Once upon a time, “cozy” meant somebody had been murdered in a picturesque English village, but at least there was tea.
You know the sort of thing.
The victim is discovered in the library. There are six suspects, all of whom have excellent reasons for wanting him dead. The local constable is baffled. Fortunately, an elderly woman who knits, gardens, or otherwise appears completely harmless has noticed that Colonel Mustard couldn’t possibly have been in the conservatory at half past eight because he’d already told Mrs. Peacock he was going to the village fête.
Case closed.
Agatha Christie didn’t invent the cozy mystery, exactly, but she’s certainly one of the people we associate most strongly with it. For decades, that’s more or less where “cozy” lived.
Not anymore.
Apparently, cozy has escaped.
First, Fantasy Got Cozy
Over the last few years, cozy fantasy has become a genuine Thing. And it’s a fascinating idea when you think about it. Fantasy traditionally gives us enormous stakes. Dark Lords. Ancient evils. Kingdoms falling. Armies marching. The fate of civilization hanging in the balance while some poor bastard who was perfectly happy tending sheep discovers that he’s the Chosen One and has to save everybody.
Cozy fantasy asks: What if he didn’t? What if the fate of the world wasn’t at stake? What if the story was about opening a coffee shop instead?
That’s essentially the premise of Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree, one of the books most frequently associated with the rise of modern cozy fantasy. An orc retires from adventuring and opens a coffee shop.
That’s it.
Well, obviously, that’s not it. Things happen. There are problems. There are relationships and setbacks and complications because otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a story. But the pleasure comes from spending time with the characters. Watching relationships develop. Watching them build something. Watching a place slowly become a community.
The stakes are smaller.
The story isn’t.
And Now Science Fiction Is Getting Cozy
This one caught my attention partly because it’s happening very close to home. Cameron Cooper recently finished writing a cozy science fiction novel. It’s with her agent now.
That sentence still amuses me slightly. Cozy science fiction.
Science fiction has spent more than a century giving us alien invasions, interstellar wars, murderous artificial intelligences, collapsing civilizations, hostile planets and assorted other ways humanity might have a really bad Tuesday.
So what does cozy science fiction look like? Pretty much what you’d expect once you understand the idea. The spaceship doesn’t necessarily have to be carrying the last survivors of humanity while being pursued by an unstoppable alien fleet. Maybe it’s just carrying people. People who have jobs. People who eat together. People who argue about stupid things. People who become friends. People trying to make a life somewhere that happens to be several light-years from Earth.
The science-fiction setting still matters. The speculative element still matters.
But saving the galaxy isn’t compulsory.
And I rather like that.
Then I Realized I’d Done It Too
This was the part that surprised me.
I’ve been writing The Summer Garden, a serial about a sixty-two-year-old widower named Scotty who moves into a condo and becomes fascinated by the community garden across the street. Eventually, he wanders over. He meets people. He gets a garden plot. He grows things. He makes friends.
That’s a somewhat spectacularly inadequate description of the story, but it’s also basically accurate. Nobody is trying to kill Scotty. There are no international conspiracies. Nobody has kidnapped the President’s daughter. There isn’t even a Dark Lord.
Instead, there are tomatoes. Weeds. Neighbours. A kid named Lucas who likes cherry tomatoes. People who have problems that can’t be solved with a gun, a sword or an orbital bombardment.
So somewhere along the way, without deliberately setting out to do it, I apparently wrote cozy fiction. I’m just not entirely sure what kind. Cozy contemporary fiction, perhaps. Cozy slice-of-life. Cozy upmarket fiction. Maybe just… cozy.
Because the more I’ve thought about it, the more I’ve started to wonder whether “cozy” is really a genre at all.
Maybe Cozy Is a Promise
Mystery tells you what kind of story you’re going to get. So does fantasy, science fiction, romance and thriller. Cozy seems to tell you something slightly different. It tells you how the story is going to make you feel.
That doesn’t mean nothing bad can happen. Cozy mysteries have been murdering people for decades, after all. It doesn’t mean there can’t be conflict. It doesn’t mean everybody has to be relentlessly pleasant to one another while drinking tea and petting cats.
It means there’s somewhere safe in the story. A coffee shop. A spaceship. A little English village. A community garden. Maybe it’s not even a physical place. Maybe the refuge is simply the people around the protagonist. Whatever form it takes, there’s a sense that despite whatever goes wrong, this is a world in which kindness matters. Friendship matters. Community matters. Things can break. People will help put them back together.
And I’ve begun to wonder whether that’s the real reason cozy fiction seems to be spreading into genres where nobody would have thought to put it twenty years ago. Maybe readers aren’t asking for stories in which nothing bad happens. Maybe they’re asking for stories that reassure us that when bad things do happen, people will show up for one another.
I can understand the appeal of that.
Especially these days.
So What Gets Cozy Next?
We’ve got cozy mysteries. We’ve got cozy fantasy. We’re getting cozy science fiction.
There are cozy romances, although romance has arguably been doing this sort of thing forever.
So where does it stop?
Cozy horror? That seems… challenging.
Cozy dystopia? The government controls your every waking moment, but the neighbourhood bakery makes a fantastic cinnamon bun.
And then there’s the one that really interests me.
Cozy thrillers.
Surely that’s impossible. Thrillers are supposed to make your pulse race. Somebody’s in danger. Something terrible is going to happen. The clock is ticking. The protagonist is being hunted. The conspiracy reaches all the way to the top. How on earth do you make that cozy?
I have absolutely no idea.
Well.
Actually…
I might have a few.
But we’ll talk about that next week.