result the tactics of the day mainly consist of charging wildly at the enemy and relying on Heroic Spirit. Enter John Geary, a fairly average fleet officer from 100 years ago, which makes him effectively a tactical genius now...
 * 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.
 * In Garth Nix's Sabriel, Sabriel finds a man who was preserved for two hundred years in the form of a statue, in order to protect him.
 * In Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl: 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.
 * In an earlier Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code, Artemis uses the refrigerator in a
 * 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.
 * In The Pentagon War, humans use "submetabolic sleep" technology to endure the years-long trips between star systems. Alpha Centaurians are cold blooded creatures who naturally hibernate when the temperature falls below 5 degrees C, so the only cryonic technology they need for interstellar voyages are refrigerators.
 * Rene Barjavel's The Ice People (original title La Nuit de Temps—can be translated as Winter Night or The Night of Time, appropriately) 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 . ..
 * In Andrey Livadniy's The History of the Galaxy series, all early extrasolar colony ships had the crew/colonists placed in cryogenic chambers for the duration of the journey. Not all woke up on arrival. If the system failed to activate the revival process in a reasonable time frame, the Hugo BD 12 androids would switch to "colony survival" mode and take any steps necessary to that end, including manual activation of the waking up process. Most ships also include stasis chambers for emergencies, including escape pods.
 * 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.
 * Alastair Reynolds:
 * In the Revelation Space universe, the preferred method of cryonics is called reefersleep, and it involves keeping the body close to absolute zero so not only is all biological activity arrested, but also electromagnetic activity from any neural implants they may have.
 * In the 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.
 * 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
 * Carreras Legions: Colonists to Terra Nova were kept in cryogenics to cut down on consumables needed for the trip between the rift and the home planets of either star system, and make them easier to handle, particularly those who weren't making the trip voluntarily.
 * 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.
 * Allen Steele's novel Coyote features a sleeper ship with a saboteur aboard whose job it is to wake up a few weeks after the beginning of the mission and destroy the ship.
 * 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...
 * James White's The Dream Millennium has an unsettling variation: the colonists aboard the sleeper ship have nightmares in which they experience increasingly violent deaths, while in hibernation. And it's a long voyage...
 * Used to allow settling of Epsilon Erdani II in Helm by survivors of the destruction of Earth's ecosphere.

Live Action TV

 * Star Trek: 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).
 * Scotty from the original series uses a variation, as revealed in the Next Generation episode "Relics". By storing himself in the transporter's pattern buffer he skipped the intervening years until rescue by essentially not existing.
 * Similarly to "The Neutral Zone", Star Trek: Voyager: "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 Amelia Earhart.
 * In a second season episode ofStar Trek: Voyager, the crew find a few aliens that are in a stasis chamber years after they should have left. Janeway, being who she is, feels they must investigate.
 * Stargate SG-1: A number of races possess stasis pods, which can preserve a humanoid for many thousands of years. Stargate Atlantis twice touched on the fact that this form of stasis does not completely halt aging, but merely slows it down; all the frozen characters they encounter, having spent 10,000 years in stasis, have aged well past their natural lifespan and would die of old age within hours (at best) of defrosting. The same happens later with in an SG-1 episode.
 * Subverted in one two-parter episode of SG1, when the team wake up and are told they have been in stasis, only to find it was
 * 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 ancient not a human, which discounts time-travel.
 * Power Rangers in Space: Zhane was preserved in a stasis pod for several years while his injuries healed.
 * Power Rangers Time Force: In the year 3000, mutant criminals are frozen and miniaturized for storage.
 * Kyoryu Sentai Zyuranger: The Zyuranger were frozen in their native time to come back in the present.
 * So Weird: "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.
 * Red Dwarf: 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). And in something of a subversion, the body itself didn't get preserved very well, either.
 * 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.
 * Knight Rider: "Knight Rider 2000"'s central premise was that, by the year 2000, criminals would be cryogenically suspended for the duration of their prison terms.
 * Humanity froze itself to wait out an environmental catastrophe in the Doctor Who serial The Ark In Space, the Cybermen froze themselves to conserve resources in The Tomb of the Cybermen, and a number of other stories featured cold preservation.
 * One other example includes.
 * "A Christmas Carol" has the Eleventh Doctor end up on a world where a greedy family lends money to people in return for a family member put on ice as collateral. The large part of the episode involves the Doctor and a kid unfreezing a beautiful woman every Christmas Eve for a day, until the kid grows up and falls for her. Unfortunately,.
 * In Torchwood, various characters are frozen/unfrozen in the Torchwood Hub, including someone who was dead for half the season.
 * Presumably, those still frozen (including ) are dead now that the Hub is destroyed as of Children of Earth.
 * Farscape once featured a stasis process which turn the future rulers of a particular planet into metal statues; during this time, they're still aware of everything occurring around them, so that when they're eventually revived, they'll have seen and heard enough of the politics going on in the building to function as effective monarchs. The statue stasis is specifically mentioned to be only safe for Sebaceans. Crichton barely survives the process the first time and would likely have died if attempted again; even the first time causes him so much pain that his statue doesn't look very "kingly," what with kneeling on the floor and screaming in agony. Interestingly, after his statue is beheaded by a Scarran, a Peacekeeper agent glues it back on, allowing him to be "revived" with few difficulties beyond those caused by his incompatibility.
 * The second-season finale featured a massive cryogenics facility beneath Diagnosan Tocot's surgery, where Tocot and Grunchlk store the bodies of all the patients that didn't survive their treatments. Most of them are pretty much beyond saving, and are only kept around as donors for luckier patients; unfortunately, because they're frozen before they actually die, the souls of the "donors" remain trapped in their bodies. However, one or two of the frozen residents turn out to be perfectly healthy- among them being Jool and a very irritated Scarran agent.
 * 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.
 * Not just medical. The Alliance was looking for a brother and a sister together, not one man with a crate.
 * Meanwhile in Angel, this is how Vampire Hunter Daniel Holtz came to the present: frozen inside a statue by the demon Sahjhan.
 * The Twilight Zone 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.
 * Adam Adamant Lives: 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 Cliff Hanger episode, it was revealed that
 * The 1960s British kids' puppet show Space Patrol (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 Buck Rogers in the 25th Century gets a one-way ticket to the future when his life support systems are frozen as well.
 * The 1967 show The Second Hundred Years 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.
 * VR.5: We learn in one of the final episodes that a character killed early on was cryonically preserved.
 * Played straight in an episode of 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 Dead Person Impersonation by killing the prison warden and putting him in the freezer instead.
 * The News Radio '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,.
 * Used in Babylon 5 to hold injured or ill individuals until they could reach more advanced medical help.
 * 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 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 Human Popsicle.
 * Saturday Night Live - the "Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer" character plays to the jury's sympathies by claiming this or that modern phenomenon 'frightens and confuses' him.
 * In 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.
 * Xena and Gabrielle of Xena: Warrior Princess was accidentally frozen and slept for over twenty years by Ares. They stayed there.
 * "Bronzing" in Warehouse 13 is functionally equivalent, except the victim remains conscious.
 * General Hospital built a storyline about archvillainess Helena Cassadine's mysterious experiments in a subterranean lab beneath the hospital. It turned out she had cryogenically frozen her elder son, Stavros, after his death twenty years earlier, and was preparing to 'defrost' him
 * In the pilot episode of Better Off Ted, Phil the scientist is put in a cryogenic tube for three days. Ted says that "We froze him. Like a human leftover."
 * One episode of Castle has a Victim of the Week who had a monitoring system to alert a cryogenics company to collect him for freezing upon his death. This causes several problems for Castle and Beckett when the company in question abscond with the body before the police arrive.
 * The main premise of "The Last Train" where a meteor strike is about to hit the earth causing bringing about the end of civilisation as we know it so the nations top scientists are stored as human popsicles in an underground laboratory whilst the general public is kept ignorant. The main characters are all random strangers travelling on the same train who get also get made into human popsicles when a junior scientist traveling on the same train realises she wont make it to the facility in time and activates one of the freezing devices. She initially has a hard time convincing the others of what really happened when they all thaw out.
 * On Fringe, the amber chemical that is used to contain interdimensional rifts sometimes traps people within it when it solidifies. The government declares people who gets ambered legally dead, but the episode "Amber 31422" reveals that the people trapped inside are in suspended animation and one person is successfully revived. In "Letters of Transit" late in the fourth season,.
 * The wealthy villain in one episode of The Saint intended to have himself frozen until his failing heart could be fixed. But first he had to perfect the freezing technique so it wouldn't kill the subject. He was kidnapping people as guinea pigs for the process. It was at least implied that there'd been some confirmed deaths of his test victims.

Music
"I'm freezing, I'm frozen, I'm icicle blue So-o-o cold!"
 * Alice Cooper's "Refrigerator Heaven", wherein the POV character gets frozen until they find a cure for cancer.

"If I live till 97 You'll still be waiting in refrigerator heaven..."
 * The song was referenced by name in Alice's later song "Cold Ethyl":

"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."
 * The narrator of James Taylor's "The Frozen Man" was subjected to an accidental version of this when he fell overboard.

"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!"
 * 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.


 * 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.
 * Denis Leary, in the song "Asshole", claims that John Wayne didn't die, but was frozen until a cure for his cancer could be found.
 * Twice in the music video for Harmony by Erasure.
 * The Monkees’ 1987 music video for the single “Heart and Soul” features Davy, Micky and Peter frozen in big blocks of ice in what is meant to be the year “1967.” Fast-forward 20 years via Exploding Calendar, and it's now 1987. A group of random hairdryers suddenly melts the ice away, freeing the threesome from their frozen state. The newly unfrozen Monkees (strangely 20 years older) then venture off and romp into the "totally 80’s" world, while still believing it is the 1960’s.
 * Tom Smith's Hyperspace Cryogenic Insomnia Blues is about an astronaut on a space ship who's crew is all in cryogenic chambers and frozen for the duration of their flight. Only his isn't working, and he is trapped inside until they reach their destination... ten years from now.
 * The song "Staci Statis" by Zombina and the Skeletones is a love song about a woman who is cryogenically frozen somewhere in space.

Newspaper Comics

 * 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.
 * Pruneface in Dick Tracy. Almost frozen to death in his original appearance in 1942, writer Max Allan Collins later revealed that he had been used in a cyrogenics experiment: allowing him to be thawed out in 1983.

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.

Tabletop Games

 * The limited release White Wolf game Orpheus is centered around a company that discovered a way to perfect the cryogenic process... and discovered a lucrative sideline in the process.

Theatre
""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!""
 * Parodied in one Australian play where the crew of a Generation Ship fall into barbarity and think that the Human Popsicles are the equivalent of frozen food. When the last remaining colonist wakes up early, he's not too impressed.

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.
 * Five. Only four actually make it to Sirius, as far as everyone knows.
 * In Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, 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.
 * The manual mentions that the technology was developed based on certain Kharakian creatures that are able to hibernate for long periods of time. Maybe we should study bears.
 * 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 necessarily with the Halo title)
 * The Halo 4 trailer answers that.
 * On an interesting note, the original Halo trilogy begins with Master Chief getting thawed out of his Cryo tube and in the last one has him getting into one.
 * The novels have another Spartan spend the entirety of Halo: Combat Evolved on ice due to an injury. Of course, thanks to Halo: Reach, this is (maybe) no longer canon.
 * In the Half-Life series,
 * The "week" example was half stasis, half Time Travel.
 * Many Sci Fi-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 Mass Effect, the Protheans use pods in order to . Alas, they forgot to stock on batteries.
 * In Romancing SaGa, this is how the Heroes encounter
 * All of the Hero storylines so far in Maplestory (minus the Evan storyline) involve this; for the Mercedes storyline, the entire elven hometown is like this, due to its ruler being cursed. The Demon Slayer is also sealed, but in rock, not ice.
 * In Day of the Tentacle, 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 The Slow Path 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.
 * Raz in Overblood wakes up from being one at the start of the game... why he was there is the mystery.
 * Played straight with Jean Bison in the second Sly Cooper 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.
 * Not to mention this would keep them young and sexy. There are no female fighters on any roster that are over the age of 25 physically. Yet we have an old man who is over 100 and still fighting.
 * In Project Eden 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
 * In Street Fighter III, Remy's ending shows him checking on his deceased older sister, who is encased in ice.
 * Samus' gunship in 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, with predictable results.
 * In a late part of the game Space Quest 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. Being a Sierra adventure game, there's plenty of ways to screw up the freezing process, which kills her and Roger via temporal paradox. (His future son, born by her, saved his life in the previous game.)
 * Space Quest 2 ends with Roger putting into cryo sleep when his escape pod's life support is almost depleted leaving the pod floating in space until Space Quest 3 begins.
 * In a Sidequest of Mario and Luigi RPG 3, the Mario brothers discover in Bowser's castle beings frozen in ice. Unfreezing them reveals 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 Live a Live as a Good Morning, Crono 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. Then they receive it themselves.
 * Descent 3 features an 'emergency stasis' system in the intro video which appears to freeze the pilot.
 * Final Fantasy VIII features the sorceress Adel, who was frozen and put into space years before the game began.
 * Crystal stasis in Final Fantasy XIII functions like cryonics, complete with transforming into an ice-like statue. ...Wait, what? You mean that's not how it works in real life? Oh...
 * Similarly, in Final Fantasy VII, Sephiroth's true body was discovered to be in stasis within a mako cocoon in a manner similar to cryogenics.
 * The player character in Infocom's Suspended is one of these. Unlike most examples, he is still partially conscious (his mind is used to control most of society's required tech), and is totally woken up (but still frozen) when a major crisis occurs.
 * Visual Novel Ever 17 does this, involving an extremely elaborate plan to give the game a happy ending.
 * Fallout 3 Mothership Zeta has plenty of those, an original Samurai, a cowboy, 20th century army medic & more - all frozen, and some don't defrost that well. RIP, Mr. Astronaut...
 * Bug!! has the Abominable Snowbug boss, first seen trapped in a large block of ice (presumably frozen during the ice age). He breaks out as soon as Bug walks a few steps.
 * Stasis is available in Dead Space 2, both in ice and time stop versions. There are frozen dead bodies of Unitologies and stasis beds to preserve critical patients. There is also the suggestion that Isaac has been in and out of stasis during the two years after the events of Dead Space.
 * In Mystery Case Files: Dire Grove, four graduate students are missing in a weird blizzard, and when you find them, they've each been turned into one of these. It's an abbreviated form of the trope, though, since they're only in that condition for a few days at most.
 * In a similar situation in Mystery Trackers 3: Black Isle, a character spent a couple days or so in a frozen state after running afoul of the villain's mental abilities. A plain old heat lamp thawed him out just fine.
 * X-COM: Terror From the Deep gives us alien popsicles. Most of the aliens were kept in cryogenic sleep chambers for thousands of years. You can even find some of these in Alien Colonies and Artifact Sites.
 * Snowball, the 1983 text adventure game from Level 9 Computing, starts with the POV character thawing out.
 * The in-development game 0x10c begins with the player character awakening from stasis, billions of years too late.
 * The in-development game 0x10c begins with the player character awakening from stasis, billions of years too late.

Web Comics

 * In Schlock Mercenary, the (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 duplicated nearly a billion times and becomes the largest single ethnic group in the galaxy.
 * For fun in this Loserz strip.
 * In Freefall, almost all space travel beyond one's current star system is done in "cold sleep". FTL travel is very expensive and takes weeks to months, and there's not enough space for life support systems.
 * In El Goonish Shive, Abraham does this to himself magically encasing himself in stone to be awakened whenever anyone touches the Dewitchery Diamond.
 * SSDD had Norman Gates faking his death and being frozen for some 400 years as part of a centuries long Xanatos Roulette involving time travel (not his plan of course).
 * Also used for cheap interplanetary travel, referred to as little more than pressurized freezers that someone without cybernetic upgrades shouldn't be able to survive.

Web Original

 * In the first Rooster Teeth Short, Burnie and Geoff attempt to send Shannon to the future via this method.
 * Bianca Holloway in The Gungan Council was frozen for thousands of years before Darth Apparatus revived her.

Western Animation
"Sokka: "How are you not frozen?!""
 * Futurama: Fry is thrust into the year 3000 when he falls into a cryonic pod. We later find that his girlfriend, Pauly Shore, Weird Al, and That Guy had all undertaken the same process (the last of which was frozen to survive terminal boneitis - ).
 * In Gargoyles, Goliath and the other survivors of Clan Wyvern were placed into stone sleep "until the castle rises above the clouds" and reviving atop the tallest skyscraper in the world about 1000 years later.
 * Batman: The Animated Series: Mr. Freeze himself was not cryonically preserved, but his condition and powers resulted from an accident while cryonically preserving his wife.
 * A Tear Jerker 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 one of the few genuine bits of pathos in the horrible Batman and Robin film. Thank you, Paul Dini.
 * Parodied in the South Park episode "Prehistoric Ice Man", in which a man is discovered frozen in ice, is successfully thawed... and turns out to be from the unthinkably ancient year 1996.
 * For those of you who haven't seen the episode, it's from 1998. Further parody and Rule of Funny is invoked when the man returns home... only to find that his wife moved on and found a new husband which she has a biological child with that's 13 years old.
 * 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 Justice League Unlimited, 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.
 * Justice League also gave us the Hitlercicle. Yes, we're serious.
 * The New Avengers did it in live action, as did The Tomorrow People with a frozen and secretly alien Hitler.
 * Similarly, in Avatar: The Last Airbender, Aang gets frozen into an iceberg for a hundred years, when he entered the Avatar State to save himself. Word of God says he survived because of the Avatar Spirit.
 * A lampshade is hung on this when he comes out of the iceberg:

"Aang: I'll freeze myself inside a block of ice! Yeah, best plan ever!"
 * Ruthlessly parodied on Avatar the Abridged Series, where Aang's instructor specifically tells him not to do this if he ever gets caught in a storm.

"Smithers: How are we doing, boys? Professor Frink: Well, we're up to fifteen!"
 * Unfortunately, spending a century in a block of ice did a number on his lifespan, which is why he's dead by the time of the Sequel Series.
 * Omi uses the "Orb of Tornami" with his particular ice incantation to freeze himself into the future twice in Xiaolin Showdown. 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.
 * Parodically referenced by The Simpsons several times.
 * In the episode "Radio Bart" Bart uses a walkie-talkie to imitate a child trapped in the bottom of a well. When nobody can offer a solution to rescue the boy, Prof. Frink suggests that the town use cryonics to freeze him so he can be rescued in the future. Poking fun at the trope while combining it with patented Simpsons Somebody Else's Problem humor.
 * Jasper Beardley tries to cryonically freeze himself to see the future in the Kwik-E-Mart's freezer section. He woke up after just a couple days, but still thought it was the future when he saw the store was selling Moon Pies. (Well... technically he's right)
 * Another episode took place twenty years in the future, and revealed that Mr. Burns had been frozen by Smithers, and he would only be thawed when "science discovers a cure for seventeen stab wounds in the back."


 * Mr. Burns' lost teddy bear also ends up frozen in the Arctic for some 40 years.
 * SpongeBob SquarePants 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 Shiny Future (literally everything was chrome) filled with Spongebob clones, and ended up in a fetal position screaming "Future!"
 * Lucky for him, by this point in time people have perfected time-travel, and Future-Spongebob directs him to a time machine that will take him back to his own time—but not before accidentally leading him into the can-opener.
 * Narrowly avoided in Sherlock Holmes in the 22nd Century: Lestrade is convinced that Moriarty somehow survived his "death" at Reichenbach Falls as a Human Popsicle, 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 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 Applied Phlebotinum.
 * Probably because he was THERE, to make very, very sure Moriarty was Deader Than Dead, not Only Mostly Dead. (And did the deed himself.)
 * Duck Dodgers' titular hero, according to the 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, Lion-O's capsule malfunctioned, and didn't inhibit his aging, making him a child in an adult body.
 * Skyfire in the cartoon version of The Transformers got the "frozen in ice" version, while all the Transformers aboard Ark and Nemesis were the "suspended animation" variety and survived thanks to their 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.
 * Captain Caveman was frozen in a block of ice in the Stone Age, and found/thawed 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.
 * On Jimmy Two-Shoes, this is the eventual fate of every member of the Henious family. As Lucius VI put it, "Every time there's an argument, someone gets frozen."
 * Bump in the Night used this trope not with ice but with fear. In one episode, Bumpy and Squishy wanted Molly to play Hide & Go Freak with them, and they managed to scare her so much that she went stiff.
 * Family Guy: Stewie asks his future self if they unfroze Walt Disney—which they did, only to have him freeze himself again after learning the Jews are still around.
 * Longshot's Cryocrypt in Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers. A bit of an audience sucker punch in that two of the Rangers have family who are locked away in it. "Lord of the Sands" also mentions that early human colonies used Sleeper Ships.
 * An episode of DuckTales (1987) was about a large, carnivorous prehistoric walrus being freed by accident from its icy prison by Webby's tuning fork and later threatening a nearby colony of penguins.
 * In "Modern Primitives" Billy finds Fred Flintstone frozen in his backyard.
 * In Robotix, the inhabitants of the planet Skalorr froze themselves underground to survive a catastrophe. Afterward, their central computer determined the world had been rendered uninhabitable. Rather than leave them all frozen forever, it transferred the minds of a few of them into the titular giant robots. They weren't expecting this, and were not pleased when the woke up in their new bodies.
 * In The Godzilla Power Hour, the Calico finds a World War I German sub frozen in ice. They have Godzilla thaw it out with his flame breath so they can study it. They are understandably surprised when the crew wakes up, thinking the war is still going on, and attacks them.
 * In Superman: The Animated Series, Supergirl aka Kara Zor-El and the rest of her family entered cryogenic stasis in an attempt to weather the devastation of their planet wrought by the nearby Krypton's destruction. Sadly, when Superman found them, Kara's pod was the only one still working. The other pods were damaged and had long ceased functioning, their occupants long dead.

Real Life

 * Ultimately, the "indefinite" version is physically impossible. Not because of the technical sides or implications, but because it uses a false premise: chemical reactions can be slowed down "as much as you want" in schoolbooks, while in reality heat motion is not the only thing allowing interactions on molecular level, so they slow down only to finite minimum speed at which quantum processes will do it no matter what. Of course, the point below which more freezing gives little return depends on the reagents, but it can be rather high (sometimes above liquid nitrogen) for very low-molecular compounds (which includes many free radicals that normally are dismissed as fleeting by-products). Of course, these limits are still wide enough that survivable freezing can be very useful.
 * The most immediate problem for living organisms (Terran, anyway) subjected to freezing is formation of ice crystals, which can both tear (by expanding) and cut (with edges) the cells apart from the inside. Many compounds can work as antifreeze without fatal poisoning - those are called "cryoprotectors". Some can even be introduced into living plants with water, and harmlessly wash away once it's warm again, which obviously has uses in agriculture. The other application is preservation of organs to be transplanted - which is not easy, but a much less complicated task than preserving the whole animal, as it's limited to a single organ with relatively few tissues, and necessary chemicals can be delivered directly via blood.
 * Successful transplant of frozen pig liver (Israeli Agricultural Research Organization in Bet Dagan, in 2008) 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 much 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.
 * The 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 prevents damage caused by ice. 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.
 * Another example is the Siberian salamander, that can stay frozen for years, and then simply walk it off.
 * 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.
 * Cryonic suspension is a service you can buy right now! The catch: Nobody knows how to freeze and thaw a person without killing them, so you have to be legally dead before it can be done to you. And it's somewhat expensive; it'll cost you or your life insurance company tens of thousands of dollars. On the plus side, the technology, and indeed science, to revive you might exist someday. Is being Only Mostly Dead instead of Killed Off for Real worth it? Your call.
 * You're hung upside-down in what's effectively a huge thermos flask with your head in a bucket. Why the bucket? Well, if the power fails, the rest of you will defrost but at least the last of the Liquid Nitrogen Dioxide will stay in the bucket with your head, which will remain frozen longest.
 * Unfortunately, one of the side effects to being frozen is the unevenness with which human tissue freezes. Remember that water expands when it freezes? It makes the head, in particular, very fragile and prone to cracking at the slightest knock. The industry term is Meatglass.
 * Minus the coming-back-to-life part, nature has created some very well-preserved mummies of early humans and hominids this way.
 * Not the least of which is Ötzi the Iceman, who was frozen in the Alps over five thousand years ago.
 * The Alpine Weta from New Zealand anybody? (Where do you think Weta Digital got their name?) freezes into a block of ice, comes the spring...
 * This actually happened to Jean Hilliard of North Dakota. She was frozen stiff, but was as good as new when she thawed out.
 * While you can't exactly go on forever, if you do happen to find yourself drowning in ice cold water, the temperature allows your brain to be deprived of oxygen longer. There have been cases of victims being underwater for almost a half hour and revived.
 * There's a saying to this effect, namely that nobody is dead until they're warm and dead.