cryogenics n.

= cryostasis n.; cryonics n.

SF Encyclopedia


  • 1960 Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner 7 Jan. a6/1

    A new branch of science called cryogenics, which is concerned with ultra cold temperatures and their effects upon things, including live things. Life processes can be suspended and familiar substances take on unpredictable properties.

  • 1964 A. K. Lang Thaw & Serve in Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction Jan. 91/2 page image Allen Kim Lang bibliography

    The truth with this Future…is that it’s trimmed of testosterone. Fortunately, thanx to the magic of cryogenics (Anything That Goes In Can Be Frozen; ‘Break the Law’, You’ll Free & Thaw, etc.), your hormone-gap is about to be plugged.

  • 1967 Times 3 June 11/5

    The almost unlimited market offered by cryogenics, a science which enables a man to pay for the freezing of his body immediately upon death, to be followed by storage and subsequent revival as soon as a remedy for the cause of death has been discovered.

  • 1976 C. Holland Floating Worlds (1977) 92 Cecelia Holland bibliography

    Its only important industry was cryogenics.

  • 1977 J. W. Macvey Interstellar Travel (1978) 8

    These include generation travel (space arks) and the use of cryogenics (suspended animation).

  • 1990 A. Steele Clarke County, Space 73 Allen Steele

    Biostasis for space travel had been achieved not by cryogenics—dozens of people from the twentieth century were still paying for that mistake—but through psychoactive drugs, clinical derivatives of dioden hystrix, the fungus that Haitian houngan had used for centuries to fake the deaths of men and women, then later revive them and enslave them as zombis, the so-called living dead of modern myth.

  • 2017 C. Cussler & G. Brown Nighthawk xxxiii. 265 Clive Cussler Graham Brown bibliography

    Using magnetic force and cryogenics to confine and control this mixed-state matter, we realized it could be stored indefinitely.


Research requirements

antedating 1960

Research History
Mike Christie submitted a 1956 cite from Robert Heinlein's "The Door Into Summer." Greg Childers submitted a 1949 cite from Physical Review. That cite refers to a Cryogenics Laboratory at the National Bureau of Standards, so it seems likely that earlier references may exist in NBS documents. Kathleen Miller submitted a 1947 cite from an article by Benjamin Fine in the New York Times, and a 1946 cite from a classified ad in the New York Times. Imran Ghory submitted a cite from an anonymous 1937 article in Science, "Fellowships of the Lalor Foundation". OED2 had a 1958 cite; OED3 updated this with an 1899 cite. However, these examples were all in the sense 'the science of low temperatures', which is not primarily an SF term. The entry was subsequently revised to have only the 'cryonics' sense.

Last modified 2021-03-08 16:12:46
In the compilation of some entries, HDSF has drawn extensively on corresponding entries in OED.