Today is the first day of winter and the day and the earth sleep.
Gil Gerard died last week, on December 16, 2025, at age eighty-two. If you watched American television in the 1970s and '80s and were a fan of science fiction and fantasy, you remember Gil Gerard as the star of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979-1981). The premise of Buck Rogers should be familiar to everyone by now: a man of an earlier time sleeps, only to awaken in a later time and to a greatly altered world.
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century was based on the comic strip of the same name, which made its debut on January 7, 1929, with art by Dick Calkins and a script by Philip Francis Nowlan. The comic strip was based in turn on Nowlan's novella Armageddon 2419 A.D., first published in Amazing Stories in August 1928. In the original, Buck is placed into suspended animation by the collapse of an old coal mine and his exposure to a radioactive gas. The date of the collapse is December 15. Throw away the year and you have the day before Gil Gerard's death, his first day of eternal sleep.
The sleeper who awakes is common in science fiction and fantasy. I have written these past two months about Washington Irving and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." Well, his other very famous story is "Rip Van Winkle" (1819), in which the title character sleeps twenty years, through the American Revolution, after having gotten drunk with the ghostly crew of the ship the Halve Maen. He awakens into America and his own lost past.
The sleeper or man in suspended animation is in other stories. They include: Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy (1888); When the Sleeper Awakes (1899) or The Sleeper Awakes (1910) by H.G. Wells; Beyond This Horizon by Robert A. Heinlein (1942); "The Marching Morons" by C.M. Kornbluth (1951); After Utopia by Mack Reynolds (1977); the Star Trek episode "Space Seed" (1967); The Planet of the Apes, with a script by Rod Serling (1968); Sleeper, co-written and directed by Woody Allen (1973); and Idiocracy, directed by Mike Judge (2006).
Sleeping in science fiction and fantasy is a kind of time travel. As a form of time travel, it's related to the dilation of time in relativistic physics and as such is ready-made for the science fiction author's purposes. Before falling into sleep, Gil Gerard offered us a time-and-space-travel valediction: "See You Out Somewhere in the Cosmos."
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