"We don't like to call it suspended animation," says Samuel Tisherman, the surgeon who is co-ordinating Department of Defense-funded research at the UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh on techniques to freeze trauma victims in the hope of keeping them alive. But reports on his research, such as this one in the Independent and this one in The Economist, have inevitably played up the sci-fi associations of "therapeutic hypothermia." The Independent's article is illustrated with an image from The Empire Strikes Back of a cryogenically frozen Han Solo; the Economist, meanwhile, goes with one of Ripley and the crew of the Nostromo emerging from hibernation in the sleep pods at the beginning of Ridley Scott's Alien. For all Tisherman's reservations, it's perhaps not so surprising that science fact occasionally needs to take a detour through science fiction before it can be made intelligible to a non-specialist audience. But we might also pause a moment to speculate on why this state of prolonged artificial somnolence -- call it hypersleep, suspended animation or cryogenic freezing -- looms so large in some of our most well-known space operas. What cultural fantasies might be encoded in the images of hibernating spacemen and -women that float so eerily through the science-fiction imagination? Anyone interested in these questions could do a lot worse than read the following post from Brian Baker's very fine (SF) 365 blog.
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