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

[brownbetty]

I think, in re: failure points for cozy fiction, one of the things your post makes me think about is that cozy SFF fails when it *artificially* lowers the stakes by hand-waving real problems, or reducing their importance. Like, "Of course running a coffee shop is easy" makes the story low-stakes by ignoring the reality of actual business ownership!

I think you are also making a point about how some cozy SFF wants to have it both ways? Assert that labour is important, but also minimize the *labour* part of labour? A sort aesthetic marxism?

[lirazel]

This is very interesting!

Judging by your initial description, I should love cozy SFF (and do, if you consider, say Robin McKinley's Chalice or Sunshine or maybe even UKL's Tehanu as cozy SFF). I absolutely LOVE the idea of lower-stakes situations, community-building, and focus on domestic labor.

But most of what's being published now doesn't work for me--it feels too twee? Like the emotions and worldbuilding aren't deep or nuanced enough? I want more to chew on! I feel very "I waws rooting for you!" when I see what's published now--I want to like it, but I don't.

[jajalala]

Thanks for writing this up! I've heard of a lot of cozy SFF recently, but on instinct I assumed it likely wasn't the sort of thing I would like, since I tend to get bored of stories that don't have a driving plot or tension. However, I do really like stories that focus on relationships, and I definitely have a soft spot for highlighting domestic labor... so hmm maybe I should give it a proper chance.

This post has confirmed I probably would not like Legends and Lattes, that's the one I've seen recced a lot that on my first glance I was like "Hm this seems kinda too chill/tensionless for me" and has kind of made me turn away every time I hear another book described as cozy SFF. After reading this post though, I think I'll take a peek at Fandom for Robots, since I'm always a big fan of robot-centric stories. And I think I'll take a closer look next time I see cozy sff... it sounds like there ARE stories in there that maintain some sort of tension and provide insights applicable to the average life lived.

Again, thanks for sharing! This was a great sized snapshot for me to interrogate my instincts on and learn more about cozy SFF

[beradan]

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.

Oh, that's it. I enjoyed Legends & Lattes enough to pick up the second one, but it's not really a genre I'd come back to. I think I just didn't recognize it because I've never worked retail. I definitely can't read cozy mysteries set in libraries because I know too much about how libraries work.

Just by way of background to your points

[kathmandu]

In the case of cozy mysteries, I see key aspects as being that *things are generally fine.*
The government is just and humane. The economy is mostly going fine. You and your friends are okay and do not need to worry about your survival. You HAVE friends, a pleasantly-large circle of best friends and middling friends and neighbors with whom you are on good terms, and romantic happiness if the author is inclined that way. Life is generally pleasant. The only problem is the murder, and it's discrete and capable of being solved by the end of the book.

The details of how things are fine vary - cats, gardening, knitting circle, sudoku, home renovations, antiquing - but whichever details the author puts in are enjoyable ornaments to daily life, the kind of thing people CAN enjoy when they're not worried about whether they'll make rent.

I think this is one way 'cozy apocalypse' and similar veins can fail, as you point out. If it's only cozy for the viewpoint character, and outside the circle of warmth there is terrible suffering or oppression, that violates the 'big picture is generally fine' principle of coziness.

[geraineon]

Oh, I never really quite understood what's cozy SFF until today I guess! Thanks for this write-up. It sounds like something I'd enjoy, in the way I'd enjoy a slice-of-life show... This kinda reminds me of the tropes chat on fedi, the week we talked about coffee shop AUs.

I'll pick up some of these titles to try!

[jajalala]

You may or may not be aware of this, but in case you are not: Apparently this post is a springboard for a panel at ReaderCon this year! You can see it on the schedule for Sunday, 11am. The panel is called "Defining and Appreciating Cozy SFF", and includes Caitlin Rozakis, John Wiswell, Natalie Luhrs, Steven Popkes, and Victoria Janssen. The description is:
At the blog Lady Business, forestofglory argues that cozy SFF "generally has small stakes," "focuses on community-building," and "honors the importance of domestic labor and other undervalued jobs." She also argues that its main failure mode is "insularity": failing to ground a story by situating it within a larger context, or failing to recognize the implications of its background worldbuilding. Panelists will explore how this framework illuminates cozy SFF's appeal, scope, and relationships to other subgenres.

discussing stakes

[brainwane]

Recently, instead of calling the stakes in many of these stories "small", I've been calling them "personal". To quote from the "What grabs and keeps me" section of a blog post I wrote about choosing short sf/f to highlight on MetaFilter: will this craftsman find the materials he needs to make his masterpiece violin? will this careworker find a way to understand and connect with her patient? will this aunt successfully make the cake that she wants to serve as a gesture of reconciliation with her family?

Because these ARE big stakes to the point-of-view the story offers us to share.

There's a moment in the Wim Wenders movie Perfect Days where a person cleaning a public toilet notices a left-behind bit of paper, a note from a stranger. The specific way he reacted to it elicited an audible gasp from me and a similar reaction from my seatmate. It has nothing to do with death or saving the world or stakes like that -- nothing about this choice will be fatal, or make the news or the history books. It's just a choice having to do with human connection, and the suspense captivated me far more than a lot of action movie-type stakes do.

[asakiyume]

Hi there! Here from your Mastodon account ;-)

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.