The latest Avatar movie is continuing James Cameron’s box office dominance, but back in 2009, Jake Sully had to reach the distant moon of Pandora before he could have his profitable adventures on it. This problem was brushed aside by an early scene where our hero wakes from suspended animation. “In cryo, you don’t dream at all,” Sully’s voiceover says. “It doesn’t feel like six years. More like a fifth of tequila and an ass-kicking.”
Suspended animation is a staple of science fiction, one used to transport characters across vast reaches of space and time. Once the domain of magic (both Sleeping Beauty and Rip Van Winkle fall afoul of fairies), sci-fi began to coalesce around the idea of blending cold, sleep, and general technobabble to put humans on figurative or literal ice. Mary Shelley and H.P. Lovecraft toyed with the idea, and then comic books and writers like Arthur C. Clarke made it a staple of both soft and hard sci-fi.
