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"I've got this beautiful panoramic three-dimensional painting of Mars based on Martian photos. It's 30 feet wide. You can pick out every pebble on the Martian landscape. And who'd have dreamed you could do that?"
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The basic idea is simple; freeze the person so they can be revived later. Small insects, for example, have been frozen and then revived successfully. Human embryos are routinely frozen, thawed and used to create viable human fetuses. Children have been revived after immersion in very cold water for up to an hour. But what do you call a person who has been frozen?
Larry Niven offers some helpful etymological material in his use of the word from his 1971 novel A World Out of Time:
"Your newspapers called you people corpsicles," said the blond man. "I never understood what the tapes meant by that."
"It comes from Popsicle. Frozen sherbet." Corbell had used the word himself before he became one of them. One of the corpsicles, the frozen dead.
Written as "corpseicle", the word can be found earlier, but not in a science fiction story. Writing in Report on the Slow Freeze, published in Worlds of Tomorrow in 1966, RCW Ettinger:
More than 100 people have been frozen since the first person placed in "cryonic suspension" 1967. Alcor provides you with some options; just have your head frozen for $50,000, or have your whole body frozen for $120,000.
Interestingly, Alcor does not really freeze your tissues:
And, best of all, the root word for "quiescently" means "in a restful state." Requiescat in pace, popsiculo.
Apparently, many science fiction writers were offered free services, and turned it down. Robert Heinlein said “How do I know it won’t interfere with my next stage?” Isaac Asimov said “I don’t think I should impose any kind of cost on the future, even the cost of just topping off my nitrogen.”
Not quite ready to be a popsicle? Try a few months in the hibernaculum, from 2001: A Space Odyssey by Arthur C. Clarke.
Compare to Suspended Animation (Frigorific Process) from The Senator's Daughter (1879) by Edward Page Mitchell, cold-sleep from Robert Heinlein's Methuselah's Children (1941), stasis from Heinlein's Door Into Summer (1951) and the EverRest Cryotorium from Roger Zelazny's Flare (1992). Comment/Join this discussion ( 1 ) | RSS/XML | Blog This | Additional
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Science Fiction
Timeline
Ultra-Realistic Robotic Arowana Robo-Fish
'Deveet unhooked his catch and laid it on the bank beside him. It was a metal fish.'
GITAI R1 Lunar Rover Like NASA Robonaut Centaur
'...waldoes in the screen followed in exact, simultaneous parallelism.'
Meshworm Soft Robot, With Peristaltic Crawling, Is Getting Better
'Seen close it was not completely flexible, but made instead of pivoted and smoothly finished segments.'
Biohybrid Robot Combines Living Muscle With Artificial Materials
'...great rectangular slabs of muscle, slung into a rectangular frame.'
Biohybrid Robots Made Of Living And Synthetic Materials
'If the biological robots were not living creatures, they were certainly very good imitations.'
Poul Anderson's 'Brain Wave'
"Everybody and his dog, it seemed, wanted to live out in the country; transportation and communication were no longer isolating factors."
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