How a Frog Froze Itself and Froze Time
Finding the real science behind the sleep that carried us to the stars
There’s a moment—somewhere in the quiet space between hypothesis and imagination—when science fiction stops feeling like fiction at all.
I remember it clearly. We were outlining the premise of On the Wings of a Pig, building the scaffolding of a story that spanned lightyears and lifetimes. The colony ship would travel to Davinci, an exoplanet more than four decades from Earth, and I couldn’t just handwave how a hundred and sixty people were going to sleep for 42 years. This wasn’t fantasy. It wasn’t the kind of story where stasis pods hum along because a blinking light says they do. If we were going to write hard science fiction—if we were going to invite readers into a world that could be—then we needed a real answer.
So I went digging through the literature the way a scientist does: chasing citations, tracing footnotes, walking backward through history to find one sliver of biological reality that could hold the weight of fiction.
And that’s when I found the frog.
If you want to read the story before you can buy the book, subscribe to the Saturday Morning Serial. One chapter, every Saturday, just for you. A thank you for supporting TCIP.
The Frog That Froze Time
The wood frog (Rana sylvatica) is, in my view, one of the most extraordinary creatures on Earth. In the frigid winters of Alaska and Canada, it doesn’t burrow deep underground like other amphibians. It doesn’t migrate. It doesn’t hibernate in the warm corner of a rotting log. Instead, the wood frog does something few animals dare.
It freezes.
Literally. Its heart stops beating. Its brain shuts down. Its blood ceases to flow. For months, it is dead by every clinical measure we’d apply to a human being. And then—when the snow melts and the sun returns—it thaws. Its organs restart. Its body reanimates. And it hops off as if nothing ever happened.
To understand what this means is to feel a kind of awe. We humans have long chased the idea of cryogenic preservation, mostly through science fiction or speculative biotech. But here was a real creature, one we could observe and study, that had already solved the problem. No speculative chamber, no futuristic nanomachines. Just evolution and adaptation.
And if nature already solved it, then so could we.
From Cryobiology to Cryo-Engineering
Once the wood frog entered the story, everything began to click. In On the Wings of a Pig, cryosleep isn’t a fanciful sleep-in-a-pod montage—it’s a carefully engineered biological process. The colony’s life scientists didn’t invent some new miracle. They translated something real.
We imagined a research program—not unlike what’s already emerging in synthetic biology—where the molecular pathways that protect the wood frog’s cells during freezing were decoded and reprogrammed for humans. Ice crystal inhibitors. Organ-specific cryoprotectants. Gene circuits that shut down metabolic activity and restart it on a timer. And just like that, a biologically plausible stasis system was born.
The passengers on the Borlaug don’t just get sedated. They are molecularly prepared for suspended animation. Their tissues laced with proteins borrowed from frogs. Their DNA edited for durability. Their bodies preserved by the same biochemical symphony that lets an amphibian survive an arctic winter.
This isn’t “magic” science. It’s biotechnology, extrapolated. And that is the very heart of hard sci-fi: finding the outer edge of real science and stretching it—ever so slightly—into the future.
The Chytrid Connection
The same philosophy guided the ecological catastrophe that opens the novel. If you’ve read the early chapters, you know that Earth is already a world in decline. Mass die-offs. Collapsing biodiversity. Climate chaos compounded by runaway biotechnology.
It begins with a frog pandemic. Not invented. Not hypothetical.
Chytridiomycosis, caused by the chytrid fungus Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis, is real. It has already driven over 90 amphibian species to extinction and pushed hundreds more to the brink. It disrupts skin function—essential for amphibians—and slowly suffocates them. It is one of the most devastating wildlife diseases we’ve ever seen. And most people have never heard of it.
In On the Wings of a Pig, the sci-fi twist isn’t the disease—it’s that someone, in a misguided attempt to make it worse for research purposes, accidentally unleashes a hyper-virulent strain. The ecological unraveling that follows is fiction only because it hasn’t happened yet. But the fear of a lab leak is straight from the reality of conspiracy circles around the world.
That’s the line we walk in science fiction. The world we invent is always just one or two mistakes away from the world we know.
The Art of Almost
There’s a principle I keep returning to in my own writing: the art of almost.
Hard science fiction isn’t about inventing new laws of physics or conjuring deus ex machina technology. It’s about getting so close to reality that you make the reader wonder if they’re already living in the early chapters. It’s about taking what we do know and asking what might be possible if we stopped being afraid of the question.
That’s how I think about science fiction—not as escape, but as extension.
What if we really understood how the wood frog freezes without dying?
What if we actually solved the precision and safety challenges of CRISPR?
What if we lost control of an engineered organism—not because of malevolence, but because of rising hubris?
In each case, the fiction is born not from fantasy but from the fragile edge of reality. That edge is where real scientists live every day. And it’s where the best science fiction comes from.
Weaving Science Into Story
When I started writing On the Wings of a Pig, I wanted to make the science believable. But as the story evolved, I realized that believability wasn’t the point—possibility was.
Every element in the book—cryosleep, ecological collapse, genetic engineering, interstellar migration—comes from a kernel of truth. And each one asks a very human question: If we could do this, should we?
That’s the power of hard sci-fi.
It’s not just about gadgets and theories. It’s about ethical tension. It’s about responsibility. It’s about how the decisions we make in labs today might echo for centuries.
Somewhere out there in the universe, a frog is thawing in the spring sunlight. Its heart is beating again. Its lungs are drawing air. And it has no idea that it may have just given humanity a roadmap to the stars.
I, for one, want to read that map.
Cheers,
-Titus