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Comment by dualogy | Hacker News Reader

> I wish people invented a reliable cryogenesis machine, so that I can go to sleep, come back after a century, live for 5-10years, and go back to sleep. Repeat the cycle.

Some SF author here wanna pick up on this theme? This has potential, if the cryo is available equally to all comers in society, because I can't imagine how the world would look like — who'd "shape the time they're in" as some-specific-generation when people pop in and out of the progression of time liberally, century-hopping, taking a gander for a few years, then sleep through many more, then respawn once more.

Maybe one can leave specs for when to not thaw (wars, pestilence, famine, recession). No one's around for the bad times! Including whoever'd manage the cryo and thawings.

Paradoxical, someone go write that SF!

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Iain Banks already wrote this for you, it's called Excession, and it is even better than you imagine.

I'm pretty sure the concept comes up in other Culture Novels but one of the main characters in Excession is the Sleeper Service, a ship which does precisely this.

>it's called Excession, and it is even better than you imagine.

I'd advise not startin with Excession but with Player of Games. Read from there. You'll get to Excession on time with plenty of background knowledge of how stuff works.

Reading Excession as book 1 will leave you ultra confused.

I think there was a sub-plot like this in "Children of Time", by Adrian Tchaikovsky. Only it was people on a generation ship that was forced to operate well beyond its limits. I don't want to give too much away but it definitely gave the concept a twist.

For the life of me I cannot remember where I saw it, but there is a comic that once explored the theme, a man wakes up from cryo 1000 years in the future to find that anyone who wanted to endeavor in any field figured they'd jump on the pod and wait for someone else to do some of more of the groundwork, that history and technological progress had basically stopped.

If you ever remember the name of that, gimme a ping!

It's (probably) XKCD #989 ("Cryogenics"): https://xkcd.com/989/

This happens in Liu Cixin's "Three Body Problem" books. Many of the characters experience life in eras starting from the near future, to a semi-utopian era a couple of centuries from now, to when humanity fights the aliens 400 years from now. They go into cold storage and are awakened when there is something for them to do.

IIRC Orson Scott Card of all people did a riff on this, but the ability to freeze yourself was theoretically merit based. So then all the best and brightest thinkers spent most of their time frozen, with kind of a "break-glass-in-case-of-emergency" setup.

Roger Zelazny's "The Graveyard Heart" does this. It's effectively one large party over centuries.

>Some SF author here wanna pick up on this theme?

Simpsons did it. Er, Vernor Vinge. Highly recommended, like all his works.

Alastair Reynolds, in "House of Suns", has a variation on this theme, with much-more-stretched timeframes.

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