Featured Essays cryogenics From King Arthur to Corpsicles: The Evolution of the Cryosleep Trope The history of cryosleep shows that there can be so much power in the right kind of nap By Matthew Byrd | Published on January 15, 2026 Credit: 20th Century Fox Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: 20th Century Fox In the depths of winter, it sometimes feels like your best option is to surrender and embrace hibernation. It’s around this time of year that I feel the urge to put on slippers and walk the path blazed by my idol: the bear on the Sleepytime Tea box. And before you say that there is no more boring notion in the wide, wide worlds of fantasy and sci-fi than napping through the winter, I ask you to consider one of SFF’s oldest, most versatile, and increasingly relevant tropes: cryosleep. For some time, the cryosleep concept has enabled storytellers to make seemingly impossible ideas (such as time travel and deep space exploration) seem remarkably plausible. Variations of the trope include everything from suspended animation to magic, but the basics haven’t changed much. When you need to knock a character out long enough for them to wake up in the glorious age of plot developments, you turn to cryosleep. And yet, for as common as cryosleep has become as a storytelling device, tracing the evolution of this trope reveals that the proliferation of cryosleep in fiction is very much based on our fascination with cryosleep in real life. It’s a relationship that will continue as we enter a bold, promising, and potentially terrifying new age for deep sleep as salvation. King Arthur, Rip Van Winkle, and the Origins of Cryosleep Rip Van Winkle illustrated by Albert Hahn (1907) Trying to identify the origins of cryosleep is a tricky proposition that requires you to think beyond the strict definition of the term. If you’re talking about instances of a character entering an induced, prolonged state of sleep, you have to acknowledge the King asleep in the mountain trope that has influenced the legends of real and folk figures like King Arthur and Charlemagne. In many of those stories, a royal figure is sent to an isolated location (typically a mountain) to rest until they can fulfill a specific purpose. In most early examples of this concept, magic is used to induce sleep for malicious or virtuous purposes. In early variations of Sleeping Beauty, the princess is put to sleep by dark magic. King Arthur travelled to Avalon to sleep until his kingdom needed him most. Medicine (poison, specifically) gradually became a popular alternative for magic, but the deliberateness of the process remained. That is part of the reason why Washington Irving’s 1819 short story Rip Van Winkle is a crucial turning point on the road to cryosleep. That story sees its titular character accidentally enter a long sleep following an encounter with mountain spirits. He wakes up 20 years later to find that much of the world he knew has changed or simply gone. The intentions of the spirits are ambiguous, and their mythical methods are familiar. But Rip Van Winkle is an unwilling subject who suddenly finds himself in a much different time and place (relatively speaking) following a deep sleep. Washington doesn’t refer to that experience as time travel (that term wouldn’t become popular until the late 1800s with help from H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine and Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court), but the hallmarks of that narrative device are there. A long sleep allows an unwilling subject to, in his own mind, instantaneously arrive in the future. Though Rip Van Winkle is a surprisingly good sport about the whole thing, this story still deals with the trials and tribulations of such processes that would become increasingly important in subsequent years as our emotional understanding of cryosleep evolved with the trope itself. That story perhaps also inspired Roger Dodsworth, who, in 1826, claimed to have been buried under an avalanche sometime in the 1600s only to awaken in the modern world. Papers across the world ran with the story, which, spoiler alert, proved to be a hoax. More importantly, that hoax encouraged Mary Shelley to write the short story “Roger Dodsworth: The Reanimated Englishman.” Essentially a fictionalized recounting of Dodsworth’s remarkable journey, it featured what would become key features of the core cryosleep idea: extreme cold prompting a prolonged slumber that allows a person to see far beyond their place and time. Perhaps appropriately, Shelley’s story entered its own prolonged slumber. It was written in 1826 but wouldn’t be published until 1863. Despite the delay, Shelley’s story (like many of Shelley’s other works) was ahead of its time. The theory of extreme cold allowing someone to survive death and see beyond their time became especially popular in the 1900s, thanks to the origins of characters like Buck Rogers, the 1922 Houdini film The Man from Beyond (perhaps the first portrayal of basic cryonics on film), and sci-fi novels that include 1938’s Who Goes There?, which features an alien frozen safely in the ice until it is awakened by explorers. You may know it better as the narrative basis for The Thing. Those works, and more, share a couple of traits that both distinguish them from what came before and pave the way for what comes next. The first is the use of extreme cold as a sleeping agent: a significant step forward on the road to proper cryosleep. The second is the often accidental nature of the freezing itself. By focusing on subjects who unwillingly traveled to far different times and places via cold-induced slumbers, these stories both thoroughly explore the challenges that arise from such occurrences and plant the seed of the idea that such things could both happen and perhaps happen to you. Those are minor, but crucial, distinctions if you’re trying to understand how we got to deliberate, technology-fuelled cryosleep and how we arrived in the era of the corpsicle. Long Live Professor Jameson Illustration for H.G. Wells’ When the Sleeper Wakes (art by Henri Lanos, 1907) The late 1800s saw the release of two stories that would have a significant impact on the evolution of cryosleep. Though both utilize similar ideas, one is distinctly dystopian while the other is somewhat unusually utopian. The utopian story, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel Looking Backward, follows a young American who wakes up in the year 2000 after undergoing hypnosis. He wakes up to find that the United States has improved the lives of millions largely through the implementation of socialist policies. It’s more of a collection of political philosophies and hypotheses than a roaring sci-fi adventure, but the thought of falling asleep for an unnaturally long time and waking up in a substantially better world was both unique for its time and somewhat unusual now. But the conceit of such induced slumbers being part of humanity’s advancements would become part of the growing cryosleep fantasy of the twentieth century. Along with his considerable aforementioned contributions to time travel in science fiction, H.G. Wells made another significant, if indirect, contribution to the development of cryosleep as a literary device with his 1899 dystopian sci-fi novel When the Sleeper Wakes. In that story, a man named Graham falls into a coma only to wake up roughly 200 years into the future. There, he finds that he has amassed a vast sum of wealth that has since been used by generations of interested parties for various purposes. Said parties are not eager to surrender the wealth to its rightful owner and go to extreme lengths to maintain their power. When The Sleeper Wakes is one of the earliest and most significant examinations of the potentially tremendous effects of the passage of time on a hibernating traveler. It equally explores the intimate effects of such a process on the traveler (such as naturally acquiring wealth), the grand changes that would naturally occur over such time, and the relationship between those things when the sleeper is finally awakened. It is, in many respects, a modern cryosleep story minus the actual cryo element. Those general themes and the more unique qualities of cryostasis would finally join forces in Neil R. Jones’ 1931 short story “The Jameson Satellite.” In that story, Professor Jameson uses the cold of space to freeze his body in a satellite and prolong his life. He ends up waking up 40 million years later to find that Earth has been taken over by cyborgs who transfer Jameson’s consciousness into a machine body. Again, a familiar enough story these days, but it represents the culmination of thoughts that were fragmented or only hinted at before. “The Jameson Satellite” features someone using a technologically driven state of extreme cold to deliberately travel into the future, only to find a world they were not entirely prepared for. The idea of someone intentionally freezing themselves using advanced technology to see beyond their years or stave off death ignited imaginations everywhere. Historically, the most significant of those imaginations belonged to Robert Ettinger. Ettinger read “The Jameson Satellite” at a young age and became so infatuated with it that he launched some of the earliest substantial research into the science of cryonics and later founded the Cryonics Institute in 1976. The works and writings of Ettinger (who would eventually become known as the Father of Cryonics) and his colleagues gradually helped cryosleep go from science fiction to science. In fact, in 1967, James Bedford became the first person to have his corpse cryogenically frozen. His frozen body is still being preserved and studied to this day. Around that same time, cryosleep quickly went from a tool that lived on the margins of genre works to a full-on trope. The Corpsicle Era Credit: 20th Century Fox The ‘60s and ‘70s were an especially prolific time for cryosleep and its sometimes unspecified alternatives in terms of deep space exploration. Foundational sci-fi stories like Planet of the Apes (above), 2001: A Space Odyssey, Lost in Space, The Twilight Zone, and more all utilized variations of cryosleep to explore the possibilities and perils that emerge when astronauts effectively freeze themselves to survive long journeys. Even NASA expanded its research into the viability of cryonics for deep-space exploration around this time. Cryosleep wasn’t born during the space race age, but it perfectly fit into a world that was suddenly dreaming of flying cars, vacations on the moon, and the general implementation of the seemingly impossible into everyday life. It wasn’t just astronauts, though. That era saw a surge in When the Sleeper Wakes story variants involving someone traveling from their past to our present or our present to the future with the help of cryostasis. Demolition Man, 1973’s Sleeper, and even Captain America’s retconned origin story all utilized versions of that idea. By the time we got to Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, the retrofuture animation of Futurama (pictured above), and, of course, the 1992 Pauly Shore/Brendan Fraser sci-fi comedy Encino Man, a previously complex sci-fi notion had become fodder for parody. Trying to cite all the uses of cryosleep during this time may be a fool’s errand. What’s more important is how quickly it was widely embraced. Cryosleep became the simple, accepted shorthand for far more advanced topics like time travel and deep space exploration. It’s the engine that enables some of our most fantastical narrative mechanisms, and it’s remarkable to consider that its rise as a plot device has been inspired as much by works of fiction as real-life events. It’s even more remarkable to think about real-life’s role in the rise of cryosleep when you consider that the actual science behind cryosleep is shaky, at best. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the biggest issue with cryosleep in real life isn’t the going to sleep part but rather the pesky waking up bit. Our bodies are filled with water, and freezing that water causes incredible (often fatal or irreversible) damage. There have been attempts to circumvent that significant problem (like filling our bodies with a kind of antifreeze fluid that could prevent or minimize cell damage), but test after test only verifies the extent of that seemingly simple issue. That’s to say nothing of the cost of storing frozen specimens for prolonged testing. It’s tragically appropriate that the term “corpsicle” came to define the cryosleep trope during this era. Just as it sounds, that crude, though appropriate, phrase refers to the body at the center of a block of ice that you’re probably picturing from one work or another as you read this. Even in tales where the frozen person is revived or resuscitated, the often morbid and increasingly comical visual of a human popsicle seemingly speaks to the ways we gradually accepted the routine absurdity of that plot device despite its prevalence. Mind you, the basics of cryosleep are not entirely without real-world merit. In 2016, researchers successfully revived microscopic Tardigrades that were frozen in Antarctica for over 30 years. Last year, scientists extracted RNA from the surprisingly well-preserved corpse of a woolly mammoth. Yet, the true power of this trope during its rise to cultural prominence lies in the feeling that it should be possible. The simplicity of freezing yourself to travel through time and space is both a big part of the reason why the cryofreezing concept will seemingly never work and why it remains such a popular idea in fiction. The scientific gap between all that and cryosleep as it is often portrayed in sci-fi works is significant, but the logic gap is much smaller. Indeed, in recent years, we’ve seen a shift towards more realistic (or simply complex) forms of cryosleep in sci-fi, even as a comically menacing group of figures hold on to the dream of cryosleep with their cold, dead hands. From Suspended Disbelief to Suspended Animation Credit: Amazon MGM Studios In 2014, SpaceWorks Enterprises published a report detailing their research into a Torpor-Inducing Transfer Habitat that may allow astronauts to enter a state of suspended animation and survive the long, grueling journey to Mars. In nature, torpor refers to a state of decreased physical and physiological activity in an animal. Sometimes described as a lighter form of hibernation, it’s a process that many animals undergo to conserve energy during a prolonged period. Their basic functions (such as heart rate, metabolism, and body temperature) are lowered, which allows them to survive with minimal traditional resources. Perhaps you see the appeal of torpor when it comes to interstellar travel. If scientists could find a way to induce a form of torpor in humans, they could, in theory, make it far easier for them to endure the physical and mental challenges of outer space voyages. The idea isn’t to “freeze” astronauts in the classic sense (though lowered temperatures would be part of the method) or even knock them out. Instead, by allowing them to enter a kind of induced form of physical and mental decompression, torpor could save resources, preserve astronauts’ mental facilities, and do all of that without damaging their pesky vital organs. It’s not just scientists pursuing a more realistic form of cryosleep. In recent years, we’ve seen an influx of notable sci-fi narratives that abandon the more popular corpsicle imagery in favor of something slightly subtler. For instance, Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary (and its upcoming film adaptation, pictured above) utilizes an intentionally crude form of suspended animation to explain how its crew can survive the trip to Tau Ceti. It doesn’t go according to plan, but that’s part of the charm. Rather than rely on the almost magical idea of classic cryosleep, the story examines the slightly more grounded and messy possibilities of the torpor concept. You’ll find something similar in The Three Body Problem. While that story utilizes a slightly more traditional version of cryosleep, it crucially notes that the body is deprived of much of its water before it is frozen. It’s a minor, also messy, but crucial detail that acknowledges our modern understanding of the inherent flaws of the classic approaches to portraying cryosleep. It effectively updates the science and fiction of the classic cryosleep concept while retaining its ability to enable fantastical, otherwise impossible journeys. In fiction, little of this is strictly new. Hibernation, stasis, and similar approaches have long been part of the cryosleep family. Even some of the aforementioned sci-fi adventures of the ‘60s and ‘70s portrayed sometimes unspecified versions of those variations that were often welcomed under the cryosleep umbrella with the casual wave of a hand. Yet, the increasingly common pivot to the portrayal of more complicated cryosleep methods is crucial to the creative growth of both this trope and our understanding of the science behind it. The classic versions of cryosleep aren’t going anywhere, but they will be joined by more nuanced portrayals that better reflect our understanding of what that may actually look like. Before our eyes, cryosleep in life and fiction is evolving from suspended disbelief to suspended animation. Just don’t tell that to the real-world billionaires who are unfathomably committed to becoming corpsicles. Whose Immortality is it Anyway? In the last few years, billionaires like Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Ellison have donated millions of dollars to various cryonics research efforts. Their donations are just part of a larger trend in the billionaire community: the pursuit of what essentially amounts to immortality. Like blood transfers and other extreme anti-aging treatments, these ultra-wealthy men hope that cryonics can help them effectively live forever. If they can’t simply freeze themselves to live beyond their years, then perhaps cryonics could be used to defeat the disease that might otherwise kill them. They are so serious about this possibility that some have even started drafting special trusts and wills that will allow them to keep their wealth if they can be successfully frozen and thawed. Strangely, we haven’t seen many portrayals of this modern cryonics movement in media. Movies like 2021’s Don’t Look Up suggest that the elite may ruin the Earth and then abandon it in the hopes of eventually finding a habitable new world, and you’ll find jokes about the rich freezing themselves in everything from episodes of The Simpsons to the urban legends about Walt Disney’s frozen body. By and large, though, portrayals of the people who are investing most in cryosleep and the reasons why they are interested in it haven’t changed much since the affluent Professor Jameson froze himself to reach what was portrayed as a fairly utopian future despite its literal lack of humanity. It’s sobering to realize how those with the most power to influence the coming centuries of cryonics see that technology being used. For decades, cryosleep has been a vital part of our space exploration fantasies. Yet, it seems that the ruling class would just as soon send robots into space and pursue immortality for themselves rather than the kind that is earned by achieving something for the betterment of all mankind. All of this despite the fact that we can cite centuries of stories that warn us about the hubris of such things. These ultra-wealthy future popsicles believe that funding their immortality rather than a better society will result in a society that will not only achieve such breakthrough medical advances but will be worth waking up in hundreds of years later. Then again, media literacy has never been the strength of billionaire tech bros. Not all hope is lost, though. “Hope,” in fact, is part of the enduring appeal of the cryosleep trope. For centuries, the principal appeal of the cryosleep trope and its many variations has been the idea that it will allow us to achieve the seemingly impossible. Travel through time, explore the deepest reaches of space, and even defeat death itself. It’s a simple device that is just grounded and realistic enough to allow us to suspend our disbelief and truly believe in something fantastical. Great science fiction has always shaped the world by challenging us to think beyond what is in the pursuit of what could be. The history of cryosleep shows that any idea, no matter how incredible, can make an impact so long as it sparks our imaginations. After all these years, storytellers, researchers, audiences, and even billionaires still hold onto the belief that we may one day take the longest winter nap and wake up in a different, perhaps even better, world. To cryosleep, perchance to dream.[end-mark] The post From King Arthur to Corpsicles: The Evolution of the Cryosleep Trope appeared first on Reactor.