Humor is always good when you’re talking about something so speculative.
The media jumped on it in a flash, as in flash frozen. Many of them got it wrong by the way, calling the science “cryogenics.” That would be the science or preservation of genetic material or the branch of physics dealing with the production and effects of very low temperatures. The correct reference, cryonics, is whole-body or neural preservation through freezing in the hope that medical science, nanotechnology, and specialized tissue regeneration techniques would someday be able to re-create human life and memory. See clarification here.
There are many people who look at King and others who have been stored in liquid nitrogen at -320 degrees Fahrenheit after they pass as wacky, but my personal belief is why not if you have the money and the desire? Who knows what future science will produce? Read more about my position here.
Of course, I’m biased; otherwise I might not have been able to create my novel “Extra Innings.” featuring baseball legend Ted Williams returning to life through cryonics. At the very least cryonics is certainly good fodder for a novel.
I'm not a doctor or a scientist, but I have done extensive research on the subject to produce “Extra Innings.” Perhaps more importantly, and certainly more interestingly, I've spent five years thinking about and exploring what one's life would be like when suddenly reanimated in the distant future.
The thoughts are intriguing: What bodily and mental functions might work, what might fail? Would you be happy if science could only reproduce you as your former 90-year-old self? How would science overcome this obstacle? Would you be lonely when loved ones are gone and literally another lifetime away? How would you support yourself? What would you do differently? Would you fall into old habits or create a new you? How would the world treat the first person in all of humanity to return from the dead and the only person on earth who knows the answer to the question: Does God, and an afterlife, exist?
And, in Ted Williams’ case, did he ask to be placed in cryostasis?
Interestingly, some of the medical advances and science terms I used in the novel were so, well, novel, they popped as a spell-check problem, unrecognizable to the Word software.
How did I answer the legion of questions above and many others as relates to cryonics? At the risk of sounding smug, you’ll have to read the novel to find out!