“This may sound like science fiction” or “no longer in the realm of science fiction” or some similar breathless exclamation accompanies almost all popular science articles. The latest discovery or invention is no longer imaginary, and we are notified that the future has arrived.

This is really peculiar. No other intellectual discipline has its own fiction. Social studies fiction, business administration fiction, music theory fiction…these genres simply don’t exist. Why not? All fiction is an exercise of imagination, successfully applied to everything from myths to miracles to biography.

When Jane Eyre runs away from Mr. Rochester, she happens to find refuge with strangers who turn out to be her own cousins. Then she inherits a fortune. Why do people love this book despite a plot that is about as realistic as Frodo reaching Mordor? And why isn’t this book science fiction?

Readers want to feel what Jane feels and can’t do that without her story. However preposterous the narrative, the emotions induced are perfectly real. If we are ever in her situation, we will feel just like Jane.

And that’s why it’s not science fiction.

As the only genre with a monopoly on the future, science fiction, however far-fetched, says “when”, not “if.” Readers don’t just suspend their disbelief, they disable it altogether, with a time stamp. Manned moon landings? Science fiction before 1969, non-fiction after. Artificial intelligence? Virtual reality? Saw it coming, see it now.

Headlines declaring, “Humans placed in suspended animation for the first time”, seem to mark just another watershed between fiction and fact.

Unfortunately, in this case, it’s the reverse: fact presented as fiction. Trauma victims about to bleed out were chilled to give surgeons a few more minutes for repairs. Something similar can be done during open-heart surgery. Animation isn’t really suspended. Metabolism and brain function don’t entirely stop. And the duration is measured in minutes, not years.

If science fiction writers hadn’t popularized the concept of “suspended animation,” no one would think they were now witnessing it. Making it an unquestioned staple of science fiction misleads the reader more than actual fantasy would. Time travel and faster-than-light drives are plot devices as improbable as talking dragons and magic carpets. Very few college students read about these and change their major to build them.

Yet dozens of human heads, some still attached to their bodies, have been cryogenically preserved with the assumption that scientists will one day figure out how to revive the deceased, mind and all. Science fiction predicts this. Therefore generations of scientists will, naturally, strive to achieve it.

In actuality, those brains are no more viable than that piece of wedding cake in the back of your parents’ freezer. It’s true that embryos and even certain adult animals can survive cryostasis, but restoration of biological function tells us nothing about restoration of memory and cognition. Without those, your revived explorers will make poor use of that really expensive spaceship.

Just for the record, scientists can’t induce hypersleep, either. They can’t even wake coma patients. Far from knowing how consciousness might be halted and restarted, researchers can’t even agree on what it is. The gestated embryo and the thawed frog alike have consciousness, but no basis for comparison with previous states of consciousness (that they can tell us about, anyway). Babies reared by their own cradles might be approved by the ethics panel before experiments on consciousness after death.

In the library, any fiction set in the future gets shelved under SF, even if completely devoid of science. Stories might feature a few space-age gadgets, obligatory as the bodices to be ripped in historical romances, not to affect the plot but simply to denote the era. Future fiction is called science fiction because the terms are synonymous. Science is considered the conjoined twin of time, progressing from dreams to expectations to reality on an inexorable trajectory. Scientific progress is so predictable that you can date your fiction by Moore’s law.

And so fiction doesn’t just imagine technological development, it directs it.

The trauma surgeon who first attempted Emergency Preservation and Resuscitation through hypothermia stated, “I want to make clear that we’re not trying to send people off to Saturn.”*

This is really peculiar. His patients are victims of violence. He set his study in Baltimore because he needs 20 people coming into the Emergency Room on the brink of death, 10 to undergo hypothermia and the other 10 to act as controls. He conducted a public relations campaign notifying the local community about the experimental procedure, so those choosing to opt out could do so before their next near-fatal shooting or stabbing.

And the goal of his research is...Saturn? The point of the newsflash is how close this medical procedure is to a literary plot device that almost certainly can never exist?

It’s sure not about the casualties of violence, or our blasé acceptance of their quantity, location, and availability for experimentation.

If we think scientific speculation is self-fulfilling prophesy, it might be wise to check our preconceptions now and again. Fiction may be reinforcing a collective delusion at the expense of realizable possibilities. Social justice or Han Solo in carbonite? One is ridiculous. The other is still waiting to be imagined.

*https://www.newscientist.com/article/2224004-exclusive-humans-placed-in-suspended-animation-for-the-first-time/#ixzz7JBeH3KsN