That he would fall into that category seems doubtful given that he’s been exposed to so much science fiction though. Cryonics is a staple of scifi, so it shouldn’t take him that much thinking to see how plausible it could be or to note that people have actually tried it.
As someone who read Ender’s Game at the age of 11, and consequently a lot more sci-fi since then, It took Eliezer’s “You Only Live Twice” post six years later to properly elevate my knowledge of cryonics to actual conscious awareness. It took an actual proponent of the procedure telling me about it and that people are actually doing it in real life for me to notice it as a useful idea.
And the only thing I needed for convincing was the feasibility of the science, not any moral qualms about the implications of it all. I was (and still am) in the same mind-set concerning life extension and widespread immortality as Harry, and a single afternoon reading about the procedure had me basically convinced.
So no, I don’t really think it’s incredibly unlikely that Harry hasn’t properly heard about cryonics as used in the manor he needs. Of course, I’m but a single data point. How many smart kids have you met that are or aren’t knowledgable about existing cryonic procedures?
I remember reading a cartoon as a kid about cryonics which portrayed it cynically if I remember correctly. I didn’t realize it was actually a thing people did, but I remember thinking “This sounds like something I would want to do in real life. There has to be some reason it wouldn’t work though, because I’m hearing about it in a cartoon and not in real life.”
What if we narrow it down to “Niven readers”? “Corpsicles” feature in a Niven-verse novel and a novella from the 70s, and Harry makes an offhand reference to Niven-verse Puppeteers in HPMOR chapter 9. Harry might not know about Alcor but he should at least be aware of the general idea.
Harry is very, very likely to have come across the concept of cold sleep. That is not cryonics. Cryonics is the idea of freezing the dead in the hope of fixing the problem later with better tech, even if you do not even know how to revive the frozen at the time. As a serious idea, it is new and fringy, as fiction.. It does come up, but not very often—even people wishing to throw a character into the future usually handwave a stasis field.
Sure. That still doesn’t answer the question of who does hear about it. We could just say that 1% of people who read SF have heard about it, but then my experience is hard to explain—I hadn’t read all that much SF by age 11. It seems quite reasonable to say that the 10 years that the Internet existed between me and Harry was decisive, but I’m asking what variables explain the difference between two SF readers, only one of whom has heard of cryonics.
Uhm—an personal experience like this holds approximately zero data about its own frequency. The sheer number of things you encounter and learn about while growing up, and the universe of learning are both so vast that if your exploration of the library strays from the beaten path of school assignments, bestsellers and nigh-compulsory classics at all, you will learn many, many things which only small minorities have also encountered.
Well, how did you hear about it? I didn’t (or didn’t see it as a real possibility) until I read a mostly non-fiction book by Robert Anton Wilson, long after the age of 11.
...not especially? I heard about when I read “Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition”, memory says at age 11 but the book’s publication date might imply I should have been 12. “The Internet has changed things”—yes it did.
This claim is surprising. The Psychomech trilogy (published in the mid 1980s) involves deliberate cryonic preservation of multiple characters in the hope that when one of them becomes a functional god he’ll be able to resurrect them. In that case, one of the characters who is preserved is the love-interest of the protagonist. And the later books in that series imagine a world in a not too distant future where cryonics is extremely common. Lem’s “Fiasco” deals with medical cryonics and is also from the 1980s. Pohl’s “The Age of Pussyfoot” also has explicit medical cryonics, albeit with a somewhat reactionary message.
Ettinger himself was inspired to think about cryonics as a practical thing from the short story “The Jameson Satellite” (admittedly fairly obscure).
As a matter of pure anecdote, I had encountered the idea in multiple contexts when I was about Harry’s age, and Harry if anything has been exposed to more scifi than I had at that age.
It’s important to remember that we’re talking 1991, rather than present day. While there are a number of older works featuring cryonics, they tend to include themes you probably don’t want to expose a ten-year-old to (Heinlein’s Door Into Summer) or are soft science fiction or outright fantasy (Star Wars, Captain America), or use a generic stasis instead of cryogenics (Aliens). Harder popular fiction versions like Futurama, Bujold’s Mirror Dance, and Cowboy Bebop wouldn’t come out for a few years.
There were older hard fiction pieces that mention it—Niven, at least—but it’s fairly recent for the concept to be an automatic assumption for near-future or even far-future works. If Rationalist!Harry read and remembered everything, he’d have to be aware of it, but honestly he’s got a bit too wide of a knowledge base to be reasonable as it is.
That he would fall into that category seems doubtful given that he’s been exposed to so much science fiction though. Cryonics is a staple of scifi, so it shouldn’t take him that much thinking to see how plausible it could be or to note that people have actually tried it.
As someone who read Ender’s Game at the age of 11, and consequently a lot more sci-fi since then, It took Eliezer’s “You Only Live Twice” post six years later to properly elevate my knowledge of cryonics to actual conscious awareness. It took an actual proponent of the procedure telling me about it and that people are actually doing it in real life for me to notice it as a useful idea.
And the only thing I needed for convincing was the feasibility of the science, not any moral qualms about the implications of it all. I was (and still am) in the same mind-set concerning life extension and widespread immortality as Harry, and a single afternoon reading about the procedure had me basically convinced.
So no, I don’t really think it’s incredibly unlikely that Harry hasn’t properly heard about cryonics as used in the manor he needs. Of course, I’m but a single data point. How many smart kids have you met that are or aren’t knowledgable about existing cryonic procedures?
I remember reading a cartoon as a kid about cryonics which portrayed it cynically if I remember correctly. I didn’t realize it was actually a thing people did, but I remember thinking “This sounds like something I would want to do in real life. There has to be some reason it wouldn’t work though, because I’m hearing about it in a cartoon and not in real life.”
SF readers don’t know either.
What if we narrow it down to “Niven readers”? “Corpsicles” feature in a Niven-verse novel and a novella from the 70s, and Harry makes an offhand reference to Niven-verse Puppeteers in HPMOR chapter 9. Harry might not know about Alcor but he should at least be aware of the general idea.
Does your theory have anything more to say than “the internet has changed things” to explain why I knew about cryonics at Harry’s age?
Harry is very, very likely to have come across the concept of cold sleep. That is not cryonics. Cryonics is the idea of freezing the dead in the hope of fixing the problem later with better tech, even if you do not even know how to revive the frozen at the time. As a serious idea, it is new and fringy, as fiction.. It does come up, but not very often—even people wishing to throw a character into the future usually handwave a stasis field.
Sure. That still doesn’t answer the question of who does hear about it. We could just say that 1% of people who read SF have heard about it, but then my experience is hard to explain—I hadn’t read all that much SF by age 11. It seems quite reasonable to say that the 10 years that the Internet existed between me and Harry was decisive, but I’m asking what variables explain the difference between two SF readers, only one of whom has heard of cryonics.
Uhm—an personal experience like this holds approximately zero data about its own frequency. The sheer number of things you encounter and learn about while growing up, and the universe of learning are both so vast that if your exploration of the library strays from the beaten path of school assignments, bestsellers and nigh-compulsory classics at all, you will learn many, many things which only small minorities have also encountered.
Well, how did you hear about it? I didn’t (or didn’t see it as a real possibility) until I read a mostly non-fiction book by Robert Anton Wilson, long after the age of 11.
I can’t recall at this distance.
...not especially? I heard about when I read “Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition”, memory says at age 11 but the book’s publication date might imply I should have been 12. “The Internet has changed things”—yes it did.
This claim is surprising. The Psychomech trilogy (published in the mid 1980s) involves deliberate cryonic preservation of multiple characters in the hope that when one of them becomes a functional god he’ll be able to resurrect them. In that case, one of the characters who is preserved is the love-interest of the protagonist. And the later books in that series imagine a world in a not too distant future where cryonics is extremely common. Lem’s “Fiasco” deals with medical cryonics and is also from the 1980s. Pohl’s “The Age of Pussyfoot” also has explicit medical cryonics, albeit with a somewhat reactionary message.
Ettinger himself was inspired to think about cryonics as a practical thing from the short story “The Jameson Satellite” (admittedly fairly obscure).
As a matter of pure anecdote, I had encountered the idea in multiple contexts when I was about Harry’s age, and Harry if anything has been exposed to more scifi than I had at that age.
On the other hand, I’d never heard of Psychomech, and I thought I knew sf from that era fairly well. Perhaps the book is better known in the UK.
It’s important to remember that we’re talking 1991, rather than present day. While there are a number of older works featuring cryonics, they tend to include themes you probably don’t want to expose a ten-year-old to (Heinlein’s Door Into Summer) or are soft science fiction or outright fantasy (Star Wars, Captain America), or use a generic stasis instead of cryogenics (Aliens). Harder popular fiction versions like Futurama, Bujold’s Mirror Dance, and Cowboy Bebop wouldn’t come out for a few years.
There were older hard fiction pieces that mention it—Niven, at least—but it’s fairly recent for the concept to be an automatic assumption for near-future or even far-future works. If Rationalist!Harry read and remembered everything, he’d have to be aware of it, but honestly he’s got a bit too wide of a knowledge base to be reasonable as it is.