Best Book Awards Winner medal, LGBTQ+ FictionAward winner2026 Best Book Awards · LGBTQ+ Fiction
Cover of The Unfrozen Few, Book One

The Unfrozen Few

Book One: Welcome to the Future
A novel by Randy Boyd

In the 1980s, eleven people dying of AIDS were cryogenically frozen until science could save them. Decades later they wake up, alive, in a world that thought they were dead.

Cover of The Unfrozen Few, Book One: Welcome to the Future, a novel by Randy Boyd, with the Best Book Awards Winner medal
  • Winner2026 Best Book AwardsLGBTQ+ Fiction
  • Finalist2026 American Fiction AwardsLGBTQ+ Fiction
  • Nominee2026 POZ AwardsBest in Literature

“An empathetic and layered meditation on illness and time.”

Kirkus Indie

“Bold and imaginative… as emotionally impactful as it is entertaining.”

Seattle Gay News / Stonewall News Northwest

“A wonderful writer who is unafraid to tackle profound issues.”

Bay Area Reporter
About the book

They were promised tomorrow. Now they have to survive it.

Surviving the freeze was easy. Now comes the fallout.

In the 1980s, at the height of the AIDS crisis, eleven terminally ill patients made an impossible choice: to be cryogenically frozen in the hope that science might one day save them.

Decades later, they awaken in present-day America—disoriented, weakened, and very much alive—in a world that assumed they died long ago. The biotech firm that froze them believes the experiment ended in catastrophe. The doctors who led the project vanished. And the society they reenter bears little resemblance to the one they left behind.

Hidden inside a facility outside Los Angeles, the survivors struggle to make sense of the modern world while confronting the emotional wreckage of lives interrupted. They are men and women from different backgrounds, generations, and belief systems, bound together by a shared past shaped by stigma, secrecy, and loss. Some emerge stronger. Others fracture. Old wounds reopen. New alliances form.

At the center of it all is Dr. Nathan Black, a young Black gay man—and the estranged son of the notorious family of Black scientists behind the biotech firm.

As Nathan clashes with the new head of the family empire—his formidable stepmother, Dr. Brenda Black—the stakes escalate far beyond the fate of the eleven survivors. What began as an act of medical desperation now threatens to expose decades of corruption, ambition, and moral compromise. The question is no longer whether the unfrozen few can adapt to the future, but whether the future is willing to make room for them at all.

Blending speculative science fiction with mystery, dark humor, and sharp social observation, The Unfrozen Few explores survival in its many forms: surviving illness, surviving erasure, and surviving the consequences of choices made when there seemed to be no other options.

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Chapters 1 and 2, free

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The saga

This is only Book One

Book Two is in the works

The Unfrozen Few is a multi-book speculative saga about time, memory, institutional power, and what it means to survive history.

Opens soon

Enter Duranga Valley

The unfrozen few went online in 2023. Their posts, their trolls and the news that followed them are waiting on the other side of this gate.

The author

Randy Boyd

Randy Boyd is a novelist and essayist whose work centers on race, sexuality, survival, and the cultural legacy of the AIDS crisis. He is a five-time Lambda Literary Award finalist and the author of four novels, including Uprising, The Devil Inside, Bridge Across the Ocean, and Walt Loves the Bearcat.