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ladybusinessLast year I wrote an essay about cozy SFF. I started out writing a passionate defense of cozy SFF, then I wasn't quite happy with it and put it on the shelf for a while. When I got back to it, I realized there were some things about the current moment of cozy SFF that I don't really like. So I had to edit my piece. But even then I felt the conversation was getting away from me.
I've only become more frustrated with what's being marketed as cozy SFF and the discourse around it. I find the stuff being published isn't digging into the themes that I want to see. Meanwhile the discourse is both dismissive and full of moral panic. I think both that domestic labor and community building are important and worth telling stories about and shouldn’t be dismissed, and that it's ok to read soft comforting stories. I wish people would calm down a bit.
In my essay I defined cozy SFF this way: “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 on-screen 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”. In retrospect I don’t think this definition was very helpful because it was more about what I want cozy SFF to be than about what cozy SFF actually is. And because I ignored the issue of feelings, but how cozy SFF makes people feel is important to the conversation even if people can have wildly different emotional reactions to the same work. I find the the subjectivity of emotional reactions leads to very frustrating conversations, and I wanted to ignore that, but it’s important to how people talk about cozy SFF whether I like it or not.
However my definition does make a good framework for a rec list. So here are some works that fit at least in part with the above definition, though most of them are not being discussed as cozy SFF. Many of these are short fiction, where there’s a lot of lovely work about these themes, but short works are generally not part of the discourse around cozy SFF. Others of these don’t get marketed as cozy because they have the wrong vibes, or big stakes, but still have themes of domestic labor and community building.
This is not intended as a complete survey of the field, just a few things that I like that include these themes. Also my ability to engage with new fiction has been sporadic since 2020 so there aren’t as many recent works as I’d like.
”The Witches of Athens” by Lara Elena Donnelly
This is a long-time comfort read of mine, a story with coffee shops, queer romance, and sisterhood. The stakes in this are very personal and there's a focus on maintaining and building relationships. Also I love that the central relationship here is the sisterhood between the witches!
“Fandom For Robots” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad
This story about a robot making friends through transformative fandom is a great example of a story about building communities! It’s super charming. Online communities have been very important to me so I especially enjoyed that aspect.
A Half Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys
This book perfectly fits the second two parts of my definition of cozy SFF, there is so much domestic labor and community building in here! But the stakes are huge, literally the fate of the planet Earth! This book really highlights why domestic labor and community building matter. Even when the world is at stake people have to eat, and eating together can help bring about solutions to very large problems.
Chalice by Robin McKinley
This is another book with bigger stakes but also a lot of domestic labor and community building. Mirasol, the main character, is a beekeeper who unexpectedly became the Chalice, a job with both practical and metaphysical components. I love all the descriptions of beekeeping and Marasol’s cottage!
“Panhumanism Hope and Pragmatics” by Jess Barber and Sara Saab
In the comments of my original post, people talked about wanting to read stories that are personal in scope and have positive outcomes even though they are set in worlds where things are terrible. This is a story along those lines. In a post-climate disaster two people meet as teens. This is the story of their relationship over time as they both try in their own ways to make the world a little bit better.
When The Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb
This book is everything that I talked about in my definition of cozy, but I would still hesitate to call it cozy because tonally it's a bit darker, and there's some onscreen violence. But it's great! It's about an angel and a demon who leave their shtetl to help a young woman who has gone missing in the US. I love how Jewish this book is, and how it includes both Jewish religious traditions (The Angel and Demon are study buddies and argue about Torah all the time) and Jewish labor organizing (planning a strike is an important part of the story). It’s also a story about people gradually building connections to a wider community.
Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night by Iona Datt Sharma and Katherine Fabian
This is a contemporary fantasy novella about two people who have to go on a quest to save their mutual boyfriend. Along the way they met many members of the boyfriend’s community who they wouldn't have interacted with otherwise. It’s also full of domestic details, getting the kids places on time, serving dinner, silly mugs. None of these details are lingered on but they all build a picture of the characters. I love that this book makes me and so many other people feel seen for aspects of ourselves we rarely see reflected in fiction!
Please tell me about your favorite SFF that engages with themes of domestic labor and/or community building!
I've only become more frustrated with what's being marketed as cozy SFF and the discourse around it. I find the stuff being published isn't digging into the themes that I want to see. Meanwhile the discourse is both dismissive and full of moral panic. I think both that domestic labor and community building are important and worth telling stories about and shouldn’t be dismissed, and that it's ok to read soft comforting stories. I wish people would calm down a bit.
In my essay I defined cozy SFF this way: “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 on-screen 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”. In retrospect I don’t think this definition was very helpful because it was more about what I want cozy SFF to be than about what cozy SFF actually is. And because I ignored the issue of feelings, but how cozy SFF makes people feel is important to the conversation even if people can have wildly different emotional reactions to the same work. I find the the subjectivity of emotional reactions leads to very frustrating conversations, and I wanted to ignore that, but it’s important to how people talk about cozy SFF whether I like it or not.
However my definition does make a good framework for a rec list. So here are some works that fit at least in part with the above definition, though most of them are not being discussed as cozy SFF. Many of these are short fiction, where there’s a lot of lovely work about these themes, but short works are generally not part of the discourse around cozy SFF. Others of these don’t get marketed as cozy because they have the wrong vibes, or big stakes, but still have themes of domestic labor and community building.
This is not intended as a complete survey of the field, just a few things that I like that include these themes. Also my ability to engage with new fiction has been sporadic since 2020 so there aren’t as many recent works as I’d like.
”The Witches of Athens” by Lara Elena Donnelly
This is a long-time comfort read of mine, a story with coffee shops, queer romance, and sisterhood. The stakes in this are very personal and there's a focus on maintaining and building relationships. Also I love that the central relationship here is the sisterhood between the witches!
“Fandom For Robots” by Vina Jie-Min Prasad
This story about a robot making friends through transformative fandom is a great example of a story about building communities! It’s super charming. Online communities have been very important to me so I especially enjoyed that aspect.
A Half Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys
This book perfectly fits the second two parts of my definition of cozy SFF, there is so much domestic labor and community building in here! But the stakes are huge, literally the fate of the planet Earth! This book really highlights why domestic labor and community building matter. Even when the world is at stake people have to eat, and eating together can help bring about solutions to very large problems.
Chalice by Robin McKinley
This is another book with bigger stakes but also a lot of domestic labor and community building. Mirasol, the main character, is a beekeeper who unexpectedly became the Chalice, a job with both practical and metaphysical components. I love all the descriptions of beekeeping and Marasol’s cottage!
“Panhumanism Hope and Pragmatics” by Jess Barber and Sara Saab
In the comments of my original post, people talked about wanting to read stories that are personal in scope and have positive outcomes even though they are set in worlds where things are terrible. This is a story along those lines. In a post-climate disaster two people meet as teens. This is the story of their relationship over time as they both try in their own ways to make the world a little bit better.
When The Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb
This book is everything that I talked about in my definition of cozy, but I would still hesitate to call it cozy because tonally it's a bit darker, and there's some onscreen violence. But it's great! It's about an angel and a demon who leave their shtetl to help a young woman who has gone missing in the US. I love how Jewish this book is, and how it includes both Jewish religious traditions (The Angel and Demon are study buddies and argue about Torah all the time) and Jewish labor organizing (planning a strike is an important part of the story). It’s also a story about people gradually building connections to a wider community.
Sing for the Coming of the Longest Night by Iona Datt Sharma and Katherine Fabian
This is a contemporary fantasy novella about two people who have to go on a quest to save their mutual boyfriend. Along the way they met many members of the boyfriend’s community who they wouldn't have interacted with otherwise. It’s also full of domestic details, getting the kids places on time, serving dinner, silly mugs. None of these details are lingered on but they all build a picture of the characters. I love that this book makes me and so many other people feel seen for aspects of ourselves we rarely see reflected in fiction!
Please tell me about your favorite SFF that engages with themes of domestic labor and/or community building!
Thoughts
Date: 2025-05-29 08:19 pm (UTC)Well, it depends on what you are looking at and what you want. Specifically, I think a lot of the problem is "marketed." I've found commercial SFF so disappointing nowadays that I can go into a bookstore and find nothing worth buying, which is so very wrong.
But crowdfunding?
>> “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 on-screen 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”. In retrospect I don’t think this definition was very helpful because it was more about what I want cozy SFF to be than about what cozy SFF actually is. And because I ignored the issue of feelings, but how cozy SFF makes people feel is important to the conversation even if people can have wildly different emotional reactions to the same work. I find the the subjectivity of emotional reactions leads to very frustrating conversations, and I wanted to ignore that, but it’s important to how people talk about cozy SFF whether I like it or not.<<
I think I see what went wrong here. "Cozy" is a mood-based subgenre, the way "horror" is a mood-based genre. It's about how a story makes the reader feel. Then you have parameters that support and create that mood. For instance, the Sleepytime Bear Bingo from
I write a lot of cozy SFF myself. My readers frequently prompt for it and sponsor it, so that adds up. One thing I find very interesting is how dominant the mood really is. They'll call something cozy that has quite rough elements, as long as the protagonist has good support. The wide-angle world can be a wretched mess, as long as the immediate context allows the characters to accomplish something. I shit you not, they asked me to create a postapocalyptic setting inhabited by poor, brown, queer, disabled, and/or female characters and then labeled Daughters of the Apocalypse as "postapocalyptic hopepunk." Conversely, a much less edgy plot may not rate as cozy because the protagonist is alone or it just doesn't have the supporting elements to create that mood.
Also worth considering is the Chobani yogurt solarpunk ad, which I analyzed:
The Chobani Solarpunk Ad (Part 1: Things I Like, Part 2: Things I Question, Part 3: The Most Interesting Part, Part 4: So You Want to Live in Chobaniland)