Related to the quest for Immortality is a technical hedge against
mortality:
suspended animation. If a creature, most interestingly a human
being, could be held in stasis, supension, refrigeration, hibernation, or
some such condition for a long time, and then revived, that creature or
person would hav experienced no subjective increase in age, but would live
until a later date in the future than otherwise.
We see this concept first as extended sleep in The French playwright
Louis-Sebastien Mercier's "L'An 2440", later translated as "Memoirs of
the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred", 1771. Most familar to the
English-speaking world is Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" (1819).
A dozen major suspended animation fictions, in alphabetical order by author:
- Edmund Cooper's "The Uncertain Midnight" (19??)
- Erle Cox's "Out of the Silence" (19??)
- Robert Heinlein's "The Door Into Summer" (Doubleday, 19?57)
- Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" (1819)
- Laurence Manning's "The Man Who Awoke" (Ballentine, 1975)
- Louis-Sebastien Mercier's "L'An 2440" (1771)
- Michael Moorcock's "The Warlord of the Air" (Ace, 1971)
- William Morris' "News from Nowhere" (19??)
- Francis G. Rayer's "Tomorrow Never Comes" (19??)
- W. Clark Russell's "The Frozen Pirate" (1887)
- Stanley G. Weinbaum's "The Black Flame" (Fantasy Books, 1948)
- H. G. Wells' "When the Sleeper Wakes" (Harper, 1899)
The concept of preserving the human life by cooling appears in science
fiction in W. Clark Russell's "The Frozen Pirate" (1887), and is now a
reality, with the technology of
Cryonics.
8 major suspended animation fictions, in alphabetical order by author:
- Nikolai Amosoff's "Notes from the Future" (Simon & Schuster, 1970)
- Anders Bodelsen's "Freezing Down" (Harper & Row, 1971)
- Terry Carr's story "Ozymandias" (19??)
- Frederik Pohl's "The Age of the Pussyfoot" (Trident, 1969)
- Mack Reynolds' "Looking Backward from the Year 2000" (Ace, 1973)
- W. Clark Russell's "The Frozen Pirate" (1887)
- Clifford Simak's "Why call them Back from Heaven?" (Doubleday, 1967)
- E. C. Tubb's "The Winds of Gath" (Ace, 1967)
and sequels in the
"Dumarest" series
- James White's "The Dream Millennium" (19??)
)
