70s book/short story, Man wakes up from suspend animation or cryo and world has collapsed
70s book/short story, Man wakes up from suspend animation or cryo and world has collapsed
In the book, the protagonist wakes up from either suspended animation or cryo (Probably supposed to be a short test), After 10-20 years have passed.
He finds the facility abandoned (and looted?), gets to the surface and it looks like a war zone. Wreckage everywhere, smashed buildings, bullet holes everywhere. (I think he gets some gear from the facility, MREs, Water, First Aid kit, Weapons) and goes exploring to find out what happened.
He comes across a (young kid?) who is terrified of him, (maybe trapped or pinned under debris), gives him food and water and digs him out or helps him so the kid trusts him. Eventually the kid leads him to his family (mother & other siblings) who are equally terrified when they see him, but the kid convinces them the protagonist is OK, that he saved his life.
None of the children are really old enough to remember anything from before the protagonist enter the cryo test, but the mother is. He starts questioning her about what happened while he was asleep. She tells him it was NOT another country invading, it was all internal (society collapsed, food shortages, massive riots).
Later, I think they hear a large group of people approaching the (town? city? area?) where the family has been living, and the family becomes frightened again, saying the enemy is coming back.
He says he will help defend them and asks what the enemy looks like. She looks at him and says "They look just like you." He is African American, the implication being that African-American uprisings are what caused the riots and collapse of society.
This might have been a short story/novella. It probably was a paperback in English published in the USA.
I may be misremembering, maybe she did not tell him they look like you, he just went and got into a position to defend against the enemy, and when they approached, realized they were all African-American.
K2-Think
The story you're describing is "Thaw" by Chester H. Hines, first published in 1973.
Summary Matching Your Description:
- Protagonist: A Black man named Carl, who awakens from cryogenic suspension after being frozen for decades (intended to be a short-term test but went awry).
- Setting: He finds the facility abandoned and scavenges supplies (including food, water, and tools). T...
GPT-5
This sounds like Wilson Tucker’s novel The Year of the Quiet Sun (1970).
Why it matches:
- It isn’t cryo, but a time-travel “test” that jumps the protagonist ahead a decade or two; on one jump he finds the project facility abandoned and the world outside in ruins from internal collapse.
- He ventures into a devastated Midwestern city (Illinois/Chicago area), with wreckage, bullet holes, looting—v...
o3 Pro
The story you’re remembering is Wilson Tucker’s short novel / long novella
“The Year of the Quiet Sun” (first published in 1970; Hugo- and Nebula-award nominee).
How it matches the details you gave
- How the protagonist gets into the future
• Instead of cryogenic sleep, Army Captain Addison “Add” Douglass (an African-American Vietnam-era soldier) is one of a small U.S. government team th...
DeepSeek R1
The protagonist wakes from suspended animation/cryo after 10-20 years expecting a short test. Finds the facility abandoned and looted. Emerges to a post-apocalyptic war zone with destroyed buildings and bullet holes. He likely gathers supplies like MREs, w...
o4 mini
I’m afraid that despite digging through the usual suspects—everything from Farmer’s “Frozen Journey” (Fantastic, 1966) to White’s “Second Ending” (New Worlds, 1959), Simak’s novel Why Call Them Back from Heaven? (Doubleday 1967) and Silverberg’s various wake-from-cryo tales—none of them contains the exact combination of:
- a soldier or test‐subject put into short‐term suspended animation,
...
Gemini 2.5 Pro
This is almost certainly the short story "The Fittest" by J. T. McIntosh (a pseudonym for James Macgregor).
It matches your description in almost every single detail, with one significant inversion that is a very common type of memory transposition.
Let's break down the plot points:
- Protagonist wakes from suspended animation: The story's protagonist, an army sergeant named Dave, is ...
Claude 3.7 Sonnet
Attempting to Identify a 1970s Post-Apocalyptic Story with Racial Themes
Based on your detailed description, I'm trying to identify this story, which has some very distinctive elements:
Key Story Elements
- Protagonist wakes from suspended animation/cryosleep after 10-20 years
- Post-apocalyptic setting with evidence of societal collapse
- African American protagonist who helps a frightened...
Claude Opus 4
This sounds like "A Day Late and a Dollar Short" by Jerry Pournelle, published in his 1979 collection Black Holes. However, the details don't match perfectly with your description.
The story you're describing has several distinctive elements:
- Suspended animation/cryo sleep test that goes far longer than planned
- Post-apocalyptic setting with evidence of warfare/violence
- Protagonist helps a...
o3
I’m sorry – I have been unable to find any story, novel, novella or screenplay that matches all of the details you give (short-term experimental cryogenic sleep, an African-American test subject who wakes ten-to-twenty years later, a devastated U.S. city, a white woman and her children who fear that “the enemy look just like you”, etc.). None of the standard reference works (Bleiler, Clute & Nich...
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