Corpsicle
Entry updated 31 December 2016. Tagged: Theme.
One of the wittier items of sf Terminology, coined by Frederik Pohl as "corpse-sicle" in his contribution to the Cryonics symposium – also including Robert C W Ettinger – "Immortality Through Freezing" (August 1966 Worlds of Tomorrow), and contracted to "corpsicle" in Pohl's novel The Age of the Pussyfoot (1969). Formed on the analogy of "popsicle", a US ice-lollipop, the word refers to a frozen dead person, preserved in the hope of resuscitation in some hypothetical, medically advanced future (see Suspended Animation). Larry Niven adopted the term in "Rammer" (November 1971 Galaxy) and "The Defenseless Dead" (in Ten Tomorrows, anth 1973, ed Roger Elwood), but took care to credit the coinage to Pohl in his essay "The Words in Science Fiction" (in The Craft of Science Fiction, anth 1976, ed Reginald Bretnor). The term also appears in Greg Bear's Heads (July-August 1990 Interzone; 1990), here applied to cryonically preserved heads rather than entire corpses. [PN/DRL]
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