I recently attended a virtual panel about “cozy fiction” at Flights of Foundry, an online SFFH (science fiction, fantasy and horror) conference. (I’m going to use the American spelling “cozy” here, even though I usually spell it “cosy”.)

Cozy isn’t just for mysteries anymore. The same kind of gentle, positive tone, and the same focus on characters and relationships, are starting to become a thing in other genres, including SFFH. (Yes, apparently you can have cozy horror.)

The session provoked a number of thoughts for me, and since I call this category of my blog “manifesto-esque rantings” I thought I would, somewhat tongue in cheek, propose a “cozy manifesto,” as follows.

1. Comedy is as worthy as tragedy

I typed that phrase into the panel’s chat at one point, when one of the panelists was talking about how cozy fiction isn’t taken as seriously as, say, grimdark, and it seemed to resonate with other attendees.

My thought as I made that point was of Shakespeare, whose comedies are comedies in the traditional dramatic sense (they end with lovers united, rather than with widespread death and destruction driven by the faults of the protagonist(s)), though they are also funny; nobody that I’m aware of argues that they’re not worth studying or performing, even though he was also a master of tragedy. I was also thinking, though, of writers like Terry Pratchett or P.G. Wodehouse, whose work is comedic but extraordinarily well written. And, in Pratchett’s case, also with some depth and dramatic heft to it, especially in his middle period.

Death definitely can be present in a cozy story; after all, cozy mysteries are almost always murder mysteries, and Pratchett’s character Death appears in every one of his Discworld books. But a cozy story is not primarily about unpleasant people doing unpleasant things to other unpleasant people, even if that does occur as an element sometimes. They can be funny, or charming, and they can be about relationships (good, stable, positive relationships, even, that work out well in the end), and that shouldn’t be grounds to look down on them.

2. The lives of ordinary people are a fit subject for fiction

Cozy mysteries generally take place in small towns or out in the country, among middle-class or even working-class people of no particular distinction, rather than in the courts of kings or the boardrooms of great corporations. Cozy fiction is OK with being small-scale, with its characters having limited power in the world, with the setting being their ordinary lives where they just try to get on with keeping things running. I bang on about this constantly on this blog, so I won’t say any more here, except to quote Middlemarch:

…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

3. Objectively small stakes can still be subjectively compelling

Going along with the previous point: cozy stories can be about stakes significantly smaller than saving the world. That doesn’t mean they’re not compelling. Compelling stakes are stakes that are compelling for a character we identify with.

Wodehouse is the all-time master of making objectively small stakes (like social embarrassment) completely compelling for the reader.

World-saving can be going on in the background, maybe even close to the foreground, of a cozy story, but it doesn’t have to be what the story is about. Consider T. Kingfisher’s Paladin’s Grace. A god has died, and severed heads keep turning up, and there’s a nasty cult looking for excuses to burn people as witches, but what the story is about is a romance between a paladin of the dead god and a master perfumer. The other elements are mainly there to drive the romance.

4. There’s a place for a literature of hope, joy, and kindness

As a minor exponent of the noblebright fantasy subgenre, I’ve believed this for a long time. Noblebright isn’t the only hopeful subgenre; there’s hopepunk (which is different from noblebright, but I believe the two can get along together, because of course I do), solarpunk, and a few others. They have a clear overlap with the cozy approach to writing. (Cozy is more of a manner than a genre.)

Part of what makes a story cozy is what could be loosely described as a “happy ending,” or at least an ending that satisfies our sense of things being how they ought to be: lovers are united, villains are punished, justice is done. It doesn’t need to be set in a just, peaceful, kind or happy society for this to be the case, though it can be. The contrast of localized justice or kindness, at the level of the story, against a darker background can work well, in fact. Hope can have different scales: personal, interpersonal, societal.

The work of Becky Chambers, for example, is often mentioned as “positive SF,” and would qualify as cozy, but the background of her stories is often a large-scale tragedy that has overtaken the earth and driven people forth as refugees, or stranded them in space with nowhere to go home to. She’s very much what I think of as a “zeitgeist writer,” and the zeitgeist she’s working in tends to have not much hope for society in the large, but allows for islands of hope among “found families” of people of goodwill. This is, broadly speaking, hopepunk; noblebright, by contrast, can believe in the possibility of societal improvement to a greater degree.

Anyway, that’s a digression; the point is that having characters who have ideals, who have hope, who strive for the good of others at their own cost, who are kind, who believe in a better future, is a feasible way to write today; that cynicism and darkness don’t need to be the defining qualities of good literature, or important literature, or serious literature. And you can write funny books, and books with everyday characters who live small lives on a limited stage, and whose stakes are objectively small, and who care for each other and do their best, and this can be good and worthy and important.

And honestly, right now (or at any moment in history, really), don’t we need more hope and joy and kindness in the world?