Copycat

My claim is that Rome's Revolution is an original work that examines our society and life in general by using the lens of science fiction to focus on particular characteristics. But at its core I freely admit that there are other science fiction stories where the hero (or villain) sleeps for a lengthy period of time until they awaken to take in the world around them. Here is a brief survey of selected literature and movies that overlap and where they differ. I will not invoke time travel if I can help it because at its heart, there is no actual time travel in my books.

"The Man Who Awoke" by Laurence Manning, written in 1933, was the story of Norman Winters. He was a rich guy and he wanted to see the future. So he built himself the equivalent of a bomb shelter, invented a stasis machine and slept in suspended animation, awakening at 5,000 year intervals until he gets to the year 25,000AD. Each age has some hallmarks and one included an age run by "The Brain" which was Manning's guess at a super-computer.

"Far Centaurus" was a short story that I cited in an earlier post. It was about four guys (what, no girls?) who take 500 years to get to Alpha Centauri. When they get there, there are already people there from the (relative to them) future. Sound familiar? However, our astronauts smell too bad (I kid you not) to the people of Far Centaurus to be allowed to wander around the general public so they eventually travel in time and return to Earth just a year and a half after they left.

One of my favorite Star Trek (TOS) episodes was called "Space Seed" with Ricardo (soft Corinthian leather) Montalban as Khan Noonien Singh, a genetically engineered superman who was put in hibernation and left frozen is space until the year 2267 AD when he was discovered by James T. Kirk and the starship Enterprise. Sound familiar? This character was also the featured bad guy in the new Star Trek Into Darkness. Same backstory and same conflict with Kirk with a few notable and amusing differences.

One of my favorite movies is "Sleeper" which was co-written and directed and starring Woody Allen. It is simply meant as a parody of other science fiction movies and owes its lineage to a story written before by no less than H. G. Wells himself called "When the Sleeper Awakes."

We have seen plenty of frozen or suspended animation in movies from "2001: A Space Odyssey" to "Alien" to "Avatar" and the technique is in no danger of falling out of favor. In summary, the idea of falling asleep and awakening many years later is a staple of science fiction but so are love stories, revenge stories, thefts, war and so on. It's what you do when they wake up that is important.