Hi all. I've been googling this every once in a while for years every time a movie or TV series or anything reminds me of it. Never was able to find it. But I did find this forum! I've been on a little bit of a nostalgia hunt and I hope you all can help me. Let's walk through the "PLEASE READ FIRST" list-o-helpful-hints, and please excuse my potentially wonky English (my native language is Dutch).
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It begins with a guy, maybe a scientist, who has himself frozen in as part of this new frozen suspension style cryosleep project thingamajig invention in what must be short after "current times" (which would be late 20th century). Probably early 2000's, like many of these pre-internet SF novels put their future-changing inventions. Not sure about the actual preservation tech described - it was not the point of the story. I think the beginning probably had an arc where his wife was frozen with an as-of-yet incurable disease, together with many others in the same predicament, and he convinced the right people to also be frozen to be woken up when there was a cure. But I could be mistaken as this is a somewhat common cryosleep theme trope and I don't remember what happened to the wife if any. Come to think of it, maybe he was sick himself and just frozen until a cure for him was found.
Second "act". In the near-future, say a couple of centuries down the line, he wakes up. I think it was by a researcher. If I recall correctly, many other sleep capsules were lost, mistreated, broken and/or simply disregarded by future generations. He meets doctors and engineers in the future, and here's something I remember very distinctly because it was the first very interesting future projection, all the scientists are so specialized in their domains that they developed entire domain-specific languages and can't directly communicate with eachother, they need an Esperanto-like common language. (Let's not get into why languages would divert instead of standardize to combine sciences...) He goes back into cryosleep for some reason, and he wakes up once or twice more during, I think, maybe after a few tens of thousands of years. Don't remember.
Third "act" goes no holds barred into the deep deep distant future. After some extreme interval, probably billions of years, his mind is reconstructed by far distant human descendants that don't have human form any more, but exist as some sort of near-lightspeed-traveling energy fields (or something). Protagonist first has to be eased into being an energy field, but then has a mind-blowing conversation with the new human kind and learns why he was resurrected. IIRC, it turns out distant humankind has forgotten what it is to be mortal, to exist as separate physical entities, to have enemies, to face extinction etc.. The conversation had one sentence that was particularly stimulating/mindblowing when I first read it, and translated into (back to?) English it's something like "there have been certain... discontinuities in our existence over the eons" (in response to his question how humankind survived this long). I remember losing a night's sleep over contemplating what that would mean
So the point is that he is the one human being that is anything like what humans once were, and that's why he is convinced to clone his own mind into countless split-offs that are sent to every corner in the universe. There was a very good reason for this. Maybe the distant humans were threatened by a common enemy, maybe they were trying to stave off the end of the universe, maybe it was just for explorations sake, I don't remember, but it was good. Then, over the course of eons and eons, he has to absorb all the countless cloned minds returning back from their separate missions into one again, which turns out to be very hard because many of them suffered something I would describe as "signal degradation" and/or horrific traumatic experiences like eons of loneliness and other debilitating effects.
Now if I only remembered how it ended... Then again - I may not be longing for a re-read if I did.
There is one particularly jarring and remarkable interlude, I think it was right in the middle of all the minds cruising through the universe, where the actual physical body of the protagonist is woken up from cryosleep for the last time, somewhere on an unnamed, unknown, uncharted planet, where it has suffered so much degradation and wear (maybe actual damage) over the eons that he painfully and gruesomely disintegrates shortly after waking up. The mind-only version of the protagonist never knows this.
Thanks for your help!
- Media (short story collection, magazine, novel, website)
- Original year of publication/airing, or at least when you have read/seen this work of fiction. "Read when I was a child" is not as useful as "Read when I was a child (early 1980s)"
)- Major themes
- Cryosleep
- Near-future human culture
- Universe exploration
- (Extremely) distant future of humankind
- Detached minds travelling the universe
- Scientifically non-ridiculous-sounding, e.g. no supernatural entities, no FTL travel etc.
- Plot (as much as you can remember)
It begins with a guy, maybe a scientist, who has himself frozen in as part of this new frozen suspension style cryosleep project thingamajig invention in what must be short after "current times" (which would be late 20th century). Probably early 2000's, like many of these pre-internet SF novels put their future-changing inventions. Not sure about the actual preservation tech described - it was not the point of the story. I think the beginning probably had an arc where his wife was frozen with an as-of-yet incurable disease, together with many others in the same predicament, and he convinced the right people to also be frozen to be woken up when there was a cure. But I could be mistaken as this is a somewhat common cryosleep theme trope and I don't remember what happened to the wife if any. Come to think of it, maybe he was sick himself and just frozen until a cure for him was found.
Second "act". In the near-future, say a couple of centuries down the line, he wakes up. I think it was by a researcher. If I recall correctly, many other sleep capsules were lost, mistreated, broken and/or simply disregarded by future generations. He meets doctors and engineers in the future, and here's something I remember very distinctly because it was the first very interesting future projection, all the scientists are so specialized in their domains that they developed entire domain-specific languages and can't directly communicate with eachother, they need an Esperanto-like common language. (Let's not get into why languages would divert instead of standardize to combine sciences...) He goes back into cryosleep for some reason, and he wakes up once or twice more during, I think, maybe after a few tens of thousands of years. Don't remember.
Third "act" goes no holds barred into the deep deep distant future. After some extreme interval, probably billions of years, his mind is reconstructed by far distant human descendants that don't have human form any more, but exist as some sort of near-lightspeed-traveling energy fields (or something). Protagonist first has to be eased into being an energy field, but then has a mind-blowing conversation with the new human kind and learns why he was resurrected. IIRC, it turns out distant humankind has forgotten what it is to be mortal, to exist as separate physical entities, to have enemies, to face extinction etc.. The conversation had one sentence that was particularly stimulating/mindblowing when I first read it, and translated into (back to?) English it's something like "there have been certain... discontinuities in our existence over the eons" (in response to his question how humankind survived this long). I remember losing a night's sleep over contemplating what that would mean
So the point is that he is the one human being that is anything like what humans once were, and that's why he is convinced to clone his own mind into countless split-offs that are sent to every corner in the universe. There was a very good reason for this. Maybe the distant humans were threatened by a common enemy, maybe they were trying to stave off the end of the universe, maybe it was just for explorations sake, I don't remember, but it was good. Then, over the course of eons and eons, he has to absorb all the countless cloned minds returning back from their separate missions into one again, which turns out to be very hard because many of them suffered something I would describe as "signal degradation" and/or horrific traumatic experiences like eons of loneliness and other debilitating effects.
Now if I only remembered how it ended...
Then again - I may not be longing for a re-read if I did.There is one particularly jarring and remarkable interlude, I think it was right in the middle of all the minds cruising through the universe, where the actual physical body of the protagonist is woken up from cryosleep for the last time, somewhere on an unnamed, unknown, uncharted planet, where it has suffered so much degradation and wear (maybe actual damage) over the eons that he painfully and gruesomely disintegrates shortly after waking up. The mind-only version of the protagonist never knows this.
- Setting
- Characters (names, descriptions)
- The language you read or heard the story in
- Details about the cover, if applicable
- Target audience/age group
- Ideas that you have already ruled out (for example, if you know the story was not written by Asimov, then tell us so that we can save time) ##
Thanks for your help!
