Yeah, what you say about cozy SFF that doesn't work for you has me thinking about the problems I've had with the cozy SFF I've read. Although I liked the philosophical conversations in Chambers's A Psalm for the Wildbuilt, I really was bothered by how much stuff was just **there** in the world of the story (mainly things like solar panels and wind turbines)--things that, in our current world, we get by exploitative extraction, etc. etc. I don't like just handwaving these things into existence because it feels too much like how people think now to the detriment of the world: "Oh, highways/smartphones/cheap food just ~ happens ~; I don't need to think about how." And, okay, the world is meant to be a cozy one; the purpose of the story isn't to address those questions--I get that--but you could handwave in something that acknowledges reality, e.g., "I remembered it was my friend Dusa's turn on volunteer mining duty" or "I'd been dreading my stint doing manufacturing, but it was actually kind of interesting"--just SOMETHING that acknowledges that if you're going to have high tech stuff, and if you don't want want it to be exploitative, then, well, it's going to take some other system of getting it. We can't all be growers of organic lavender or tea merchants...
But this also can be a YMMV thing--what gets under one person's skin in one book may not bother other readers, and that same bothered reader may give a pass to something in another book that bothers a different reader.
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Yeah, what you say about cozy SFF that doesn't work for you has me thinking about the problems I've had with the cozy SFF I've read. Although I liked the philosophical conversations in Chambers's A Psalm for the Wildbuilt, I really was bothered by how much stuff was just **there** in the world of the story (mainly things like solar panels and wind turbines)--things that, in our current world, we get by exploitative extraction, etc. etc. I don't like just handwaving these things into existence because it feels too much like how people think now to the detriment of the world: "Oh, highways/smartphones/cheap food just ~ happens ~; I don't need to think about how." And, okay, the world is meant to be a cozy one; the purpose of the story isn't to address those questions--I get that--but you could handwave in something that acknowledges reality, e.g., "I remembered it was my friend Dusa's turn on volunteer mining duty" or "I'd been dreading my stint doing manufacturing, but it was actually kind of interesting"--just SOMETHING that acknowledges that if you're going to have high tech stuff, and if you don't want want it to be exploitative, then, well, it's going to take some other system of getting it. We can't all be growers of organic lavender or tea merchants...
But this also can be a YMMV thing--what gets under one person's skin in one book may not bother other readers, and that same bothered reader may give a pass to something in another book that bothers a different reader.