page_title: Suspended animation in fiction
section_title: Literature
hierarchical_section_title: Suspended animation in fiction / Literature
context_page_description: Suspended animation in fiction is the temporary halting of life processes of fictional characters followed by their later revival.
  The process often serves as a plot device and is used in innumerable science fiction stories as a means to transport a character from the past into the future or to aid interstellar space travel. Often, in addition to accomplishing whatever the character's primary task is in the future, he or she must cope with the strangeness of a new world, which may contain only traces of his or her previous surroundings. In some instances, a character is depicted as having skills or abilities that have been lost to society during their period of suspension, allowing them to function as a heroic figure in their new time.
context_section_description: Some form of suspended animation often occurs as an element in many King asleep in mountain stories, a genre in which folk heroes from past eras are believed to be sleeping or otherwise kept alive for extended periods until they are needed to return to deal with some great peril, for example, Holger Danske.
  In the classic fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty, a princess is cursed to sleep for 100 years by an evil fairy, where she would be awakened by a king's son. When the good fairy hears this, she knew that the princess would be frightened if she found herself alone when she wakes up. So the fairy uses her wand to put every living person and animal in the palace to sleep until the princess awakes.
  In Shakespeare, several tales (Romeo and Juliet, Cymbeline) employ plot devices of a drug which induces a suspended animation state which is indistinguishable from death.
  In American fiction, the first story to deal with suspended animation is the tale of Rip Van Winkle, a short story by American author Washington Irving published in 1819 as well as the name of the story's fictional protagonist. In the story, a British subject in the American colonies wanders into the Catskill Mountains in the years before the American Revolutionary War, and finds a group of fairies, whose moonshine he drinks. He then falls asleep for 20 years, and returns to his village in what is now the United States, finding his home town and country utterly changed. The story has become a prototype for social dislocation tales of the type.
caption: A depiction of Sleeping Beauty where the kingdom undergoes magical suspended animation for 100 years (by Viktor Mikhailovich Vasnetsov).
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