If you say the word cozy to me I will, without any intention whatsoever, immediately picture the Sleepytime bear. Pajamas, a fireplace, a nice little cap—the only thing wrong with the bear is that his room is entirely too bright for a friend that, to all appearances, just wants to doze off by the fire. It’s a sweet image that I have been looking at since I was a tween. I kind of love it. And yet I have for a while now just groaned at the rise of cozy when applied to SFF.
The term, as I understand it, was lifted from the world of mystery, where it tends to mean somewhat gentle, small-town investigations undertaken by people who are probably not cops. Cozy mysteries arose, according to Novel Investigations, partly in response to the more hardboiled style of seedy underworlds and terrible humans.
So what happens when the world itself seems to be a seedy underworld, and too many terrible humans are in power? We start to want cozies—and in genres beyond mystery. We want comfort reads, books in which nothing bad happens, and competence porn.
Still, one person’s comfort rewatch is another person’s disliked Battlestar Galactica episode in which people punch out their feelings, which is to say, I think comfort is a trickier subject than is sometimes addressed. But cozy is more like a subgenre—a style as much as a feeling. It can be comforting, but isn’t necessarily synonymous with “comfort reads.” Cozy tends toward witches and innkeepers, ordinary folks, unchosen ones, the regular-old crews of regular-old ships. It’s found families and unexpected magical inheritances, and stories about just trying to find one’s place in the world (or galaxy). And it’s been bubbling up for years and years, well before our current pandemic-shaped landscape.
So why did I bristle at the category? Why did I want to not read all the sweeter-sounding books, even though I went looking for exactly this kind of thing when I wrote a column, two years ago, called “What to Read When You Are Worn Out on World-Saving”? Why do I hate it when stories are called “low stakes” because they’re not about saving the world? The stakes for anyone, in their own life, are high. Can’t that reality play out in stories, too? Maybe “stakes” is just not a useful way to look at books.
Categories and genres are weird things. Sometimes they make perfect sense; sometimes they feel like mental sandpaper. I know I’m not the only person who has heard of a new subgenre that ends in -core or -punk and cringed, quietly, on the inside. Cozy has always elicited a similar response in me. It sounded too small. But I think, now, that I was caught up in a weird kind of semantics. I think that maybe it’s about something else altogether, something we just don’t always want to say on account of we might sound kind of mushy and sentimental.
Cozy, in SFF, just means it’s about people.
There are other awkward words for this. Human-centric, maybe. Things that might once, or by some people, get called “soft SF,” in opposition to “hard SF,” a frustrating delineation that always felt like a ranking of the sciences to me. I haven’t heard these terms much in recent years, and I’m not sad about it. But that doesn’t mean the kinds of stories the awkward terms were trying to describe stopped existing.
Cozy means we soft little creatures, the ones rattling around in tin cans in a galaxy that could kill us in minutes—we’re the point. Not the world, not the spaceship, not the neat wormholes or the super-cool magic sword or the things that need to be collected. Cozy is why I play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom and never tackle the final battles, opting instead to run around visiting every village I can find, helping random people with their often very weird problems. Cozy is a whole genre of helping random people with their often very weird problems, you could say. There might be an epic battle against magical forces, but it’s over there. There are still people going about their days, collecting bugs, needing to get a rushroom fix, or trying to make their kid happy.
Yes, books with big epic quests and world-saving are also about people. Books are about people, generally speaking. But every storyteller prioritizes: Are you saying something all-encompassing or something intimate? Do you want to look deep into the hearts of a bunch of weirdos on a spaceship or do you want to trace the rise and fall of a dynasty? Do you want to do both? Can you do both? What do you want your readers to take away from a story?
What do you, as a reader, want to take from a story? Has it changed, at all, in the last five or eight years? Has it changed again in the last year?
An old friend pointed out another thing about cozies, and about comfort, the other week. She said the same thing I just said: that they’re about people. But her point was that they’re also not about machines, or sweet new technologies, or finding new ways to share on social media. They’re not about robots, or so-called AI; they’re about the things that the techbros can’t or don’t or won’t understand, in their quests to optimize and minimize and turn every narrative into a quickly digestible blog post.
Cozy stories can be a kind of defiance. Their rise is a testament to what a lot of readers need—comfort, yes, but also connection, meaning, purpose, ritual, care, love, possibility. Not just the possibility of a single, lovely, charming story, but a reminder that it’s possible for our world to contain those things, again, in larger measure that it feels like it does right now.
This doesn’t mean there’s no struggle, no difficulty in the character’s lives. But it does mean recognizing that not every struggle is against a demon king with a sword. What we’re struggling with, down here on the ground, with our muddy boots and our broken hearts—those struggles are just as valid. If the world is constantly questioning your right to exist, to be equal, to be heard, why would you not want a story that lets you live, however briefly, in a world where none of that happens? When you turn the last page, all the struggles are still real, from book bans to bombings. Escapism isn’t a dirty word, and it’s not just about leaving the world behind for a little while. It’s also about coming back better able to face what’s right in front of us.
Chandler’s 1944 The Simple Art of Murder gave me the impression cozies came before the hard boiled works, or perhaps it was before Chandler’s particular line of hard boiled works. Chandler spends the essay being inordinately grumpy about what he feels are absolutely ludicrous contrivances designed to provide the detective with the opportunity to solve the case before the bumbling cops do. In retrospect, the essay reminds me of hard SF authors moaning about other sorts of SF.
That was my first reaction; ISTR that Father Brown and Miss Marple preceded noir, which depended on an unstable environment (e.g., Los Angeles during expansion) rather than a stable environment disrupted by murder (e.g., an English village).
I have to argue with “not about robots” because Becky Chambers’ “Monk and Robot” books are quintessentially cozy.
I get the distinct impression Chandler didn’t want girl cooties on his mysteries. Which also reminds me of a certain type of SF fan.
The Golden Age mysteries (20s and 30s) aren’t quite as cozy as the modern version, but tended towards amateur sleuths who encounter a disturbing number of murders, and not too graphic violence. The Golden Age authors also had a fair number of women, Agatha Christie being the most famous, but also people like Dorothy Sayers and Josephine Tey, while the hard boiled books skewed more male.
I’ve seen the “cozy” term applied to a lot of SFF where I wonder if the other person was reading the same books I was. Pratchett’s works, for example, are funny and insightful and compassionate, and a comfort read for me, but there’s too much anger in them to really be cozy.
One interesting opinion I come across fairly often is the idea that books that dwell on misery and degradation, and feature graphic violence, are more “mature” than books that feature decent people doing their best in difficult situations. I think this comes in part from confusing maturity in depth and themes (which does not require graphic violence), and the rating system for movies (where the more sexual/violent a movie is, the more mature the rating).
What are some examples of Cozy SFF books to add to a TBR list?
I would class Becky Chambers’ books as cosy SFF. Her Wayfarers series is set in space. Her Monk and Robot series are earth grounded. Both are good reads and leave you on an upbeat, uplifted note.
You might like to try Tales & Feathers Magazine, by the same folks who do Augur Magazine. T&F is more ‘slice of life’, strictly speaking, than cosy, but a lot of the short stories fit in to that idea of cosy.
https://www.augurmag.com/tales-and-feathers-magazine/
In addition to the other recommendations, try I’ve Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level. A young Japanese woman, Azusa, finds herself reincarnated in a stereotypical fantasy world. She’s an immortal and never-aging witch, and all she wants is to live a peaceful, stress-free life. She’s very kind and gentle; she has more than enough power to wipe out a city, if not a country, but she prefers helping the people of the nearby village (who come to love “the Witch of the Fields”). Even when she’s attacked by monsters, Azusa will only defend herself before trying to discern why the monster attacked her. More often than not, they become her friends and sometimes even stay with her as a sort of found family.
The most obvious recent ones that I’m aware of are Travis Baldree’s “Legends & Lattes” and “Bookshops & Bonedust” – I mostly read hard SF, but greatly enjoyed both of them!
You beat me to it! I can’t give them enough praise.
Mirable by Kagan, Demon Daughter by Bujold, The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Mandanna, Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō by Ashinano, and Ogami-san Can’t Keep It In by Yoshidamaru. That last is not the ecchi manga you might expect from the set-up (socially isolated teen plagued by intrusive thoughts about sex runs into another socially isolated teen with an uncontrolled ability to cause people to blurt out their innermost thoughts).
ISTM that “it’s about people” is too broad a definition for “cozy”; for example, I’d say Merchanter’s Luck is about people, but it’s certainly not cozy. Perhaps it has more to do with the scale of the ambitions of the characters (e.g. serving a good cup of coffee, to take an obvious recent example, rather than saving a kingdom), or how much those characters are affected by large-scale events?
Indeed – quite a few quite reasonably graphic murder mysteries are ‘about people’, in that they’re about teasing out and understanding the complex interpersonal relationships, love affairs and business partnerships that have caused a string of horrible murders.
I think cozy is just too individually understood to be that useful as a genre (at the moment/yet). Becky Chamber’s Monk and Robot books are called ‘cozy’ and certainly they’re engineered to strip away a degree of nastiness from the real world I am happy not to deal with. She paints a world without bigotry and without material want, without imminent climate collapse. And yet the books have such an urgent and deep sense of aboutness because she’s interested in the human quest for meaning and happiness even in a world where those problems are solved. I wouldn’t call them cozy, and I’m not sure they aspire to the cozy label because they deal with profoundly difficult territory – being human remains a deeply challenging undertaking even in a world of happiness and mutual support.
Whereas Legends and Lattes and other books more consciously written to fit the emerging genre make me feel pandered to and patronised. While there are themes I’m happy to take a rest from, I think I need a certain amount of friction, a certain amount of potential grit in the oyster to engage with a book happily.
I agree; lots of books are anbout people without the aesthetic of coziness. I also think some high-stakes (if you want to use that term) have a low-light warm-sweater feel. The Golden Compass has an emphasis on warm clothing and comfort food giving it some cozy elements, but the book as a whole is not cozy.
Murderbot feels cozy to me, though I am not sure why. Maybe it is the shorter length of the books, the small circle of main characters, the mysteries that must be untangled, and the fact that interpersonal relationships feel as important as the mission at hand.
Murderbot has many characters that prioritize the needs and feelings of others. To me that makes it feel cozy.
In addition the violence is done not out of malice but is done begrudgingly and as minimalistically as possible.
High-stakes, and not at all free of violence, are the Cthulhu Mythos works of John Michael Greer–a series of 7 [Weird of Hali], a duology and a couple of single books, with the Deep Ones and so on being friends instead of enemies to humans who come to know them, and some of the old gods being more than friends with some, and together these battle a “rationalist” army of paranoid techbros who want to destroy everything mysterious. The world is saved and the families, genetic or found, stay together. Content warning–some violence and the collapse of a technological situation (which means people like me would die. Oh, and some sex.) But I enjoyed them very much.
Ruthanna Emrys’ books about Aphra Marsh I would recommend also [Come on, where’s that 3rd one?]
Kij Johnson’s “Dream-quest of Vellitt Boe” might be a good choice as well.
What I want Cozy to be is small and close up. Small stakes, focused on everyday life and everyday people. To me that inher means there will be tension and conflict, just the small, mundane conflicts of being alive. For there to be always a happy ending is the opposite of cozy to me because coziness has to be real. If it isn’t real and it’s always happy then it’s perfection, which is the opposite of coziness. Coziness has to be a little bit messy, not concerned with how things are supposed to be, only concerned with how things are now.
This is beautiful. Much to think about it such a brief post.
For me the term cozy applied to a book implies it will not be upsetting. No graphic violence/sex, no child abuse, no “rip your heart out” with the last chapter. Sometimes that type of book is the escape I seek. Other times I want to read a gripping human story that kills a favorite character at the end or has a devastating twist because I want to be fully absorbed in a dangerous world or want to feel the catharsis of crying over a fictional character.
I do wonder if people who use Agatha Christie as an example of a cozy author have reread her works recently. I read many of hers as a teenager and my recollection of her work was far more cozy than the impression I have since rereading them within the past few years. She has some wonderfully evil and dangerous people and ideas in some of them. And good doesn’t always triumph.
I do wonder if ‘cozy crime’ is kind of based on a flawed understanding of the previous body of crime fiction. Agatha Christie, the model for a lot of cozy crime is as much vicious satire as cozy detection. It depicts a world where most upstanding pillars of society, judges, aristocrats, doctors and celebrities are all sitting around waiting to murder each other or get murdered. Behind every happy marriage is a bed-hopping, impotent motive for homocide. Dorothy L Sayers’ murders and intellectual game playing were the stage setting for some difficult and insightful grappling with the difficulties of society and femininity between the wars.
Richard Osman is often named as a modern cozy crime author, but his works take place in a world of crooked business investments, violent drug deals gone wrong and murderous hitmen. I don’t he’s sitting down to write something cosy, I think he’s just writing in the British crime tradition, which has always allowed for cream teas and morally difficult homicide to exist side by side.
I think people are writing consciously targeted cozy fiction are possibly misunderstanding the models they’re taking from.
The root of most of the confusion here, I think, arises less from the word “cozy” than it does from the word “subgenre”.
“Cozy” is not a subgenre. It is not a theme. It is not a category.
“Cozy” is a tone.
This is why trying to map the history of “cozy” in mysteries gets confusing. because, yes, it does go back at least as far as Agatha Christie (see not just Miss Marple, but most particularly her “Tommy and Tuppence” books). Examples of “cozy” in American mystery likewise date back farther than “late” in the 20th century. Elizabeth Peters’ The Seventh Sinner (introducing series character Jacqueline Kirby) is certainly a prime example – but not all of Peters’ canon is cozy; there is a major multi-book plot arc midway through her Amelia Peabody novels that went to some really dark places.
Cozy mysteries are limited neither to women authors nor women protagonists. Emma Lathen’s long and popular series starring investment banker John Putnam Thatcher is absolutely cozy in tone, and Aaron Elkins’ series featuring forensic anthropologist Gideon Oliver certainly qualifies, as does Lawrence Block’s series about semi-reformed burglar Bernie Rhodenbarr. See Amanda Cross’s mysteries featuring English professor Kate Fansler for yet another early example. And I’d even submit that Robert van Gulik’s classic Judge Dee mysteries have elements of the cozy about them; for all that the murders (and occasionally the punishments) are sometimes graphic, the highly ordered and civilized approach to solving them is tonally comparable to cozy storytelling in more modern settings.
It’s true that the recent surge of “cozy” mystery has gone very sharply overboard into “eccentric small town with really quirky characters and some combination of recipes and/or fantasy elements” mode, to the extent that that combination of setting and tone has become the dominant force in the market. But like all marketing trends, I expect that one to burn itself out before too much longer, while the cozy tone itself survives in the wider category under other templates.
Meanwhile, two recommendations to finish out the post: in mystery, Gigi Pandian, whom I’d regard as one of the best and most versatile mystery writers I’ve run across in the last decade. And in fantasy, Spells at the Crossroads by Barbara Ashford, which adds musical theater to the above-noted “eccentric small town” mix and – despite a certain amount of character-angst along the way – strikes me as very much in the right end of the cozy pool. (Note that the latter book is an omnibus, having been previously published in two separate volumes; some sources may list it incorrectly as #3 in a series.)
If Noir gets to be a sub-genre then Cozy may be appropriate as a sub-genre?
I’d submit that “noir” is also a tone rather than a subgenre – so, no, I don’t think that works.
Let me amplify. First of all, let’s note that what’s meant by “genre” varies somewhat depending on whether one is an academic or a publishing-industry professional. Either way, though, my reading of the term is that “genre” describes a work or works as a whole – whether by subject matter (mystery, romance, fantasy), structure (comedy or tragedy, as with Shakespeare’s plays), or some other content-based element.
By contrast, when I describe “cozy” and “noir” as tones, I’m talking less about the story as a whole than I am about the words from which it’s been constructed, and the way in which those words create an atmosphere. Tone in particular is a function of word-by-word prose – or poetry, for that matter; consider the difference in tone between the verse of Rudyard Kipling and that of Gilbert & Sullivan.
Looking at mystery, the tone of Elizabeth Peters’ “Vicky Bliss” novels is distinct from that of the supernatural Gothic-suspense books she published under the Barbara Michaels byline. Looking at horror, the tone of Lovecraft’s prose is distinct from that of Stephen King or “Mira Grant” aka Seanan McGuire. And there are writers whose tone varies from one mode to another within a series or even within a single novel (I am thinking particularly of Lois McMaster Bujold here, but there are certainly other examples).
Tone is also a major factor in the degree to which modern Sherlock Holmes pastiches ring true to the spirit of the original Conan Doyle stories – some writers are demonstrably better than others at imitating the nuances and rhythms of Watson’s text.
(I fully expect to get pushback on defining “noir” as a tone, but at the least I think tone is an essential component of what makes a “noir” work what it is.)
Lawrence Block is the absolute last person on Earth I’d guess to have written a cozy mystery, prolific though he is. I sense some Wikipedia and library time in my near future!
To me, cozy isn’t just about people, it’s about CARING about people.
I used to describe this idea in terms of the Pinky & the Brain episode in which the *plan* was to take over the world via an exploding moon rocket (with many more details involving a disco ball) but that involved maybe 30
seconds of the show. The other 14 minutes were about their asinine plot to make the money to get the rocket in the first place (which involved art fraud and Pinky faking his own death). Fortunately “cozy” now does all that in 2 syllables.
And the one time Brain got what he wanted (spoiler if it still applies) at Christmastime, he gave it up because Pinky wished for him to get everything he wanted . . . and what Brain wanted at that moment was for everyone to be happy as he was.
Okay, I absolutely love thinking about Pinky and the Brain as cozy, this entirely works for (and makes perfect sense to) me.
This doesn’t exactly describe it, but I think of some of this as the difference between “plot-driven” stories and “character-driven” stories. Like books where you’re most interested in *what* happens next vs. books where you’re most interested in learning *who* the characters are and how they’re interacting.
I feel like this discussion intersects in interesting ways with very recent threads and blog posts I’ve read about the rise of a subgenre currently being called “romantasy.” Romance is a genre that is defined by some fairly strict rules and conventions. Probably the most key one (aside perhaps for the HEA or HEAForNow ending) is that, big stakes or little, the story and everything that happens in it is ultimately about and centers the relationship. Many of the cozy descriptions people are proposing above are similar, if you substitute “person” or “people” in the place of “people in a romantic or sexual relationship.”
OT, I wish we could give a thumbs up to the original post as well as the comments. I really enjoyed the article, as well as the discussion.
When discussing stakes, I think there’s more to it than just low/high, there are also personal vs. public stakes. Public stakes are the epic ones–the world will fall to evil if we don’t stop Sauron or we must stop terrorists from blowing up a building–but personal stakes such as a character’s life/happiness can still be quite high. Some stories have both, some only have personal, but if you only have public stakes then your story may have a problem.
I found the term a turn-off at first. It almost made me not read a few books because people on Reddit hailed the book as the ultimate in “cozy fantasy”. I prefer character-driven stories, but that’s me.
I love your essay because it’s about pigeon-holing stories & how some people, especially writers, hate that. Topper, written in the 1920’s, would probably fit today’s “cozy” catagory, as long as cozy and boozy are somewhat equivalent.
Madeleine L’Engle hated being categorized as a “Children’s writer”. She wrote books for people, she said, & found it insulting to be categorized. She passed away right around the time when publishers created “YA” fiction. I know she would have detested the term. Others capitalized on the trend, proclaiming their characters to be 10 years younger than they normally would have chosen as an age, in order to ride the wave of that trend. This is like bell bottoms or halter tops in the 1970s — a trend that will wear thin all too soon.
For me, some of it is what the story believes in: Do some people care enough about other people or about good important things to set aside self-interest?
And then some of it is content/setting; while it is actually possible to have a cozy book set in a literal war zone, it presents more… challenges… to the author to do so realistically, and it is generally easier in a circumscribed setting where large bad things are not happening.
But a focus on caring [whether that caring is expressed via *extremely* good mechanical service done to vehicles or via a cup of tea], a focus that at least generally ends up on what might go right instead of on what has gone wrong, and some degree of hope, minus some other factors [cliff-hangers, adrenaline, harsh betrayal, etc.] make for a cozy book for me.
Yes. Hope is the key
Yes. Goodness is a key element
I understand why one would equate cozy with human centered, after all we humans find our deepest experience of safety in relationship with trusted humans. And as mammals we experience safety as warm and comfortable ie cozy.
To me cozy is not about humans but not machines, it is about the quality of the relationships. Specifically the presence of what others here have named: kindness, goodness, hope; but also Compassion, a feeling of been seen and accepted, a feeling of togetherness. To me cozy has a quality of the exquisite beauty, rightness, truthfulness of life coming through any suffering that is experienced. (Examples here are the afore mentioned Becky Chambers Monk and Robot series, as well as Dreamhealers series by M.C.A. Hogarth).
For me the strongest words in this article are at the end. “Their rise is a testament to what a lot of readers need—comfort, yes, but also connection, meaning, purpose, ritual, care, love, possibility. Not just the possibility of a single, lovely, charming story, but a reminder that it’s possible for our world to contain those things, again, in larger measure that it feels like it does right now. “
I would just like to note – there’s a reason I used the word “people” rather than “human” through most of this piece. People, to me, is a broad category that encompasses all sentient beings. Robots, aliens, you name it. It’s not limited to humans.
Thank you for this clarification. And thank you for writing this article that has gotten us thinking about what it is for us to feel cozy, and what specifically it is that we enjoy about certain books that make us feel this way.
Perhaps we can then take this understanding into our daily lives as more coziness for ourselves and extend it all the ‘sentient beings’ around us.
“Battlestar Galactica episode in which people punch out their feelings” – ah, you really went there, didn’t you?
I think my definition of cozy is a bit broader than yours. It usually has to involve the MC(s) finding/having found family, a sense of belonging, and, most of all, hope. The scale of the plot doesn’t matter as much to me. I do think it’s a lot easier to focus on those aspects when you don’t have the whole demon-lord-with-a-sword thrown in, though.
Absolutely lovely article. Thank you so much for writing it.
I think this is over-complicating what “cozy” means. Every story I’ve ever seen with that label has been relatively low tension and with an emphasis on wish-fulfillment stuff like living in a nice cottage or running a coffee shop. I don’t think we need to make it any deeper than that. Not enjoying this kind of story is common and normal.
Cozy fantasy has been around for decades in Japan as a sub-genre known as “slice of life”. It simply tells stories of everyday life in whatever setting the author chooses, be it a world of witches, space janitors, or two little creatures living in the woods trying to start a business.