67. Considering the cosy turn in SFF: who gets to be comforted?

Photo by Jayden Wong on Unsplash: image of a lit fire in a stone fireplace

I’ve been thinking about the “cosy turn” in science fiction and fantasy lately, after reading Travis Baldree’s Legends and Lattes from the library. It appears to be the comparison-text for the New Cosy Wave, and it remind me of nothing so much as the time, many years ago, that I read a murder mystery narrated by a cat. A perfectly normal cat who solved crime by causing its person to stumble over solutions: in a string of Helpful Coincidences, everything works out. The just enjoy familiar comforts, while the unjust suffer consequences of their own making, and there’s never any real doubt about the outcome.

It’s clearly an appealing mode.

And yet, as a trend, it strikes me much as the grimdark turn of… is it really more than a decade ago now? (It is: my youth is retreating.) It strikes me much as the grimdark turn that became prominent in the late 2000s and early 2010s did: the “nasty, brutish, and short” view of human life typified by simplistic fan reception of the work of George R.R. Martin, that found further expression in the fantasy work of Richard K. Morgan, and a more perfect form in the early work of Joe Abercrombie and Mark Lawrence, as well as in certain apparently immune-to-irony fictions set in the same Warhammer 40K universe that gave the grimdark trend its name.

The grimdark turn retreated from moral complexity into the kind of ugly nihilism that views right action as either impossible or futile. (If I may cite myself from 2015 without disappearing up my own navel.) The cosy turn shows an inclination to retreat, I think, in the opposite direction: an optimism that sees moral questions, when not entirely irrelevant to the lives of the characters, as presenting no significant – that is to say, easily resolvable – challenges or costs.

If you don’t have the contrast of something bitter, sweetness can be very one-note. But bitterness, or even seriousness, to excess also becomes a form of monotony. Both modes often suffer – in an artistic, rather than commercial sense – from rejecting tonal contrast, and the potential of such contrast to highlight different parts of the human condition, and thus move the audience to reflect more deeply on the work and on themselves. It is in both cases a rejection of emotional complexity as well as moral complexity.

I think necessarily we must distinguish between “cosy” as a marketing category, “cosy” as an aesthetic, and “interiority” and “domesticity” as artistic lenses that overlap with cosy-the-marketing-category and cosy-the-aesthetic but are not encompassed by it. (Cosy as marketing category and cosy as aesthetic are also not precisely the same, but I find they have more in common.)

When I speak of interiority here, as an artistic lens, I mean a focus on what is usually private and interior: quiet reflection or self-reflection, a certain quality of the contemplative, a sense of the import of personal, private thoughts or resolutions for oneself even if the import of those resolutions is never apparent to the world outside one’s own self. I think for me interiority in fiction carries a sense of the fictional actor as one who is engaged in an intimate revelation with and to the reader, not as a performance but such that the reader becomes privy to such intimate struggles that, in the real world of imperfect knowledge, no one is ever really privy to with regard to another.

When I speak of domesticity, I speak not of the private interior self – the self revealed only in thought – but of the private sphere: the concerns of home, family, daily life, the private apartments that by convention are not exposed to public view. The realm of human life traditionally seen as belonging to women, as “women’s work.” Katherine Addison’s The Goblin Emperor, for example, is a book much concerned with interiority, and with the domesticity of the titular emperor’s private apartments. Becky Chambers’ A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet is science fiction very much engaged with spaceship domesticity.

Cosiness as an aesthetic draws from the domestic scene without being confined by (or to) it: it roots itself in the familiar, at least from its creator’s or presumed audience’s point of view. Thus its political viewpoint is often small-c conservative, taking a position that values established institutions, social norms and relations, rather than seeking to upend or undermine them entirely.

Let me clarify: The small-c conservative political viewpoint has all but disappeared from national politics in the Anglophone world, replaced by lumbering and radical Frankenstein’s monsters dedicated to destroying long-standing state institutions in the name of market efficiency, or to neofascist projects emerging from a “culture war.” It is not a requirement that the instinct to conserve the familiar should be homo- or transphobic or racist: it really depends on what’s seen as safe and familiar. (To take an example: from a political point of view, marriage equality can be seen as a conservative compromise. It preserves the social privilege accorded to legal marriage, and upholds pairbonding and the reproduction of normative middle-class values as an ideal. The abolition of marriage as a legal, state-recognised affair that affords privileges is by far a more radical position.)

Within this generally conservative framework, cosy fiction allows for occasional gestures towards radicalism, but to the extent that it upholds a framework of values – and is not, for example, a montage of wool jumpers, crackling fireplaces, and warm beverages – it gives priority (and assigns worth) to the familiar over the strange, the comfortable over the difficult, the long-known over the new. From, at least, the point of view of the author and the assumed audience. It is a species of fiction that occupies itself with communities and with relationships, one that reaches for a sense of security and stability for its characters, and one rejects the grand in favour of the personal.

(This is not an essay about Legends and Lattes specifically, but if it were, I would be able to substantiate these points by direct reference to that book. And several others. It’s illuminating to compare the modern “cosy mystery” genre with the mystery novels written in the 1920s and 1930s to which they are sometimes compared – or the 1940s and 1950s – and find in the originals much less of an urge towards the comfortable. Yes, I’m being a bit lazy in not quoting you paragraphs – but it’s be a bit lazy or write 5000 words, and I don’t have the focus for the latter right now.)

Cosy as a marketing category brings together disparate works that are united perhaps by their aesthetics, perhaps by sentiment, and perhaps by neither: a work will be labelled “cosy” in marketing terms if those doing the labelling believe it will sell to people who have bought other things labelled in this way. Marketing categories are far from always a useful category for understanding or discussing art, save in economic terms.

I have been trying, as I write, to avoid discussing art in terms laden with moral or aesthetic judgement. Do we have a vocabulary for literature that doesn’t devalue artistic earnestness, or deliberate naiveté, or simplicity? I like my texts replete with complexity, but I seldom enjoy stylistic elaboration or experiment, so I don’t want to say that I find either complexity in any sense to be intrinsically superior to simplicity, or, for that matter, vice versa. Likewise with regard to what is comfortable and what is difficult. Yet it seems to me that language itself – or perhaps a long tradition in literary criticism – makes it nearly impossible not to imply judgement, one way or another. Is it better to be earnest or cynical, straightforward or twisty, fast or slow? Better in what sense? Different works of art have different goals and different audiences.

(I do believe that art is better, more communicative, as art, when it avoids monotony. Balance and proportionality, directing the attention of the audience to what the creator intends the work to be about. What is art for? It’s a conversation about being human, in the end.)

That presents a challenge when it comes to discussing what… let’s be fancy, let’s call it an artistic movement, or at least a trend… what any given movement is doing, and why, on its own merits. The “cosy turn” in science fiction and fantasy, and particularly fantasy, speaks to and reflects something – some need, some lack, some desire, some fantasy – in the current moment, much as the grimdark one did a decade and more ago. The idea of safety, of stability, present in the cosy is powerfully attractive, and I think it must be in some sense in dialogue with the de-stabilised political and social environments that have obtained in both the largest Anglophone democracy (the USA) and the oldest Anglophone parliamentary system (the UK) for the better part of the last decade. (Much as I suspect the grimdark turn was in part a reaction to the cynically imperial and ultimately self-defeating foreign adventures of the US-led Anglo-American “War on Terror,” and the pervasive, self-righteously bellicose propaganda that surrounded, and indeed still surrounds, the entire project.)

I don’t find most works (at least, the ones I’ve read) marketed as “cosy” to be satisfying. Their visions of security and comfort, and the oft-times co-operative coincidences that allow for those visions to be made real, ring a little hollow – as unreal as a world where no one is ever generous. And I am made somewhat uneasy by the way in which the “queer cosy” seems to be an expression par excellence of US (white) middle-class assimilationist queerness, reproducing the structures and strictures of white (capitalist) heterosexuality. On the one hand, this is a victory of sorts: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. On the other hand… that’s a bit of a problem.

It feels telling to me that I have seen vanishingly – and I mean vanishingly — few works by BIPOC writers (and/or featuring BIPOC protagonists) described in “cosy” terms. Does only whiteness get to be “cosy”?

And if so, what does that say about who gets to be comforted by their fictions, and who does not?