On Cozy SFF

[forestofglory]

Over the last decade or so I've seen the term “cozy” applied to a subset of SFF more and more. I've even used it myself as the theme of a couple of short SFF rec lists. But I also see confusion as to what "cozy SFF" means, and a certain amount of scorn for the concept. I think the concept of cozy SFF has a lot to offer, even if I’m not thrilled with the current direction the subgenre is going.

First let's define what cozy SFF is. Now I'm not a fan of drawing hard and fast genre lines, instead I like to think about genre as conversation. Cozy SFF has been around long enough that we can talk about some key themes in the conversation. Cozy SFF generally has small stakes, focusing on small moments, not the fate of the world. These lower stakes generally go along with much less onscreen violence in these stories. Another key aspect of cozy SFF is that it focuses on community-building. And finally, cozy SFF honors the importance of domestic labor and other undervalued jobs.

Of course some books meet some of these criteria but not others, but are worth discussing as part of the cozy conversation. This isn’t meant to draw hard lines around cozy SFF, but rather to outline the key themes that I want to talk more about.

Often when I talk to people about what makes a book cozy we get caught up in how the book makes the reader feel. However, I find that unhelpful. Different readers can feel very different things about the same book! The same book can be harrowing or comforting to different readers. So instead of focusing on intangibles I want to focus on elements of plot and theme.

Cozy fiction is part of the reaction to grimdark, because unrelenting grimness is not “realism.” The idea of cozy stories gets looked down on for being low conflict and low violence, but the low stakes problems of cozy SFF are closer to most of our day-to-day lives than any fantasy of political agency.

I sometimes see cozy SFF compared to cozy mysteries but I think that they are not closely related and are separate conversations. Romance novels, on the other hand, often deal with similar themes to cozy SFF, and I hope to see more stories that are in conversation with both traditions.

Cozy SFF focuses on community- building. In “Fandom for Robots” a robot learns how to make friends and participate in transformative fandom. In The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet the crew of a spaceship must get along during a long isolated journey. We see community-building appear again and again in cozy fiction. Being in community with other people is harder than it seems and one of the most important things that we do as humans. Stories that showcase this are vital. Looking closely at how communities work or don't on a small scale helps us better understand our own communities.

In "The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction" Ursula K Le Guin wrote about the difficulty of centering tasks that have to be done again and again in stories. Cozy fiction succeeds at making domestic labor matter to the story. In these stories a correctly-made meal can win someone's heart or change someone's fate. Building relationships of caring matters. Seeing and valuing these everyday acts is powerful.

Now having read all that, you might think that I love all cozy SFF, but in fact there's several popular cozy SFF stories that I dislike or have mixed feelings about. So let's talk about the ways cozy SFF can fail at its goals. The main failure point of cozy SFF is insularity–stories that are so focused on the small that they ignore the wider implications. One way this can happen is that fairly dire social conditions can be normalized. For example, the background eugenics and cultural uniformity are brushed over in Becky Chamber's Wayfarer books. Another way that cozy SFF is too tightly focused is slapdash worldbuilding. I spent most of Legends & Lattes wondering about the broader economy of the world. Cozy SFF is small-scale but that doesn't mean that the larger picture shouldn't matter. When the larger picture is ignored, stories feel ungrounded.

There’s a recent trend in cozy SFF of having the main characters starting a small business, generally something that acts as a gathering place like a coffee shop or a bookstore. These stories overlook how much work and stress running a small business is! I get that the idea of spending all your time in a cozy yarn store is appealing, and these kinds of places are important for building community. But the fantasy of ease to me undermines one of the key points of cozy fantasy: that building community and performing domestic labor are work. Taking away that labor undervalues work that is already undervalued, instead of showing how vital that work really is.

Despite its flaws, cozy SFF is important. Stories at all scales matter. Cozy SFF's focus on community and domestic labor help us to remember the importance of these things and imagine worlds where they are valued.

Comments

[kathmandu]

There was a wave, about twenty years ago, of multiple cozy-mystery series featuring a heroine who had been in some occupation like accounting, and got fed up with how stressful it was and how full of contacts with criminal people, so she started a carpentry business, or a bakery, or just bought a big old house in the country and spent all her time repairing it. Which last is not even an income-generating activity, but these were written in the aftermath of a stock crash and economic recession. 'Accounting is high-stress and introduces you to the criminal element' was a direct reaction to the crash having revealed embezzlement, stock frauds, etc. And all these stories were fantasies of having a concrete, generative occupation where you could be your own boss, doing things that people often enjoy when it's a hobby or a now-and-then task. The bakery one acknowleged that getting up at four am every day to start the baking could be hard on a person's social life...but then she somehow always fitted in lots of cosy chats and freelance detection, and the sleep-deprivation never caught up with her.