History Main / SleeperStarship

* In ''The Dream Millennium'' by James White, humans flee a dystopian future Earth on a thousand-year-long trip on a sleeper starship. They are periodically awakened for monitoring and to decide if they should stop at planets the ship approaches. However, while going into and out of suspended animation, they start to have nightmares in which they experience increasingly violent deaths -- and it's a ''long'' voyage...

** ''The Dream Millennium'' is about the crew and passengers of a starship on [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin a thousand-year-long voyage]] between several star systems. They are periodically awakened by the ship's autopilot to make command decisions and make sure they have not been victims of CryonicsFailure. But then they start dreaming during the freezing and thawing process...

* ''Film/{{Interstellar}}''. When Dr. Mann is woken from his cryo-pod, he says he never set a wakeup date as he'd either be rescued or he'd be marooned on the planet forever, [[GoMadFromTheIsolation so it would be best never to wake up.]]

* In ''Film/CloudAtlas'' one of the main character tells his story as an elderly man on an off-world habitable planet, and one of his children asks to be told about the "Whoahsome ship and the Big Sleep", which implies that a sleeper starship was used to reach their new home.

* ''Literature/VoyageFromYesteryear'' by Creator/JamesPHogan has the planet Chrion orbiting one of the stars of Alpha Centauri be initially settled by humans from an embryo seed ship; followed decades later by a series of starships from Earth with crews who live through the entire voyage. The confrontation between the two quickly bogs down in a FilibusterFreefall, for which Hogan became infamous.

* In one ''Literature/SectorGeneral'' story, the protagonists have to deal with the technical, medical, and logistical problems created by the discovery of a severely damaged Sleeper Starship which has functioning life-support for the (many) surviving popsicles, but nothing else. In another, they initially mistake a LivingShip in suspended animation along with its crew for a patient with a parasitic disease.

* In ''The Silent Stars Go By'' by James White, humans in an AlternateHistory launch a starship with tens of thousands of passengers in suspended animation monitored by crew members who do two-year-long shifts before returning to sleep themselves.

* ''Literature/VoyageFromYesteryear'' by Creator/JamesPHogan has the planet Chrion orbiting one of the stars of Alpha Centauri be initially settled by humans from an embryo seed ship; followed by decades later by a series of starships from Earth with crews who live through the entire voyage. The confrontation between the two quickly bogs down in a FilibusterFreefall, for which Hogan became infamous.
* In ''The Watch Below'' by James White, aquatic aliens fleeing the destruction of their world arrive on Earth. There is conflict between those who spent the centuries-long trip sleeping and the {{Generation Ship|s}} crew.

* Most of humanity's first colonies in the ''Literature/KnownSpace'' universe were settled by sleeper ships, in one case the crew who stayed awake forced the colonists to accept a caste system with the crew on top as they were being awakened.

** Crew for new ships are awakened from the massive bays of frozen colonists onboard the mothership. How many there are in total depends on how many you save in the second mission, up to 600,000. [[AllThereInTheManual The manual]] mentions that the technology was developed based on certain Kharakian creatures that are able to hibernate for long periods of time. Maybe we should study bears.

* When Vegeta and Nappa set course for Earth in ''Anime/DragonBallZ'', they set the system on their "Attack Ball" space pods to put themselves into a state of sleep for most of the one-year journey.
* Project SEEDS in ''Manga/{{Trigun}}'' consisted of millions of humans on ice in thousands of ships, while a small awake crew searched for a habitable planet to settle. When Knives crashed the fleet into the planet Gunsmoke, most of the occupants were killed.

* In the classic Creator/ECComics story "50 Girls 50", a crewman entrusted with setting the cryogenic controls on his ship exploits them to wake up early, unthaw women one at a time, and manipulate them into sexual relations until [[TheBluebeard he gets bored, murders his current "Eve", and moves on to another]]. Double- and triple-crosses ensue.

* The Astraeus mission in later seasons of ''Series/{{Eureka}}'' puts its passengers in hibernation for the trip. The hibernation is to keep the crew from getting crushed by the FTL drive's acceleration; it isn't supposed to be a long trip at all. The distance from Earth to Titan is only about 70 light minutes, meaning a faster-than-''light'' drive would take at most 70 minutes to get there.

[[folder:Newspaper Comics]]
* When planning a mission to Mars in ''ComicStrip/SafeHavens'', Samantha considers this option to save on supplies and boredom. She also considers the idea of, instead of using any sort of technology to do that, just transforming the whole crew into bears and entering hibernation. (In the end it was concluded that it was actually cheaper just to install [=WiFi=] on board the ship to keep the crew entertained. Probably for the best in hindsight, considering [[spoiler:Samantha ends up ''pregnant'' during the mission.]])
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* The titular ''VideoGame/{{Marathon}}'' colony ship is a generational ship. The Martian moon Deimos was converted into the ''Marathon'' and sent on a 300-year journey to Tau Ceti. While a few crew members "wake" during the trip, most of them are in suspended animation.

* In ''TabletopGame/BattlefleetGothic'', the Dhows utilised by the [[TheFederation Tau Empire’s]] Nicassar subjects are primarily sleeper ships, each containing a hibernating extended family of the semi-nomadic aliens as they slowly travel across the gulfs of interstellar space.

* The ships of the Charnel Guard Chapter of [[SuperSoldier Adeptus Astartes]] from ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'' contain vast stasis crypts where the battle-brothers of the Chapter [[HumanPopsicle sleep in suspended animation]] between campaigns.

** According to the {{backstory}}, the ''Calypso'' is one of many ''Odessa''-class seedships sent out as a last-ditch effort to preserve humankind elsewhere in the galaxy, when it becomes clear that humans are losing the war with the Centaurians ([[spoiler:it's later revealed in the game that the Centaurians are driven by a genetically-imprinted hatred for all beings not created by the [[AbusivePrecursors H'riak]]]]). Each seedship captain is given strict orders to maintain radio silence and assume that Earth and every other seedship have been destroyed.

** At the end of ''VideoGame/HaloWars'', the ''Spirit of Fire'''s crew goes into very, ''very'' long cryosleep, as a result of [[spoiler: using their slipstream drive as a bomb]]. In context, they go to sleep before ''VideoGame/HaloCombatEvolved'', and wake up after ''VideoGame/Halo4''.

* Despite having warp drive, the four colony ships that brought the original Terran colonists to the Koprulu sector in ''Franchise/StarCraft'' used cryo. Just as well, since a computer error led to them being in warp for thirty years. The UED Expeditionary force in ''[[VideoGame/StarCraftI Brood War]]'' did this as well, despite making the trip in a year or less.
* Creator/ChoiceOfGames' text-based game ''Planet Quarantine'' starts with the PlayerCharacter waking up from [[HumanPopsicle cold sleep]] as the ship ''Jessica'' is nearing an Earth-like world called Niah (short for "[[FunWithAcronyms Needle in a Haystack]]"). The player is the commander of a quarantine team whose task is to go through each colonist's mind and possessions to make sure no "undesirable" items make it through to the new worlds (this is done en route to prevent a public outcry over such drastic censorship on Earth). All undesirable items are destroyed, and undesirable ideas are "corrected". If a person turns out to have faked his or her tests to get aboard a ship, he or she may wake up with a "freezer burn" that erases his or her personality, allowing that person to start a brand-new life on arrival. Depending on your choices in the game, you may take another such trip.
* The intro to ''VideoGame/{{Freelancer}}'' shows the five [[TheAlliance Alliance]] colony ships being packed full of sleeping pods, despite having FTL drives. It's unclear how long the trip to the Sirius sector would take (the intro {{Time Skip}}s after the jump to 800 years later and fully-established multi-system colonies), so the pods may be there to conserve supplies. The original intro shows a warship jumping after them, implying that either the ship also had pods (unlikely given what we know from ''VideoGame/{{Starlancer}}''), or the trip is possible without them (the intro ending implies that the warship did indeed arrive).
* ''VideoGame/{{Cyberqueen}}'' is set on one of these. It starts when the protagonist wakes, to find that all the other pods are empty. [[spoiler:It turns out that the [[AIIsACrapshoot ship's AI]] has rebelled and is subjecting crew members to various forms of BodyHorror.]]
* ''VideoGame/WildStar'' has FTL, but both the Exiles and Dominion transport the bulk of their settlers to Nexus in cryo-storage. The Exiles in particular had been wandering space for three centuries, rotating non-essential personnel in and out of cryo to avoid overtaxing life support on their rickety old ship. Your character starts out getting thawed upon arrival in system.
* In ''[[VideoGame/{{Earth 2150}} Earth 2160]]'', it's eventually revealed that the [[{{Eagleland}} United Civilized States]] [[HomeworldEvacuation evacuation ship]] is of this type. When it failed to arrive to Mars in-between ''Earth 2150'' and ''Earth 2160'', the other two factions ([[MakeTheBearAngryAgain Eurasian]] [[TheEmpire Dynasty]] and [[LadyLand Lunar]] [[OneNationUnderCopyright Corporation]]) assumed that it was either destroyed by a meteor or that the on-board computer [[AIIsACrapshoot went insane and killed everyone aboard]]. In fact, [[spoiler:the computer simply chose to keep the evacuees on ice until the ED and the LC pound each other in a brutal war of attrition, then follow up by sending in robot army to clean up the mess, freeing up room for UCS settlers]].
* In ''VideoGame/{{Evolve}}'', ships store their passengers and crew in cryopods while in Cherenkov space, with only AIs left 'awake'.
* ''VideoGame/MassEffectAndromeda'' stars the crew of one, arriving in the Andromeda galaxy after a generations-long trip. The original trilogy never needed this, as mass relays allow rapid intragalactic transportation but don't exist outside the Milky Way. In fact, the player arrives on one of four such ships, one from each major Citadel Council race: asari, salarian, turian, human, with an occasional minor race representative thrown in (there's a krogan crew member). The ships were sent out shortly after ''Mass Effect 2'' (i.e. prior to the [[spoiler:Reaper invasion]]) and have traveled for 600 years. Upon arriving, the crew finds that their ship has been thrown off-course and must now try to locate the other three ships and the Nexus, a Citadel-like hub station sent ahead of the ships. The ending of the original trilogy remains deliberately unknown, separated from the new setting in both time (600 years) and space (over 2 million light-years). Discussion is made that there was plans for a fifth ark, helmed by the quarians (and also including drell, volus, elcor, and hanar), but with the technical problems of accommodating those species on one ship, no one's sure whether it'll turn up or not. It's not until after the end of the game that it turns out it does exist. Also, in a side-mission, it turns out the kett, who lack the PortalNetwork of the mass relays, also use these to get about Andromeda.
* The ''White Whale'' in ''VideoGame/XenobladeChroniclesX'' was designed this way, with a portion of the crew running the ship [[spoiler: using robot bodies remote-controlled by their still-sleeping selves in stasis]]. When the ship is destroyed, the bodies still in stasis are preserved in the ship's core. [[spoiler:But in truth, rather than storing bodies in stasis, their [[BrainUploading consciousness' were uploaded]] into the core's computer.]]
* ''Videogame/{{Rimworld}}:'' Due to a lack of FTL technology, this is the only thing allowing for long-distance space travel; this is the reason why {{Lost Colon|y}}ies are absolutely ''everywhere''. Half the starting scenarios involve their malfunction near a planet, necessitating their evacuation, and the endgame is usually to make another and set off to the stars once more.
* The ''Genesis'' expansions for ''VideoGame/ArkSurvivalEvolved'' are set aboard the namesake ColonyShip whose passengers are kept in hibernation, their minds linked to a grueling simulation program to train them for arrival on an unknown planet. They're awakened as needed for maintenance when the automated systems fail... or when the ship gets attacked.
* ''VideoGame/OutThere'' starts with the protagonist waking up from cryosleep to discover that he is not, in fact, near Jupiter, as expected but in a remote star system. Luckily, there's some sort of alien device in space that gives you the plans for a [[FTLTravel space folder]]. To build it, you need silicon, and the only way to get it at this point is to dismantle your cryochamber. If you run out of fuel and/or oxygen without anything onboard to replenish them, then you get a NonStandardGameOver with a message that your PlayerCharacter is entering a stasis chamber... even if your ship doesn't have one.
* ''VideoGame/{{Outriders}}'': The last of humanity is packed in cryopods on the [[TheArk Flores]] for the journey to Enoch. A more specific example is the [[TheProtagonist Outrider]], who is shoved into a pod by Shira in the prologue and wakes up 31 years later.

--->'''Emory:''' ''Amazing'' hypersleep! I think I had, like, thirty wet dreams.\\

* ''[[WesternAnimation/IlEtaitUneFois Once upon a Time... Space]]'': The first interstellar spaceship from Earth was of this kind. [[LostColony Believed lost]] for nearly a millennium by the start of the series, said spaceship arrives unannounced to its destination -- smack in the middle of Federation space -- and the [[HumanPopsicle recently reawakened crew]] finds out that the cosmos was colonized by [[LightspeedLeapfrog much faster ships]], and their thousand-year journey now takes about a week.
* ''Franchise/StarTrek''

* ''Anime/LilyCAT'' travels between two planets, sticking most of the cast into cryostasis.
* When Vegeta and Nappa set course for Earth in ''Anime/DragonBallZ'', they set the system on their "Attack Ball" space pods to put themselves into a state of sleep for most of the one-year journey.

* While exploring the Negative Zone, the ComicBook/FantasticFour encounter the survivors of Kestor aboard a huge starship in Issue #253. Thousands of Kestorans lie in suspension tubes, while a minimal crew keeps the ship running. [[spoiler:Subverted in that the First Officer knows a terrible secret: none of those in the tubes are viable. The crew are the last of their race, and they've been aboard ship for so long, they're unfit to live on any habitable planet.]]
* The ''Comicbook/GuardiansOfTheGalaxy'' character Vance Astro spent 1,000 years in suspended animation for a slower-than-light trip to Alpha Centauri... Only to find Earthmen had invented hyperdrive and beaten him there by several centuries. (However, they did throw him a welcoming party.) As a bonus bummer, the long time he spent in the tube has damaged his body so he needed a full-body life-support suit to survive.
** Marvel's ''ComicBook/{{Micronauts|MarvelComics}}'' basically cannibalized this figment of Astro's backstory and gave it to Arcturus Rann. Like Astro, he went into stasis for most of a space voyage only to find that the rest of the universe (well, Microverse) had discovered warp travel while he slept.
* In the classic Creator/ECComics story "50 Girls 50," a crewman entrusted with setting the cryogenic controls on his ship exploits them to wake up early, unthaw women one at a time, and manipulate them into sexual relations until [[TheBluebeard he gets bored, murders his current "Eve," and moves on to another]]. Double- and triple-crosses ensue.

[[folder:Film]]
* ''Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey'': Three of the five astronauts aboard the ''Discovery One'' were placed in suspended animation. The trip is one of months, not centuries, but suspended animation is used to avoid the problem of having to pack several months' worth of food, and to help keep secret the real purpose of the mission. The HAL-9000 computer [[spoiler:interfered with their life support, killing all three]]. In ''Film/TwoThousandTenTheYearWeMakeContact'', Floyd tells his son it's "so we won't go cuckoo."

** In [[Film/{{Alien}} the first movie]], the stasis effect was how the android planned to get a crewmember infected with an alien larva back home: the alien won't hatch in stasis, and the other cryopods can [[CryonicsFailure easily be sabotaged]] to eliminate all other witnesses.
** In [[Film/{{Aliens}} the second movie]], we find that Ripley's escape crypod had been drifting for over half a century: she is now a woman without a place, as her family has all died of old age long before (setting up her adoption of Newt). The Sulaco also uses suspended animation, which - echoing the first movie - Burke plans to use to smuggle facehugger larvae past Earth's quarantine.
** In [[Film/Alien3 the third movie]], the Sulaco is attempting to return home via autopilot (as the few surviving humans are in the freezer and the AP, Bishop, is damaged): thus, nobody is available to kill a facehugger that managed to get aboard and causes more damage.
** In the [[Film/{{Prometheus}} prequel]] [[Film/AlienCovenant movies]], stasis pods are shown being used on earlier slower interstellar spaceships like the ''Covenant''.
* The Elysium in ''Film/{{Pandorum}}'' features a model of pod that combinates a hypersleep chamber and an EscapePod, and it seems to have its user contained in an artificial skin aside from the classic liquid.
* ''Film/TheFifthElement'': The shuttle to the space cruiser puts all of its passengers into 'hypersleep' just before takeoff, even though the trip takes just a few hours.

* In ''Film/MrNobody'' Nemo takes a trip to Mars aboard one of these, in order to maintain his late bride's promise of spreading her ashes on the red planet.
* ''Film/{{Moon}}'' (2009). A hibernation chamber is used by the solitary moonbase operator for the three-day trip back to Earth. [[spoiler:It turns out to be an incineration chamber, as each operator is a clone who gets destroyed after CloneDegeneration sets in, and replaced by another clone with FakeMemories.]]
* In the original ''Film/PlanetOfTheApes1968'', four astronauts in deep hibernation go on a 2000-year voyage. One of them, the only woman aboard, doesn't make it.
* ''Film/PitchBlack'' begins with the crew and passengers on a long-distance ship in hibernation. In a bit of unusual flair with the concept, the AntiHero (and narrator) Riddick is awake in his pod and introducing the rest of the cast by smell.
* ''Film/{{Outland}}''. It takes a year to travel from the mining colony on Io (a moon of Jupiter) back to Earth, so the travellers are put into cold sleep. At the end of the movie, the hero tells his wife that he's looking forward to sleeping with her for an entire year.

* The [=SSS17=] in ''Film/AlienCargo'', which carries chemicals from Titan to Earth and takes months to get there, so the crew operates in two-person shifts. Then something goes very very wrong on the last rotation...
* In ''Film/{{Interstellar}}'' the astronauts sent through the wormhole spend most of the two-year trip to the wormhole (orbiting Saturn) in suspended animation. They also carry human embryos as a Plan B for humanity's survival. [[spoiler:It's only halfway through the movie that the astronauts discover there is no Plan A to save the humans back on Earth.]]
* ''Film/Passengers2016'' is set on a starship making a 120-year journey, with automated robots running things and all the humans in hibernation. Problem is, for some reason, two people wake up 90 years early and can't get their pods to work again.

* In ''Film/RocketMan1997'' chambers are again used to conserve food and air on both the trip to Mars and the return trip. However, the protagonist is impeded from entering his both times.
** A simple design adjustment would avoid this: simply make all 4 pods have identical sizes instead of having 3 human-sized ones and one for a [[ChimpsInSpace monkey]] (and yes, the monkey ends up stealing the main character's pod both times).
* In ''Film/{{Doppelganger}}'', Ross and Kane are placed in suspended animation for their outbound journey onboard the ''Phoenix'', being revived three weeks later when they reach the CounterEarth.

* Robert Silverberg's novella ''TheSecretSharer'' contained both variants, comatose humans in pods AND personalities-as-electronic-matrices
* ''Literature/TheHitchhikersGuideToTheGalaxy'':

*** The same book has a spaceship on Frogstar B, which is holding its departure while waiting for the ship's supply of lemon-scented towelettes to be restocked. Since civilization on the planet fell centuries ago, they've been waiting a long time, but the robotic attendants are figuring that eventually civilization will re-arise, and then there will be lemon-scented towelettes again, and ''then'' they can take off. In the meantime, the (by now hopelessly insane) passengers are kept asleep most of the time.
** In ''Literature/MostlyHarmless'' the alien Grebulons which set up on the planet Rupert are in one of these until a massive malfunction wakes them up early.
* Creator/RobertAHeinlein used this trope in several novels:
** ''Literature/MethuselahsChildren'': The starship ''New Frontiers'' was part sleeper part relativistic due to the thousands of people on board.
** In ''Literature/BetweenPlanets'', the passengers on an interplanetary liner bound for Venus argue about whether to sign up for hibernation; the only apparent drawback (and the subject of an explicitly unanswerable bunk-room debate) is whether or not cold-sleep "stops the clock" on whatever lifespan you otherwise could have expected to have, or if it means that you miss out on that much of your allotted lifetime by spending it as a frozen quasi-corpse.
** In ''Literature/TheRollingStones1952'', when twins Castor and Pollux Stone suggest making money on the family's vacation voyage to the Asteroid Belt by taking along a few AsteroidMiners in hibernation, their father vetoes it, pointing out that (in this novel's setting) only about seven in ten cold-sleep passengers will survive a lengthy voyage.
* Most of humanity's first colonies in Creator/LarryNiven's ''Literature/KnownSpace'' universe were settled by sleeper ships, in one case the crew who stayed awake forced the colonists to accept a caste system with the crew on top as they were being awakened.
* Niven and Pournelle's ''Literature/{{Footfall}}'' has the Fithp using a hybrid system, most are in stasis while necessary maintenance and piloting is done by successive generations of crew. The result is a significant culture clash between the 'Shipborn' and the defrosted original generation.
* Also by Niven, ''The Legacy of Heorot'' and ''Beowulf's Children'' (co-written with Jerry Pournelle and Steven Barnes), with a crew of interstellar colonists who discover too late the drawbacks of the freezing process they used, with the colonists suffering various forms of brain damage after being frozen and thawed multiple times -- a phenomenon that their children call "ice on their minds".
* ''Literature/SholanAlliance'': This is how humans traveled to Kiess. About 1/3 of them never woke up.
* The ''Literature/RevelationSpaceSeries'' by Creator/AlastairReynolds are full of {{Human Popsicle}}s, as they deal with a universe in which FasterThanLightTravel is impossible, though ''near'' lightspeed travel is possible via [[MileLongShip Lighthuggers]]. On most journeys, cryogenic pods aren't strictly necessary as TimeDilation caused by near-C speed means that the subjective time to travel a dozen lightyears is only a fraction of that, though passengers and most crew are frozen for the sake of convenience. Notably, the series makes some attempt to deal realistically with the health dangers of cryogenics, beyond outright failure.
* In ''Literature/HonorHarrington'', for the first millennium or so of space travel sleeper ships are the only safe way to move around between the stars at sublight speeds, with {{hyperspace}} used almost entirely by high-risk scouting missions with correspondingly high fatality rates. Later advances in {{hyperspace}} travel make running into [[NegativeSpaceWedgie grav waves]] much less likely, making it safe enough for use in colonization efforts. The original Manticoran colonists put all their life savings in a series of trust funds and traveled to their new homeworld on a slower-than-light sleeper ship, knowing that within the 600 years or so it would take for them to get there, A) someone probably would have invented a safer form of FTL travel, and B) the managed trust would make it so they could buy what else they may need. The trust managers invested well over the years and when they arrived there was a small colony full of technical experts waiting for them, including the bare bones of what would be their space navy.
* Creator/RogerZelazny's ''Isle Of The Dead'' is about a 20th-century Earthman who signs up as one of the first space explorers before humans have light speed. Everything has to be in sleeper ships and it takes 40-80 years to get to the planet. He does this several times. When FTL travel is made practical, it causes colossal changes throughout the galaxy, let alone Earth. Our hero is now the oldest living human, feels he doesn't belong anywhere and goes to the longest-lived race in the galaxy to see how they live their thousand-year lives -- and thereby hangs the tale.
* Found in the ''{{Literature/Remnants}}'' series by K.A. Applegate. In an attempt to survive the impending destruction of Earth, people get onto a large spaceship and shoot blindly into space. In order to live as long as it takes to find a habitable planet, they enter a stasis of some sort. However, in a few characters' cases, it doesn't work out as planned. Specifically: Two-thirds of the passengers die outright from CryonicsFailure. One character remains conscious while frozen, thus being paralyzed and deprived of sensory input for five hundred years, which causes temporary catatonia and permanent brain-rearrangement upon revival. Another character, who was pregnant, gestates extremely slowly and gives birth, while still in stasis, to a NightmareFuel mutant baby with no eyes and a PsychicLink to its mother, among other things. It, too, grows extremely slowly while in stasis, ending up around two-ish physically when everyone gets unfrozen.
* Creator/HarryTurtledove's ''Literature/WorldWar'' series has the Race (and, once they master space flight) humans using cold sleep to travel between their respective homeworlds due to the distances involved. For humans, the process hasn't been perfected, and in the final book their ambassador (Henry Kissinger) dies sometime during the trip and this is only learned when they try and fail to revive him. [[spoiler:Of course, it becomes a moot point when humans develop FTL travel near the end of the novel.]]
* Peter Hamilton's ''Literature/TheNightsDawnTrilogy'' has Zero-Tau pods which are used to keep people in stasis, notably in colony ships. Since thousands of people are transported in each ship, the resources to feed and house the colonists for the voyage (even though it is rather short) would be beyond the ship's capacity. They are put in Zero-Tau pods, along with everything they take with them, namely embryos of farm animals and crop seeds. As added horrors: [[spoiler: the Returned do not go to sleep in a Zero-Tau pod and essentially become conscious prisoners in the frozen body. Few of them can last for very long before they flee back into their dimension, driven half insane by the experience. Zero-Tau pods become the traditional exorcism measure.]]

* In Andrey Livadniy's ''Literature/TheHistoryOfTheGalaxy'' series, all early extrasolar colony ships had the crew/colonists placed in cryogenic chambers for the duration of the journey. Not all woke up on arrival. If the system failed to activate the revival process in a reasonable time frame, the Hugo [=BD12=] androids would switch to "colony survival" mode and take any steps necessary to that end, including manual activation of the waking up process. Most ships also include stasis chambers for emergencies, including escape pods.
** The ''[[http://livadny.ru/wp-content/themes/livadniy/timthumb.php?src=/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/alfa_bg4.jpg&zc=1&w=710 Alpha,]]'' the first extrasolar colony ship (also the largest ship ever built due to the fact that [[SubspaceOrHyperspace hypersphere]] hasn't been discovered yet) was designed to have half its crew in stasis with both shifts alternating every six months. Besides the crew, there were 500,000 colonists in stasis.
** WordOfGod is that, by the time the half-a-century period known as the Great Exodus ended, 7023 colony ships (with the colonists in stasis pods despite FTL travel having been discovered) have been sent out from Earth. The vast majority of them have either been lost, destroyed, never made planetfall, landed on planets incapable of supporting human life, or resulted in the colonists degrading (either dying out or forming [[LostColony Lost Colonies]]).
* ''Literature/CarrerasLegions'': Colonists to Terra Nova were kept in cryogenics to cut down on consumables needed for the trip between the rift and the home planets of either star system, and make them easier to handle, particularly those who weren't making the trip voluntarily.
* Allen Steele's novel ''Literature/{{Coyote}}'' features a sleeper ship with a saboteur aboard whose job it is to wake up a few weeks after the beginning of the mission and destroy the ship. [[spoiler: The saboteur loses his nerve and changes places with a member of the crew who was supposed to stay asleep for the entire journey. This crewmember remains awake and lives out the rest of his life alone for several decades aboard the ship when the AI running the ship is unable to return him to sleep. The crewmember does leave a note for the captain explaining the situation and outing the saboteur, however.]]
* Used to allow settling of Epsilon Erdani II in ''Literature/{{Helm}}'' by survivors of the destruction of Earth's ecosphere.
* In Creator/PoulAnderson's "The Burning Bridge", many colonists are kept in this for the interstellar trip -- they rotate.
* Used in ''[[Literature/DragonridersOfPern Dragonsdawn]]'', with necessary crew rotating in five-year shifts.
* This is ''supposedly'' the purpose of the eponymous ''Victory'' in Mark S. Geston's novel ''Lords of the Starship''. Vast numbers of women and children are put into suspended animation and stacked like cordwood in the vast ship's hull, with the expectation that the men will follow before takeoff. However, [[spoiler:the entire project is a hideous hoax. The ship is a fake, designed only to destroy itself and anyone in the vicinity. If the supposedly-frozen occupants weren't actually dead to begin with, they certainly are by the end of the book.]]
* In ''[[Literature/TakeshiKovacs Altered Carbon]]'', it's mentioned that the anti-BrainUploading Roman Catholic Church has sent a couple sleeper ships to other systems. While most prefer to [[SubspaceAnsible needlecast]] their egos or if there is no receiver at the planet deploy an upload seedship.
* In ''Literature/RatsBatsAndVats'', the Earth ship that terraformed Harmony and Reason was not fast enough for humans to live on board, as Chip, the protagonist, was cloned based on [=DNA=] records and it's implied that the humans from Earth were cryogenically frozen.
* In ''Literature/{{Blindsight}}'' deep space travelers are given gene therapy so that they can hibernate for years with mechanical support. The genes are derived from vampires, who were a HumanSubspecies that fed on other humans and slept for long periods so their prey could repopulate, and were extinct until recently.
* In the ''Literature/HyperionCantos'', Martin Silenus is frozen and put on a spaceship by his parents so he won't have to face the family's collapse. When he wakes up Martin's mind still works but he can only voice six words due to brain damage ([[SevenDirtyWords all of them offensive]]) and is faced with several generations' worth of debt. Too bad when your career of choice is "poet" -- though it turns out that this and his life on a CrapsackWorld were needed to teach him to be a proper genius.
* In Creator/WilliamShatner's Franchise/StarTrekExpandedUniverse novels, this is how Emperor Tiberius I (Kirk's EvilCounterpart in the MirrorUniverse) survives to the post-TNG era, while Kirk is stuck in the Nexus. After leading the Cardassian-Klingon Alliance against his former Terran Empire, he realizes he has [[YouHaveOutlivedYourUsefulness outlived his usefulness]] and flees before the Cardassians and the Klingons can dispose of him on a ship with cryopods. Naturally, he only planned to "sleep" for a year before trying to retake his "rightful" place as Emperor, but the wake-up system failed, and the ship was adrift until about a year before the novels take place when a Mirror!Klingon ship finds him. The Klingons immediately recognize him and plan for him to stand trial and be executed, but Tiberius manages to seduce a female Klingon and (after killing her), escape and enact his plan into motion.
* The Souls from ''Literature/TheHost2008'' go into suspended animation when traveling between worlds since the trip can take up to a century.
* In Jack Campbell's ''Literature/TheLostFleet'' series, protagonist John Geary's ship is sneak-attacked by Syndicate Worlds warships and destroyed after a desperate battle. His hibernation escape pod's beacon is damaged, leaving him stranded among the ship's debris for over a century. When he's finally picked up, he discovers that the war started by the sneak attack has run continuously ever since. Worse yet, his heroic last stand has become the stuff of legends, and "Black Jack" Geary is now something of a semi-mythical folk hero. Worst of all, the terrible casualty rate has killed off skilled fleet officers faster than they could train the next generation, and as a result the tactics of the day mainly consist of charging wildly at the enemy and relying on HeroicSpirit. Enter John Geary, a fairly average fleet officer from 100 years ago, which makes him effectively a tactical genius now...
* James White used this trope in several variations, done by aliens as well as by humans.
** In one ''Literature/SectorGeneral'' story, the protagonists have to deal with the technical, medical, and logistical problems created by the discovery of a severely-damaged Sleeper Starship which has functioning life-support for the (many) surviving popsicles, but nothing else. In another, they initially mistake a LivingShip in suspended animation along with its crew for a patient with a parasitic disease.
** In ''The Silent Stars Go By'', humans in an AlternateHistory launch a starship with tens of thousands of passengers in suspended animation monitored by crew members who do two-year-long shifts before returning to sleep themselves.
** In ''The Watch Below'', aquatic aliens fleeing the destruction of their world arrive on Earth. There is conflict between those who spent the centuries-long trip sleeping and the GenerationShip crew.
** In ''The Dream Millennium'', humans flee a dystopian future Earth on a thousand-year-long trip on a sleeper starship. They are periodically awakened for monitoring and to decide if they should stop at planets the ship approaches. But while going into and out of suspended animation, they start to have strange dreams...
* ''Literature/TheWorthingSaga'' uses a variant in which people lose all of their memories while in stasis, so their brains need to be scanned in advance, so their personalities can be re-uploaded when they wake. This leads to a situation in which, due to a collision, 112 colonists are technically alive, but only two of them have surviving memories. The remaining colonists are essentially newborns in adult bodies when they wake up and have to relearn everything in order to function.
* ''Literature/Aeon14'': The initial human settlement of the stars around Earth was accomplished through sleeper ships that took decades or centuries to reach their destinations. The [[{{Terraform}} Future Generation Terraformers']] "worldships" went first, followed by several waves of colonies organized by the Generational Space Service. The protagonists' ISS ''Intrepid'' is the biggest and most advanced ever built, 25 kilometers long and carrying a population of 25 million. It's also the last: the Sol system falls into CivilWar not long after they leave in the early 42nd century, and a couple hundred years later, [[spoiler:FasterThanLightTravel is invented and all hell breaks loose]].
* ''Literature/TheLoneliestGirlInTheUniverse'': The ship the main character Romy is on ''The Infinity'' serves this purpose. Designed to transport people to a planet in Alpha Centauri by putting them in a form of cryo sleep called Topar. Romy was born when two of the crewmembers had a kid making her the first human born in space. However, thanks to a series of events Romy ends up as the only person on board.
* In Creator/CordwainerSmith's ''Literature/ScannersLiveInVain'', this is a requirement for normal people to travel in space, due to the "Great Pain of Space", a physical and mental agony, implied to be caused by radiation, that drives anyone who experiences it to [[DrivenToSuicide suicide]]. The crew of spacecraft, on the other hand, [[CyberneticsWillEatYourSoul well...]]
* In Arthur C. Clarke's ''Literature/RendezvousWithRama'', the titular vessel is assumed by some characters to be a sleeper ship, though later novels reveal it to be something entirely different.

* ''Undertow'' by Creator/ElizabethBear had a galactic society that used Schrodinger's Uncertainty Principle to teleport goods and information instantly between planets. However, living creatures like humans that went through the process wound up dead on the other side due to collapsing the wave function. As such, transporting people from planet to planet requires slower-than-light ships and cryonics.
* In ''Literature/VorkosiganSaga'' it's implied that the settlement of Beta Colony, one of the first planets colonized off of Earth, was done using this method at sublight speed, as there were either no wormholes leading to the system, or the wormhole technology hadn't been invented yet.
* Creator/OrsonScottCard does more with the idea in another book, ''Literature/TheWorthingSaga'', where he projects the decay of a society through the fact that the richest people can afford to undergo routine stasis and "live" practically forever while poorer people live regular lives that are literally a fraction as long.
* Creator/HarryTurtledove's ''Literature/{{Worldwar}}'' series has the Race (and, once they master space flight, humans) using cold sleep to travel between their respective homeworlds due to the distances involved. For humans, the process hasn't been perfected, and in the final book their ambassador (Henry Kissinger) dies sometime during the trip and this is only learned when they try and fail to revive him. [[spoiler:Of course, it becomes a moot point when humans develop FTL travel near the end of the novel.]]
* ''Literature/DragonridersOfPern'': Used in ''Dragonsdawn'', with necessary crew rotating in five-year shifts.
* James White's ''The Dream Millennium'' has an unsettling variation: the colonists aboard the sleeper ship have nightmares in which they experience increasingly violent deaths, while in hibernation. And it's a ''long'' voyage...
* Creator/RogerZelany:
** ''Isle Of The Dead'' is about a 20th-century Earthman who signs up as one of the first space explorers before humans have light speed. Everything has to be in sleeper ships and it takes 40-80 years to get to the planet. He does this several times. When FTL travel is made practical, it causes colossal changes throughout the galaxy, let alone Earth. Our hero is now the oldest living human, feels he doesn't belong anywhere and goes to the longest-lived race in the galaxy to see how they live their thousand-year lives -- and thereby hangs the tale.
* In ''Literature/LordOfLight'', the fact that the colonists were all shipped through interstellar space as human popsicles is offered as the explanation for why they didn't develop mutant superpowers when the ship's crew did.
* ''Literature/AuroraCycle'': Most people undertake Fold journeys frozen because it has negative effects on conscious minds. Anyone over 25 ''has'' to travel in cryo, while younger people will be okay, but need to be in cryo if the journey is long enough. Auri O'Malley becomes a FishOutOfTemporalWater when the colony ship she was travelling on was lost in the Fold for 220 years until her rescue at the beginning, with herself as the only survivor.
* Creator/VernorVinge's ''Literature/ADeepnessInTheSky'': Sleeper units are the only way for slow-zone spacers to survive the decades and centuries between ports. At one point, the young Pham Nuwen avoids using one out of fear and spends a couple of years studying instead.
* In the ''Literature/JacobsLadderTrilogy'', the colony ship ''Jacob's Ladder'' carries hundreds of thousands of cryonically frozen passengers in addition to a living crew.
* Lisanne Norman's human colonists travel in cryonics to get to their first extra-solar colony world. It performs poorly with a large number of colonists dying before planetfall.
* In ''Literature/TimeToOrbitUnknown'' the colonists are not frozen but held in a sort of biochemical slowdown which requires growing artificial nerves to maintain the body's fitness. This process is slightly risky and can only be done once, so once you wake up from stasis, you're staying awake. As such, the trip was designed to have two crews, one which would cover the first half of the journey and then start their sleep, and one which would be woken up midway through and then stay awake until arrival.

* The Eligius IV pops up in the fifth season of ''Series/The100''. It was an interstellar mining ship that used prisoner labor, with cryosleep used to help the prisoners and crew survive the journey.
* The ''Series/RedDwarf'' became an unintentional one when Lister was arrested for smuggling and sentenced to spend the remainder of the intra-stellar voyage in stasis. Mid-way, a disaster flooded the ship with radiation and the AI, Holly, had to wait three million years for it to go away, leaving Lister the only (human) survivor. Later the stasis booths on the Star Bug are used for two centuries at a time while chasing down the stolen Dwarf.
** The books explain that about a century before the series start, there was interest in interstellar travel so ships built then (like the ''Dwarf'') had stasis booths. But every SleeperStarship that was sent out found no habitable worlds and no sign of life in any solar system they had the delta-V to reach, and by the time of ''Infinity Welcomes Careful Drivers'' humanity had given it up as a waste of time and money. [[spoiler:Until they came up with a method of FasterThanLightTravel, anyway.]]
* The Astraeus mission in later seasons of ''Series/{{Eureka}}'' put its passengers in hibernation for the trip.
** The hibernation was to keep the crew from getting crushed by the FTL drive's acceleration. It wasn't supposed to be a long trip at all. The distance from Earth to Titan is only about 70 light minutes, meaning a faster-than-''light'' drive would take at most 70 minutes to get there.
* The ''Series/StargateAtlantis'' team once found an Ancient battleship with its entire crew in stasis and connected to a virtual reality simulation.
* ''Franchise/StarTrek'':
** In the ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'' episode "[[Recap/StarTrekS1E22SpaceSeed Space Seed]]", the ''Enterprise'' encounters the S.S. ''Botany Bay'', a "sleeper ship" with seventy-two people in suspended animation. They turn out to be genetic supermen from the period of the Eugenics Wars on Earth. It also explains why Khan is older than the others -- as leader, he would have spent less time in the freezer tubes than his followers.
** The ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' episode "[[Recap/StarTrekTheNextGenerationS1E25TheNeutralZone The Neutral Zone]]" follows up on this with another spacecraft discovered by the crew of the ''Enterprise''-D in the 24th century. This is a primitive "cryosatellite" or "capsule" of roughly late 20th or early 21st-century technology containing a vault with cryotubes. Several are empty, at least one experienced a [[CryonicsFailure cryo-failure]], and three contain [[HumanPopsicle human popsicles]], although unlike Khan and his followers, these are regular old un-augmented 20th-century human beings who had died of natural causes and had been put in cryo-stasis so their bodies would not decay, with the hope their condition could be reversed with more advanced medicine in the future. It works, but it's still a mystery how an orbital satellite with very limited propulsion wound up hundreds of lightyears from the Sol System.
* ''Series/TheTwilightZone1959'': In the episode "[[Recap/TheTwilightZoneS5E135TheLongMorrow The Long Morrow]]", an astronaut will be in frozen suspended animation during his forty-year trip to a distant star and return.
* The ''Series/BabylonFive'' episode "[[Recap/BabylonFiveS02E05TheLongDark The Long Dark]]" involves a ship sent from Earth shortly before FirstContact (and use of FTL) with a married couple in stasis chambers. Unfortunately, only the woman survives. Her husband is dead, but not due to a malfunction. Actually, [[spoiler:he is "eaten" by an EldritchAbomination that hitched a ride on the ship]].

* An episode of ''Series/{{Lexx}}'' has a group of teenagers convince their unpopular friend to steal his father's spaceship and go for a ride. Apparently, space travel using this method requires suspended animation, so they program the timer for a year. Unfortunately for them, they mess up the programming, and the timer is never activated. They're picked up centuries later by the titular LivingShip. One of the teens accidentally lets the undead assassin Kai loose with instructions to "kill everyone". Naturally, Kai slaughters all the teens in the most graphic way possible.
* ''Series/LostInSpace'': The Robinsons were supposed to spend the trip to Alpha Centauri inside the Jupiter 2's suspended animation "freezing tubes"
* ''Series/BattlestarGalactica1978'': The fleet comes upon a ship carrying 2 families (a father and his kids, a mother and her kids but the adults aren't a couple). The fleet nearly kills the father, by waking him up. The atmosphere on the Galactica is too heavy for him. They are escaping from a colony, where none of the people born can return to their home world which is divided into east (USSR) and west (US) because they can't survive in the atmosphere.

* This is how ''{{Series/Firefly}}'' indicated humans got from Earth to the new system they colonized.
* Used extensively in the setting of ''Series/Earth2''; for decades-long interstellar trips like the main cast's journey from Earth to G889, for relatively short-duration trips within the solar system, and for medical purposes. This is despite repeatedly undergoing the cold sleep procedure causing brain damage, which happened to one of the main characters as part of his backstory (it also accidentally [[spoiler:made him receptive to the alien Terrians' telepathy]]).

* The parody song "Compound Interest" has the astronauts investing their money in developing FasterThanLightTravel before setting out, so when they wake up they own most of colonized space.

* It is implied in Creator/SternElectronics' ''Pinball/{{Flight 2000}}'' that the [[CrewOfOne one-man spaceships]] are these, carrying their HumanPopsicle passengers to another planet.

* In Creator/TheBBC series ''Radio/{{Earthsearch}}'' and ''Earthsearch II'', relativity is never violated, as interstellar travel is only possible due to suspended animation. However, the starship the protagonists use was also designed as a GenerationShip because every year as a HumanPopsicle means they age a month.

** The ''Zenith'', a massive ColonyShip launched from Earth to Aldabaran in the backstory, was a hybrid sleeper and GenerationShip with most of the colonists in stasis while the crew were awake and formed a hereditary caste system over the centuries. With the captain's family forming the nobility of the Zenithian Hegemony after they reached their destination.

* In ''TabletopGame/{{GURPS}} TabletopGame/TranshumanSpace'', nanostasis is routinely used to save on life support during interplanetary travel.
* Classic ''TabletopGame/{{Traveller}}''. One common way to travel between star systems was "cold sleep", using drugs to slow down the passenger's metabolism. It was much cheaper than normal passage but had a risk of death during revival.

* Creator/GamesWorkshop games:
** The ships of the Charnel Guard Chapter of [[SuperSoldier Adeptus Astartes]] from ''TabletopGame/Warhammer40000'' contain vast stasis crypts where the battle-brothers of the Chapter [[HumanPopsicle sleep in suspended animation]] between campaigns.
** In ''TabletopGame/BattlefleetGothic'', the Dhows utilised by the [[TheFederation Tau Empire’s]] Nicassar subjects are primarily sleeper ships, each containing a hibernating extended family of the semi-nomadic aliens as they slowly travel across the gulfs of interstellar space.
* In ''TabletopGame/EclipsePhase'' Hibernoids were genetically engineered to crew interplanetary ships with the ability to sleep for up to 40 days at a time without food or water. While Titan’s [[spoiler: and Firewall’s]] interstellar colonization projects (without the Pandora Gates) tend to focus on upload ships.
* Travel between Earth and Poseidon in ''TabletopGame/BluePlanet'' is spent in induced hypothermic metabolic suppression, lowering life support requirements enough to be economically possible at all. IHMS is grueling, and even people who survive it are often worse for wear.

[[folder:Theatre]]
* Parodied in one Australian play where the crew of a GenerationShip fall into barbarity and think that the Human Popsicles are the equivalent of frozen food. When the last remaining colonist wakes up early, he's not too impressed.
-->"You mean to tell me you've eaten all the great scientists and engineers who were going to build this new world? Didn't anyone protest?"\\
"Of course they did. But we ate them anyway!"

[[folder:Theme Parks]]
* In Mission: SPACE at [[Ride/DisneyThemeParks Epcot]], the riders spend most of the months-long trip to Mars in hypersleep
[[/folder]]

[[folder:Video Games]]
* The titular ship in ''VideoGame/{{Seedship}}'' is this, carrying the last of humanity.
* Despite having warp drive, the four colony ships that brought the original Terran colonists to the Koprulu sector in ''VideoGame/StarCraft'' used cryo. Just as well, since a computer error led to them being in warp for thirty years. The UED Expeditionary force in ''Brood War'' did this as well, despite making the trip in a year or less.
* In ''VideoGame/SidMeiersAlphaCentauri'', the Human colonies in Planet come from a big spaceship, the ''U.N.S. Unity'', sent by the United Nations to build a colony on another planet, filled with thousands of cryogenically frozen people.
** Ditto for the SpiritualSequel ''VideoGame/CivilizationBeyondEarth'', except for the [[MiddleEasternCoalition Al Falah]] faction, who arrived in a [[GenerationShips Generation Ship]] (the "Rising Tide" DLC). As such, they usually refer to the other factions as "Sleepers". It's stated that it was the fifth generation that finally reached the planet. In a way, it was a blessing for them, as the long journey and generations of passing down only the necessary values means that all they care about is the success of their mission. Things of the past, such as race, tribe, old grudges, religion, no longer matter to them.
** Also the same for the unofficial SpiritualSequel ''VideoGame/PandoraFirstContact'', except for one of the factions, [[AnimalWrongsGroup Terra Salvum]], who lacked the funds to buy one of [[MegaCorp Noxium]]'s starships, instead stealing the plans and building their own. Since they lacked the technical know-how to build proper (and safe) cryopods, they settled for sending a [[GenerationShips Generation Ship]]. Improper radiation shielding also killed off most of the adults, resulting in only children making it to the final destination, even more fanatical than their parents in their desire to stop the exploitation of the planet by the others.
* The titular ''VideoGame/{{Marathon}}'' colony ship is a generational ship. The Martian moon Deimos was converted into the ''Marathon'' and sent on a 300-year journey to Tau Ceti. While there were a few crew members "wake" during the trip, most of them were in suspended animation.
* Crew for new ships in ''VideoGame/{{Homeworld}}'' are awakened from the massive bays of frozen colonists onboard the mothership. How many there are in total depends on how many you save in the second mission, up to 600,000. [[AllThereInTheManual The manual]] mentions that the technology was developed based on certain Kharakian creatures that are able to hibernate for long periods of time. Maybe we should study bears.
** The backstory for the ''Cataclysm'' expansion pack states that those who were awakened on Hiigara from those pods found themselves at a disadvantage. Those who fought the Taiidani claimed higher status than those who merely slept. This kicks off the main plot when a small clan tries to strike out on its own among the stars. The manual also touches on their reaction to learning that EverybodysDeadDave; many were DrivenToSuicide. One particular Hiigaran was one of only two members of his small kiith who made the cut (the other was his wife). When he was awakened at Hiigara, he discovered that not only was his entire kiith wiped out when the Taiidani destroyed Kharak, but his wife was also killed when the remaining Taiidani ships opened fire on the cryo-pods. Instead of committing suicide, he demanded and was given a small frigate, crewed by others who have been likewise hurt by the Taiidani, who became honorary members of his kiith. The manual claims that the man became one of the most prolific bounty hunters, going after many of the Taiidani war criminals.
* ''Videogame/AlienLegacy'' starts with the seedship UNS ''Calypso'' arriving to the Beta Caeli system after traveling for many thousands of years (according to some calculations). The crew has been on ice this whole time. You start with only a small portion of the colonists with the remaining ones still frozen due to a lack of livable space and resources. As you build up your planetside colonies and ship colonists from the ''Calypso'', more are awoken. A random event may happen that will kill the still-frozen colonists due to a malfunction if you're too slow in waking them up. Imagine the colonists' surprise when they found out that another seedship (launched 16 years later) beat them to the punch by 21 years thanks to advances in fusion.

* ''Franchise/{{Halo}}'' doesn't have large-scale dedicated sleeper ships, but most ships have cryogenic stasis. Master Chief [[{{Bookends}} begins]] [[VideoGame/HaloCombatEvolved the first game]] awakening from fugue and [[spoiler: ends ''VideoGame/{{Halo 3}}'' going into a stasis pod]].
** This is because human slipstream technology isn't very advanced. It routinely takes from a week to several months to get from one star system to another. Cryopods are there to conserve supplies and to subjectively shorten the trip. The Covenant have no need for these, as their drives are much more efficient. After the original trilogy's end, human slipspace tech takes a big leap, leaving cryosleep all but unnecessary except for ''very'' long distances, as shorter jumps now take hours or days.
** At the end of ''VideoGame/HaloWars'', the ''Spirit Of Fire'''s crew goes into very, ''very'' long cryosleep, as a result of [[spoiler: using their slipstream drive as a bomb]]. In context, they go to sleep before ''VideoGame/{{HaloCombatEvolved}}, and wake up after ''VideoGame/{{Halo 4}}''.

* The text-based game ''[[Creator/ChoiceOfGames Planet Quarantine]]'' starts with the PlayerCharacter waking up from [[HumanPopsicle cold sleep]] as the ship ''Jessica'' is nearing an Earth-like world called Niah (short for "[[FunWithAcronyms Needle in a Haystack]]"). The player is the commander of a quarantine team whose task is to go through each colonist's mind and possessions to make sure no "undesirable" items make it through to the new worlds (this is done en route to prevent a public outcry over such drastic censorship on Earth). All undesirable items are destroyed, and undesirable ideas are "corrected". If a person turns out to have faked his or her tests to get aboard a ship, he or she may wake up with a "freezer burn" that erases his or her personality, allowing that person to start a brand-new life on arrival. Depending on your choices in the game, you may take another such trip.

* The shuttle to the space cruiser in ''Film/TheFifthElement'' put all of its passengers into 'hypersleep' just before takeoff, even though the trip took just a few hours. Possibly it was meant to save them from the discomfort of hyperspace entry.

* Fairly common in the ''WebOriginal/OrionsArm'' universe, older ones using cryonics while most built during the Federation era and later use considerably safer nanostasis. One notable CryonicsFailure during the early days of interstellar travel resulted in House Stevens' practice of reproducing through cloning as a means of avoiding inbreeding.

* Used in ''Literature/{{Dragonsdawn}}'', with necessary crew rotating in five-year shifts.

* Peter Hamilton's ''Literature/TheNightsDawnTrilogy'' has Zero-Tau pods which are used to keep people in stasis, notably in colony ships. Since thousands of people are transported in each ship, the resources to feed and house the colonists for the voyage (even though it is rather short) would be beyond the ship's capacity. They are put in Zero-Tau pods, along with everything they take with them, namely embryos of farm animals and crop seeds. As added horrors: [[spoiler: the Returned do not go to sleep in a Zero-Tau pod and essentially become conscious prisoners in the frozen body. Few of them can last for very long before they flee back into their dimension, driven half insane by the experience. Zero-Tau pods become the traditional exorcism measure.]]

** In ''The Dream Millennium'', humans flee a dystopian future Earth on a thousand-year-old trip on a sleeper starship. They are periodically awakened for monitoring and to decide if they should stop at planets the ship approaches. But while going into and out of suspended animation, they start to have strange dreams...

* In one ''Literature/SectorGeneral'' story, the protagonists have to deal with the technical, medical, and logistical problems created by the discovery of a severely-damaged Sleeper Starship which has functioning life-support for the (many) surviving popsicles, but nothing else.

* ''Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey'': The trip is one of months, not centuries, but suspended animation is used to avoid the problem of having to pack several months' worth of food, and to help keep secret the real purpose of the mission. In ''Film/TwoThousandTenTheYearWeMakeContact'', Floyd tells his son it's "so we won't go cuckoo."

** In [[Film/{{Aliens}} the second movie]], we find that Ripley's escape crypod had been drifting for over half a century: she is now a woman without a place, as her family has all died of old age long before (setting up her adoption of Newt).

* Three of the five astronauts aboard the ''Discovery One'' in ''Film/TwoThousandOneASpaceOdyssey'' were placed in suspended animation. The HAL-9000 computer interfered with their life support, killing all three.

** ''WesternAnimation/BeastWars'': Most of the crew of the ''Axalon'' in stasis. When it looks like it's going to crash, [[TheHero Optimus Primal]] [[EscapePod ejects the stasis pods]] in hopes that the sleeping crew would at least survive. [[spoiler:A few do and make planetfall to join the war, but the majority are destroyed after the Season 1 finale, killed and knocked out of orbit by the alien superweapon or the Quantum Surge caused by its destruction]].

** ''WesternAnimation/StarTrekProdigy'': Jankom Pog travelled to the Delta Quadrant in one. The pre-Federation Tellurites used to fill their exploratory vessels with orphans.

** ''WesternAnimation/StarTrekLowerDecks'': In "[[Recap/StarTrekLowerDecksS1E04MoistVessel Moist Vessel]]", despite being called a "generation ship," the stranded alien vessel has all its passengers "mummified" in SuspendedAnimation capsules.