Cryonics: Key Books and Articles
Cryonics: A Complete Reading List
A guide to books and articles about cryonics — from the foundational texts that launched the movement to technical manuals, memoirs, critical perspectives, and key academic papers.
Contents
• Founding & Foundational Books
• Technical & Procedural Books
• Memoirs & First-Hand Accounts
• Philosophy & Ethics Books
• Anthologies & Collections
• Related & Adjacent Books
• Pro-Cryonics Articles & Essays
• Skeptical & Critical Articles
• Cryonics In Fiction
• Academic Papers & Legal/Ethical Analysis
• Long-Form Journalism & Popular Writing
• Free Online Resources & Archives
Founding & Foundational Books
These are the texts that created and defined the cryonics movement. If you read nothing else, start here.
The Prospect of Immortality Robert C.W. Ettinger | 1964
Buy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Prospect-Immortality-Robert-C-Ettinger/dp/097434723X
Read free online (Cryonics Institute): https://cryonics.org/cryonics-library/the-prospect-of-immortality/
The book that started it all. Robert Ettinger — a physics and math teacher from Michigan who was wounded in World War II and spent years in a hospital contemplating mortality — privately published a short version in 1962 before Doubleday released the full version in 1964. In it, Ettinger laid out a simple but revolutionary argument: death is usually a gradual process, and if a body can be frozen quickly enough after the heart stops, future technology may be able to repair the damage and revive the person. Isaac Asimov reviewed an early manuscript and declared the science sound. The book became a Book of the Month Club selection, was published in nine languages, and Ettinger appeared on television with Johnny Carson, David Frost, and others.
It is, in every sense, the founding document of the cryonics movement. A 2005 updated edition adds historical commentary by R. Michael Perry and Jim Yount.
It is not too much to say that Ettinger laid out the entire cryonics movement and effort in his amazingly prescient book. In particular, he was the first to lay out the cryonics version of Pascal’s Wager: if you’re cryopreserved and cryonics fails to work out, you’re just as dead as you would be otherwise. But if it does work, you’re alive, and alive in an advanced future that could extend your life span to an unknown number of years. Certain death, or possible life? The rational choice is obvious.
There is only one aspect of the cryonics effort which followed that Ettinger failed to address in The Prospect of Immortality: the economic aspect. How to attract funding and establish business entities capable of actually supplying cryonics services. Ettinger assumed that cryonics was so obviously desirable that entrepreneurs and government would flock to develop it. But after the initial flurry of publicity, those who wanted to benefit from cryonic suspension had to build the businesses and techniques themselves, sometimes with disastrous results. Making cryonics possible, and making it popular, proved to be two different things.
Man Into Superman Robert C.W. Ettinger | 1972
Buy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Man-Into-Superman-R-C-W-Ettinger/dp/B000H5MY74
Read free PDF (Cryonics Institute): https://cryonics.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/ManIntoSuperman.pdf
Ettinger’s follow-up to The Prospect of Immortality, published a decade later. While the first book focused on cryopreservation as a way to cheat death, this one expanded the vision dramatically: if we are going to wake up in a technologically advanced future, why stop at simply repairing the damage? Ettinger argued for radical human enhancement — improved bodies, extended lifespans, and even the transformation of human nature itself. This is considered one of the founding texts of transhumanism (a philosophy that advocates using technology to transcend human biological limits), and Ettinger is recognized as a pioneer transhumanist thinker as a result.
We Froze the First Man Robert F. Nelson | 1968
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/We-Froze-First-Man-Nelson/dp/B0007DJ7TG
Written just a year after the first cryonic suspension of Dr. James Bedford in January 1967, this book is Bob Nelson’s account of the earliest days of the cryonics movement from the inside. Nelson was a television repairman who read Ettinger’s Prospect of Immortality and became so inspired that he founded and ran the Cryonics Society of California — despite having no scientific training whatsoever. The book covers the bedlam, excitement, and ethical debates that surrounded the first human cryonic preservation.
Nelson later became infamous in the cryonics community when it emerged that a number of the bodies he was supposed to be maintaining had thawed and decomposed after he ran out of money — events he chronicles much later in his second book, Freezing People Is (Not) Easy (see below.) This earlier volume captures the movement’s naive optimism at its origin.
Technical & Procedural Books
These books explain how cryonics actually works in practice — the chemistry, procedures, equipment, and protocols used by cryonics organizations.
Human Cryopreservation Procedures Aschwin de Wolf & Charles Platt | 2020
Buy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Human-Cryopreservation-Procedures-Aschwin-Wolf/dp/B08C97D93G
At over 700 pages, this is the most comprehensive and detailed procedural manual on cryonics ever written. Aschwin de Wolf is one of the world’s leading cryonics researchers and writers; Charles Platt is a British science journalist who became deeply involved in Alcor (the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, one of the two main cryonics organizations in the U.S.). The book covers every phase of a cryonics procedure: from the moment of cardiac arrest, through the stabilization of the body, the perfusion with cryoprotectants (chemicals that prevent damaging ice crystals from forming in tissue), and the cooling to liquid nitrogen temperatures (-196°C / -320°F). It is explicitly written for practitioners and researchers, not casual readers — but it is the definitive technical reference for understanding how cryonics is performed today.
Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology K. Eric Drexler | 1986
Buy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Engines-Creation-Coming-Nanotechnology/dp/0385199732
Read free online: https://web.mit.edu/STS.035/www/PDFs/Drexler.pdf
Not strictly a cryonics book, but essential reading for understanding the scientific hope underlying it. Drexler introduced the concept of nanotechnology — molecular-scale machines that could manipulate matter atom by atom — to the world in this landmark text. Chapter 9 is directly about cryonics and argues that molecular-scale repair machines could, in principle, reverse the damage caused by cryopreservation and revive frozen people. This argument — that nanotechnology (technology operating at the scale of individual atoms and molecules) is the mechanism by which frozen cryonics patients might eventually be repaired — is central to why serious cryonics advocates believe the science is plausible.
Memoirs & First-Hand Accounts
Personal accounts from people who have been at the center of the cryonics movement — both believers and critics.
Freezing People Is (Not) Easy Bob Nelson, Kenneth Bly & Sally Magana | 2014
Buy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Freezing-People-Not-Easy-Adventures/dp/0762792957
Bob Nelson’s second book — a complete reckoning with his time as the president of the Cryonics Society of California. Nelson was the TV repairman who froze the first human (Dr. James Bedford) in 1967, and who went on to maintain a small number of cryonics patients in an underground vault in Chatsworth, California. Underfunded, overwhelmed, and eventually unable to keep up with the costs of liquid nitrogen, Nelson allowed multiple bodies in his care to thaw and decompose — a catastrophe that resulted in lawsuits and national news coverage. This book is his confessional, decades later. It is an utterly unique document: the story of a well-meaning amateur who found himself at the center of one of the strangest enterprises in American history. Film director Errol Morris called it a quintessential American story about frontiers, dreams, and unintended consequences.
Frozen: My Journey into the World of Cryonics, Deception, and Death Larry Johnson & Scott Baldyga | 2009
Buy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Frozen-Journey-World-Cryonics-Deception/dp/B003156B2C
Larry Johnson was a highly experienced paramedic and clinical director who was hired by Alcor as a patient care technician. What he witnessed inside Alcor — including what he describes as the botched preparation of the head of baseball legend Ted Williams, whose family had him cryonically preserved after his death in 2002 — turned him into a whistleblower. After leaving Alcor and receiving what he describes as death threats, Johnson went into hiding and co-wrote this exposé with screenwriter Scott Baldyga. The book is deeply unflattering to Alcor and triggered an enormous controversy in the cryonics community. Alcor disputed many of the claims. Readers should treat it as one side of an acrimonious dispute, but it remains the most prominent critical insider account of the cryonics industry.
Philosophy & Ethics
Books that grapple with the deep questions raised by cryonics: What does it mean to die? Is the desire for radical life extension ethically justified? What is personal identity?
Forever for All: Moral Philosophy, Cryonics, and the Scientific Prospects for Immortality R. Michael Perry | 2000
Buy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Forever-All-Philosophy-Scientific-Immortality/dp/1581127243
Michael Perry holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Colorado and has worked at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation since 1987, serving as its patient caretaker. This book is his philosophical case for cryonics and scientific immortalism. Perry develops a materialistic worldview in which death is not inevitable or necessarily irreversible, and argues that the revival of preserved individuals is theoretically achievable through the creation of functional replicas of persons. He also makes the moral case that pursuing the conquest of biological death is not only permissible but obligatory — a great moral project that could give humanity a shared and meaningful purpose. The book is dense and thoroughly argued, touching on ontology (the study of being and existence), ethics, and the philosophy of personal identity. Goodreads reviewers consistently rate it 4.75 out of 5.
Anthologies & Collections
Multi-author compilations that survey the field broadly, often containing some of the best essays and technical articles written on cryonics.
Preserving Minds, Saving Lives: The Best Cryonics Writings from the Alcor Life Extension Foundation Edited by Aschwin de Wolf & Stephen Bridge | 2015
Buy on Amazon (hardcover): https://www.amazon.com/Preserving-Minds-Saving-Lives-Foundation/dp/0996815317
Buy on Amazon (paperback): https://www.amazon.com/Preserving-Minds-Saving-Lives-Foundation/dp/B07ZWJVMPV
A 570-page collection of the best articles from Cryonics magazine, Alcor’s publication, from 1972 to 2012. Edited by Aschwin de Wolf (one of the world’s leading cryonics researchers) and Stephen Bridge (who served as CEO of Alcor from 1993 to 1997), this is as close to an encyclopedia of cryonics as currently exists. It covers the rationale behind cryonics, the scientific evidence supporting it, the evolution of Alcor’s procedures, philosophical debates, legal considerations, and internal disagreements within the cryonics community. Notable contributors include Brian Wowk, Ph.D. (on vitrification technology), Ralph Merkle, Ph.D. (on nanotechnology and cell repair), and Gregory Fahy, Ph.D. (on nanotechnological brain repair scenarios). Available in both paperback and hardcover.
The Scientific Conquest of Death: Essays on Infinite Lifespans Editors: by the Immortality Institute | 2004
Buy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Conquest-Death-Essays-Lifespans/dp/9872222207
Read free online: https://www.cryonicsarchive.org/library/online-books/
An anthology published by the Immortality Institute (now called LongeCity), a nonprofit organization dedicated to combating aging and death. The essays span a wide range: science, philosophy, politics, and futurism. Contributors include researchers and advocates across the life-extension and cryonics community. The book is often cited alongside Ettinger’s founding texts as one of the essential cryonics anthologies, and the full text is available free online through the Cryonics Archive.
The Prospect of Immortality — Fifty Years Later Edited by Charles Tandy & R. Michael Perry | 2014
Buy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Prospect-Immortality-Fifty-Years-Later/dp/1627873635
Published to mark the 50th anniversary of Ettinger’s groundbreaking work, this anthology brings together updated and expanded versions of the key ideas that launched the cryonics movement. Edited by Charles Tandy (Associate Professor of Humanities and Senior Faculty Research Fellow in Bioethics at Fooyin University, Taiwan) and R. Michael Perry (of Alcor), it includes articles on nanotechnology, philosophical and theological analysis, legal discussions, and economic considerations. It is both a retrospective on the cryonics movement’s first half-century and a forward-looking examination of where the field might go.
Related & Adjacent Books
Books that don’t deal exclusively with cryonics, but are essential context for understanding the science, philosophy, or history surrounding it.
Nanomedicine, Volume I: Basic Capabilities Robert A. Freitas Jr. | 1999
Buy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Nanomedicine-Volume-I-Basic-Capabilities/dp/1570596808
Read free online: http://www.nanomedicine.com/NMI.htm
The first of a projected multi-volume series, this is the definitive technical examination of how nanotechnology could be applied to medicine at the molecular scale — including, ultimately, the repair of cryopreserved tissue. Freitas, a researcher at the Institute for Molecular Manufacturing, provides an extraordinarily detailed analysis of what molecular machines could theoretically do in the human body. For those who want to understand the technical basis of the claim that future technology could repair frozen tissue, this is the essential reference. Volume IIA, covering biocompatibility, was published in 2003. Both volumes are available free online.
Pro-Cryonics Articles & Essays
Articles written by advocates, researchers, and sympathetic commentators explaining the scientific and philosophical case for cryonics.
Scientific Justification of Cryonics Practice Benjamin P. Best | Rejuvenation Research, Vol. 11, 2008
Read free (NIH/PMC): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4733321/
The most frequently cited peer-reviewed scientific paper making the case for cryonics. Best, then of the Cryonics Institute, surveys the experimental evidence: that very low temperatures can preserve tissue for centuries; that vitrification (ultra-rapid cooling that avoids ice crystal formation) can preserve brain tissue without structural damage; that the neurological basis of personal identity and memory likely survives cryopreservation; and that the damage done is theoretically reversible given sufficiently advanced molecular repair technology. This is the paper to read if you want a rigorous, scientifically grounded overview of why cryonics researchers believe their work is credible.
The Arrest of Biological Time as a Bridge to Engineered Negligible Senescence Lemler J, Harris SB, Platt C, Huffman T | Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Vol. 1019, 2004
Read article: https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1196/annals.1314.063
A landmark paper: the first to present the scientific case for cryonics in a major medical journal. It demonstrates good ultrastructure (cell-level structure preservation) of vitrified and re-warmed mammalian brains, and documents the reversibility of prolonged warm ischemic injury (damage from oxygen deprivation) in dogs without subsequent neurological deficits. One of the “first papers” setting forth the present scientific evidence in support of cryonics.
Aldehyde-Stabilized Cryopreservation McIntyre RM, Fahy GM | Cryobiology, Vol. 71, 2015
Read article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S001122401500264X
This paper announced a major technical breakthrough: the first demonstration of whole-brain vitrification with perfect preservation of neural connectivity throughout the entire brain — what researchers call the “connectome” (the complete map of neural connections in a brain). The technique, called aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC), combines chemical fixation with cryoprotection to achieve preservation quality far beyond what was previously possible. It won the Brain Preservation Prize, a $100,000 competition launched specifically to incentivize research into preserving the neural structures thought to encode memory and personal identity. This paper is one of the most significant in recent cryonics history.
Persistence of Long-Term Memory in Vitrified and Revived Caenorhabditis elegans Vita-More N, Barranco D | Rejuvenation Research, Vol. 18, 2015
Read article: https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/rej.2014.1636
A critically important experiment: the first demonstration that memory persists in a living organism after cryopreservation and revival. The researchers trained C. elegans (a tiny roundworm with a fully mapped nervous system of 302 neurons) to associate a particular smell with food, then cryopreserved and revived the worms and found they retained the learned association. While C. elegans is far simpler than a human brain, this experiment provided the first direct empirical support for the claim that cryopreservation need not erase learned behavior or memory.
The Science Surrounding Cryonics Multiple authors | MIT Technology Review, October 2015
Read article: https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/10/19/109714/the-science-surrounding-cryonics/
Published as a direct response to Michael Hendricks’s skeptical article (see below), this piece by researchers including neuroscientists and medical professionals argues that cryonics deserves open-minded scientific discussion. It reviews what the science of roundworm nervous systems, frozen embryos, and extreme hypothermia tells us about the plausibility of preserving the mind. The authors argue that prevailing views are often shown to be incorrect — citing the history of germ theory — and that what seems impossible now may be achievable in the future.
Vitrification as an Approach to Cryopreservation Fahy GM, MacFarlane DR, Angell CA, Meryman HT | Cryobiology, Vol. 21, 1984
Read article: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0011224084900382
The foundational paper on vitrification — the process of cooling biological tissue so rapidly that water molecules don’t have time to form ice crystals, instead solidifying into a glass-like state. This was the first paper to show that large organs could be cryopreserved without structural damage from ice, which is the major physical mechanism of cryonics-related injury. Nearly all modern cryonics protocols are based on vitrification rather than simple freezing, making this one of the most scientifically important papers in the field’s history.
Skeptical & Critical Articles
Well-argued critiques of cryonics from scientists, bioethicists, and journalists. The mainstream scientific community generally regards cryonics with skepticism, and it is important to engage seriously with these critiques rather than dismiss them.
The False Science of Cryonics Michael Hendricks | MIT Technology Review, September 2015
Read article: https://www.technologyreview.com/2015/09/15/109906/the-false-science-of-cryonics/
The most widely read and debated critical article on cryonics in recent years. Hendricks, a neuroscientist and assistant professor of biology at McGill University, argues that reanimation — or even the simulation of a frozen person’s mind — is an “abjectly false hope” beyond the promise of technology. His central argument: even if we could perfectly preserve the physical structure of a brain, that structure alone does not encode the dynamic electrochemical processes that constitute consciousness, memory, and identity. The article triggered an outpouring of responses from cryonics advocates and remains a reference point in any serious debate about the field.
Cryonics: Science or Religion? Simon Dein | Journal of Religion and Health, Vol. 61, 2021
Read article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10943-020-01166-6
A critical academic article by a medical anthropologist arguing that cryonics should be classified as a pseudoscience because of its lack of falsifiability (meaning no experiment could currently disprove it) and testability. Dein contends that cryonics functions more like a religion than a science: it places faith in technology that doesn’t yet exist and promises to overcome death. An important perspective from the sociology and anthropology of science, even if cryonics advocates strongly contest its framing.
Cryopreservation of Animals and Cryonics: Current Technical Progress, Difficulties and Possible Research Directions Ekpo MD et al. | Frontiers in Veterinary Science, Vol. 9, 2022
Read free (PMC): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9219731/
A rigorous peer-reviewed review article that takes a balanced look at where the science actually stands. It reviews the technical progress in cryopreservation, discusses the genuine scientific difficulties (ice crystal formation, osmotic damage, cellular injury during warming), and suggests research directions that could advance the field. Notable for acknowledging both the legitimate scientific contributions being made and the significant gaps between what has been demonstrated in the lab and what cryonics organizations currently offer to patients.
Academic Papers & Legal/Ethical Analysis
Peer-reviewed and scholarly work examining cryonics from legal, ethical, philosophical, and sociological perspectives.
Cryonics, Euthanasia, and the Doctrine of Double Effect Philosophy, Ethics, and Humanities in Medicine, 2023 | Springer
Read article: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13010-023-00137-5
This peer-reviewed article examines a legally and ethically significant real case: in 1989, Thomas Donaldson, a cryonics advocate diagnosed with brain cancer, petitioned California courts to allow physicians to hasten his death so that his brain could be cryopreserved before further deterioration. The article compares traditional clinical and legal definitions of death with an “information-theoretic criterion” — the idea that death occurs not when the heart stops but when the information encoding a person’s identity is irreversibly destroyed. It then analyzes whether such a procedure would constitute euthanasia and whether it could be ethically justified under the doctrine of double effect.
Donaldson v. Van de Kamp: Cryonics, Assisted Suicide, and the Challenges of Medical Science Pommer RW III | Journal of Contemporary Health Law and Policy, Spring 1993
The legal analysis of the Donaldson case above. When Donaldson filed suit in California seeking the right to die early enough to preserve his brain, the legal proceedings raised profound questions about the right to die, the definition of death, and the legal status of experimental medical procedures. The case was ultimately dismissed, but it remains one of the most significant legal encounters between cryonics practice and the law.
Extreme Life Extension: Investing in Cryonics for the Long, Long Term Romain T | Medical Anthropology, Vol. 29, 2010
Read article: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01459741003715391
A medical anthropology article examining cryonics not as a medical or scientific question but as a social and cultural practice. Romain spent time with cryonics communities and analyzes who signs up for cryonics, what motivates them, how they construct narratives around the decision, and how the practice relates to broader American cultural attitudes toward death, technology, and individualism. One of the few rigorous social science examinations of the cryonics community.
Pro/Con Ethics Debate: When Is Dead Really Dead? Whetstine L, Streat S, Darwin M, Crippen D | Critical Care, Vol. 9, 2005
Read via Cryonics Archive: https://www.cryonicsarchive.org/library/selected-journal-articles-supporting-the-scientific-basis-of-cryonics/
Historically significant as the first substantive discussion of cryonics in a major mainstream medical journal. The debate format brings together multiple perspectives on the question of when death should be considered irreversible — a question with profound implications for cryonics, organ donation, and end-of-life care. The article helped bring cryonics into the mainstream medical ethics conversation for the first time.
Cryonics Fiction
Cryonics has been a rich subject for novelists since the movement’s earliest days. The books below range from earnest advocacy in narrative form to satirical black comedy to literary meditation to young adult coming-of-age. Ettinger himself grew up reading science fiction — he credited Hugo Gernsback’s pulp magazine Amazing Stories as a direct inspiration for his ideas — and the traffic between cryonics fiction and cryonics fact has always run in both directions.
The First Immortal James L. Halperin | 1998
Buy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/First-Immortal-Novel-Future/dp/0345421825 Read free online: https://ha.com/information/tfi.s
The most openly pro-cryonics novel ever written, and among the most influential. Halperin, a coin dealer and futurist rather than a professional novelist, follows Dr. Benjamin Franklin Smith — a physician who dies of a heart attack in 1988 and is cryonically preserved — through his revival in 2072, when nanotechnology has made restoration possible. The novel spans 200 years and traces the intertwining fates of Smith’s entire extended family, many of whom are also eventually frozen and revived. It is meticulously researched and reads less like a conventional novel than like a detailed argument for why cryonics is both scientifically plausible and morally compelling. Both Alcor and the Cryonics Institute recommend it as educational reading. The author has estimated that since its publication it has been instrumental in recruiting a significant portion of new cryonics organization members. Halperin made the full text available as a free download. Publishers Weekly called it thorough and innovative; others have noted that the characters are thin and the writing functional rather than literary — but as a vision of what cryonics advocates actually believe the future will look like, it has no equal in fiction.
The Door Into Summer Robert A. Heinlein | 1957
Buy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Door-into-Summer-Robert-Heinlein/dp/0345413997
The oldest novel on this list and one of the earliest works of serious fiction to treat suspended animation as a real and usable technology rather than a comic or fantastical device. Heinlein — the Grand Master of science fiction, author of Stranger in a Strange Land and Starship Troopers — wrote it in thirteen days in 1956 after his wife remarked that their cat, repeatedly confronted with snow outside every door of the house, was clearly looking for a door into summer.
The plot follows Daniel Boone Davis, a talented engineer who has invented a line of household robots, only to be swindled out of his company by his unscrupulous business partner and fiancée. Facing ruin and despairing of his situation, Dan opts for the Long Sleep — the novel’s term for cryonic suspension — planning to wake up thirty years later in a better world. What he doesn’t know is that the future he wakes into has also mastered time travel, giving him a way back to settle accounts.
The cryonics in the novel is handled with unusual matter-of-factness: the Long Sleep is simply a service one can purchase, a practical tool for getting past an unbearable present rather than a grand philosophical gamble. This normalised, almost casual treatment of suspended animation was remarkably prescient — written a full decade before the actual cryonics movement began with the Bedford suspension in 1967. Carl Sagan listed it among the science fiction stories so tautly constructed and rich in detail that they sweep the reader along before there is even a chance to be critical. It was recently made into a Japanese film available of Prime Video, and consistently ranks among Heinlein’s most beloved novels.
Why Call Them Back From Heaven? Clifford D. Simak | 1967 Buy on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Call-Them-Back-Heaven/dp/0380505754
Published the same year as the first actual human cryonic suspension, Simak’s novel imagines a near future in which cryonics has become so dominant that it has reorganized all of civilization. A corporation called Forever Center promises everyone resurrection in a technologically perfected future — and as a result, people spend their entire waking lives in poverty, hoarding money for their next life rather than enjoying their current one. Religion has largely collapsed, since why believe in heaven when you can buy it? The plot follows Daniel Frost, a Forever Center employee who stumbles onto classified documents, is framed for treason, and has his right to immortality revoked — a punishment worse than death in this world. Simak, a three-time Hugo Award winner and Grand Master of science fiction, uses the cryonics premise to explore what humanity loses when it trades the present for the promise of a perfect future. Critics and fans alike consider it one of the most thoughtful cryonics novels ever written, and one of Simak’s best books.
Tech-Heaven Linda Nagata | 1995
Buy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Tech-Heaven-Linda-Nagata/dp/0553569260
One of the few literary science fiction novels to place cryonics at its emotional center and treat it with genuine seriousness. When Katie Kishida’s husband Tom is killed in a helicopter accident, she defies her family and the law to have his body preserved in liquid nitrogen. She believes that future medicine will find a way to revive him. But as Tom lies frozen across the years, Katie’s own life is suspended too — emotionally unable to move on, she becomes a fugitive when the government criminalizes life-extension research, hiding Tom’s body in a South American mountain fortress.
Nagata, whose work has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and several other major science fiction awards, is interested in the human cost of the cryonics decision as much as its science, and what that choice means for the living who dedicate their lives to the cryopreserved. A thoughtful, emotionally sophisticated novel that takes the technology seriously without becoming a tract.
Noggin John Corey Whaley | 2014
Buy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Noggin-John-Corey-Whaley/dp/1442458720
A young adult novel that won author John Whaley the Michael L. Printz Award for his debut novel and was a National Book Award finalist and named one of Time magazine’s best YA books of all time. Travis Coates is sixteen years old and dying of leukemia. He agrees to participate in an experimental program: his head is surgically removed and cryogenically frozen, with the hope that technology will eventually allow it to be reattached to a donor body and revived. Five years later, that technology arrives. Travis wakes up — still sixteen, still himself — attached to a body that is taller and more muscular than his original, in a world that has moved on without him. His best friend is struggling through college. His girlfriend is engaged to someone else. And Travis is still a sophomore. The novel uses its cryonics premise not to explore the science but the human experience of discontinuity and adjustment— of waking up to find that the world changed while you were frozen.
Vital Parts Thomas Berger | 1970
Buy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Vital-Parts-Novel-Thomas-Berger/dp/0877770271
A very different kind of cryonics novel — bawdy, satirical, and wickedly funny. Thomas Berger, best known for Little Big Man, follows Carlo Reinhart, a hapless middle-aged failure in late-1960s suburbia: his wife is leaving him, his hippie son despises him, his business schemes have all collapsed. Then an old high school acquaintance named Bob Sweet reappears, oozing success, and invites Reinhart to get in on the ground floor of the cryonics business. The novel uses the cryonics craze — which was genuine and vivid in 1970, following the Bedford suspension three years earlier — as a lens for Berger’s razor-sharp satire of American middle-class life, consumerism, the counterculture, and the desperate human need to believe in something. Harper’s called it a masterpiece. Reviewers have compared it to Catch-22 and A Confederacy of Dunces. It is the third novel in Berger’s four-volume Carlo Reinhart series.
Zero K Don DeLillo | 2016
Buy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Zero-K-Novel-Don-DeLillo/dp/1501135392
DeLillo’s eighteenth novel and one of the most critically admired works of literary fiction to take cryonics as its subject. Jeffrey Lockhart’s billionaire father Ross has invested his fortune in a remote, secret compound in central Asia — part scientific facility, part religious cult, part think tank — called the Convergence, which promises to preserve the wealthy in cryonic suspension until a future civilization can cure and revive them. When Ross’s younger wife Artis, who has multiple sclerosis, agrees to be frozen, Jeffrey travels to the compound to say goodbye. The New York Times called it DeLillo’s most persuasive novel since Underworld. It is not a novel about whether cryonics works, but about what it means — about time, loss, mortality, the hubris of the extremely rich, and what we must commit to when we refuse to accept death. DeLillo presents the Convergence’s rhetoric as simultaneously persuasive and fanatical, and the novel resists easy conclusions. But the writing is, as always with DeLillo, extraordinary.
Frankissstein: A Love Story Jeanette Winterson | 2019
Buy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Frankissstein-Jeanette-Winterson/dp/0802129498
A literarily ambitious novel on this list on a par with DeLillo. Winterson braids two timelines together: one follows the nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley in 1816 Geneva as she writes Frankenstein during that famous stormy summer with Byron and Polidori; the other is set in Brexit-era Britain, where a young transgender doctor named Ry Shelley is falling in love with Victor Stein, a charismatic AI researcher and transhumanist. Running through the contemporary storyline is a cryonics facility in Phoenix, Arizona — clearly modelled on Alcor — housing dozens of legally dead men and women waiting to be revived.
The structural conceit is that every character in the present-day storyline is an echo of someone from the 1816 scenes, and cryonics functions as the novel’s answer to Frankenstein’s monster — the same dream of defeating death, updated for the age of liquid nitrogen and nanotechnology. Longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize. The Washington Post praised it as dazzlingly intelligent; the New York Times called it talky, smart, anarchic, and sexy; the Guardian called it a work of both pleasure and profundity. It is perhaps the only ‘Woke’ novel ever written, and treats cryonics not as a premise but as a literary and philosophical mirror: a way of asking what we really mean when we say we want to live forever, and whether the self that gets preserved is the self that matters.
Long-Form Journalism & Popular Writing
Notable magazine and newspaper articles that have examined cryonics for general audiences.
A Dying Young Woman’s Hope in Cryonics and a Future Amy Harmon | The New York Times, September 2015
Read article: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/13/us/cancer-immortality-cryonics.html
This front-page New York Times article about Kim Suozzi — a 23-year-old woman with terminal brain cancer who arranged to have her brain cryopreserved after her death — sparked a major public debate about cryonics and became one of the most widely shared articles on the subject. It is a deeply human piece of journalism that follows Suozzi and her boyfriend through her final months, her decision to pursue cryopreservation, and the aftermath. Her brain was preserved by the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in January 2013. The article prompted Michael Hendricks’s critical MIT Technology Review essay and a wave of further coverage. (A subscription may be required.)
Many Are Cold, Few Are Frozen: A History of Cryonics W. Patrick McCray | Histories of the Future
Read free online: http://histscifi.com/essays/mccray/cryonics.html
A scholarly but highly readable historical essay tracing the origins of cryonics from Edgar Allan Poe and Jack London’s 19th-century cold-sleep stories, through Hugo Gernsback’s science fiction pulps, the 1967 freezing of James Bedford, and the development of cryonics organizations. McCray situates cryonics within the broader American cultural context of technological utopianism and the space age, and gives an unusually balanced and detailed account of why the movement emerged when and where it did.
Free Online Resources & Archives
Key websites where you can access primary source material, technical papers, historical documents, and ongoing research for free.
Cryonics Archive — Online Library
https://www.cryonicsarchive.org/library
The most comprehensive free online library of cryonics material. Includes the full text of The Prospect of Immortality, Engines of Creation, Human Cryopreservation Procedures, the Alcor book Preserving Minds Saving Lives, and a curated list of the most important peer-reviewed scientific papers supporting cryonics (with summaries and links). An indispensable starting point.
Selected Journal Articles Supporting the Scientific Basis of Cryonics
A curated and annotated list of the most important peer-reviewed papers in cryonics and cryobiology, organized by milestone achievement. Includes the first paper showing cat brain electrical activity could be partially recovered after 7 years of frozen storage (Suda et al., 1974); the first paper showing dogs could be recovered after 3 hours of total circulatory arrest at 0°C (Haneda et al., 1986); the first demonstration of whole brain vitrification with perfect neural connectivity preservation (McIntyre & Fahy, 2015); and over a dozen other landmarks. Each entry includes a short description of its significance.
Alcor Life Extension Foundation — Library
Alcor is one of the two main cryonics service providers in the U.S., based in Scottsdale, Arizona. Its online library contains a large collection of articles, technical documents, research papers, and historical materials, most freely available.
Cryonics Institute — Cryonics Library
https://cryonics.org/cryonics-library/
The Cryonics Institute (CI), founded by Ettinger himself in Michigan, maintains a large free library including PDFs of Ettinger’s own books and a variety of historical and technical documents. The CI is the other major U.S. cryonics service provider alongside Alcor.
Cryonics Society — Website and Papers
https://cryonicssociety.org/cryonics-society-papers/
A nonprofit advocacy organization for cryonics, the Cryonics Society maintains an extensive collection of original essays, interviews, and analysis covering the social, cultural, philosophical, legal, and financial dimensions of cryonics. Topics include why cryonics has struggled to gain mainstream acceptance, how to protect cryonics arrangements legally, the relationship between cryonics and religion, and asset preservation strategies for cryonics members.
Compiled April 2026. Amazon links are provided as a convenience; this list has no commercial affiliation.
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