Cozy Sci-fi and Fantasy
The uncertain subgenres I didn’t know were my favorite
I’ve always struggled trying to explain the kinds of stories I love the most. They’re sorta a little bit of this, but sorta a bit of that and don’t fall into a solid genre. But now they are starting to, apparently, and now those sub–genres are trending. Cozy Sci-Fi and Fantasy.
These are just a few of my favorite stories of my childhood: Bridge to Terabithia, A Wrinkle in Time, ET, Flight of the Navigator, Back to the Future, Matilda, The Littles, The Rescuers, Charlotte’s Web, Stuart Little, Labyrinth, and Never Ending Story. Even some of the teen horror back then: Christopher Pike and RL Stine were pretty light on actual terror. These stories are what I’d now consider cozy. They are light on magic or science, sometimes only having hints of it, and are grounded in reality with a dualism that I loved when I was a kid. Being grounded made the magic seem more likely versus the high fantasy books I could never get into. If everything was made up, there was nothing to relate to. If a character was straddled between worlds, I was enraptured.
I read the same way today. Don’t bother me with a tome of fantasy or science fiction no matter how rich and imaginative. I will most likely be lost and bored. But hand me something with a more delicate brushstroke (think Time Traveler’s Wife, Midnight Library, House in the Cerulean Sea) and I’m completely drawn in. For me, these kinds of stories capture a feeling of possibility that hard sci-fi or high fantasy cannot, and more importantly provide a comfort that things will be okay even if I don’t completely understand why something is happening.
That comfort is what I sought growing up (and still often today). Life was unpredictable and sometimes scary when I was a child. (not much has changed!) Books were a safe escape. I never expected those stories to be perfect or have all the answers or even have a total happily ever afters. I just needed them to feel real and real means you don’t always know how something will turn out. Magic and science and mystery are wonderful vehicles for that theme and ultimately they provide a feel-good ending even if it’s a bit open-ended. Very much the way I view life in general.
In 2020, our world was thrown into a severe state of questioning. The collision of the election, pandemic, and George Floyd’s murder dramatically affected our sense of security and made us uncomfortable with the lack of answers. We were fearful for our health, had direct loss of health and life, loss of jobs and homes, communities that supported us were in chaos or shut down, friendships and often family restricted to Facetime and Zoom where we lost the nuance of expression and touch, and so much more upheaval I can’t fit into a single paragraph. I think 2020 created a global question of why is this all happening?
People went in all different directions to find an answer to that question. Some dug in and researched. Some let TikTok explain everything. News platforms took advantage. Conspiracy theories formed. There were a lot of thoughts and prayers. Many lost trust in officials and government. Many didn’t like the “science” and how it kept changing. Some thought a government takeover was in order. Some got distracted with a monolith that appeared in Utah. And all of it got politicized in a way that I don’t think we’ve seen before, creating stark black and white thinking in situations that require a lot more than that from us. We just wanted answers.
In one of fiction’s earliest forms, the epistolary novel, the primary format was letters between two people expressing morality and instructions on “how to live”. As the genre evolved, the preaching slowly fell out of favor for more storytelling. Go figure- people grew tired of being told what to think. Over the last two centuries, fiction has grown into categories and sub-categories in which a reader is sure to find their personal niche. Books are allowed to be entertainment instead of only instruction.
But as the culture battled itself in 2020 and beyond, publishing began to shift back into that old trend of instructing readers on how to be a good human, particularly in children’s books. No longer in the obvious epistolary instructional format, but in the guise of storytelling with child characters whose dialogue reads like that of a forty-year-old Who Knows Things.
None of these “more instructional than story” books are “bad”. But are they enough? Will students tire of being told how to think? We risk a certain kind of persuasion fatigue, I believe, when books become more about messages than literature. And is it a sustainable trend for authors to have to pony up corresponding lesson plans and book club questions and public speaking events as though they are singular experts on the topics they write about? Some authors thrive on all of that, but I began writing for children because I love writing and language and the putting together the puzzle of a story. Not because I wanted to give TedTalks or fight book bans in all my spare time. But the pressure is real! (And fighting book bans is beyond important, don’t get me wrong, but that’s an entirely different blog post—the point is we shouldn’t even have to be doing it in the first place.)
Regardless, all of this was how Monolith, a light sci-fi for middle grade readers, came to be. Born of a simple conversation, the story turned into my answer for all of the above: Uncertainty is okay. In fact, I dare say it’s actually important. It’s important to be able to sit with it for a little while. It gives you time to think, feel, and process before you take action. Uncertainty keeps us humble; it reminds us that we are not the center of the universe. It is a basis for art and the conversation that surrounds art. It’s how scientists develop questions that create theory and law. It’s why magic is…magic. It's the exhilaration of riding a roller coaster or watching a scary movie or traveling to a new city. Uncertainty can hold you back because it’s scary, but if you let it, it will drive you toward deeper meaning in your life. And when you don’t have all the answers, you are more empathetic, more relatable, more compassionate. More universal.
Light sci-fi and fantasy also fall in that delightfully uncertain cozy category. You’re not going to get hard and fast science facts. You’re not going to get fully-developed fantasy creatures and poems in elvish. You’re not going to get a pedantic lesson that tells you how to behave or what to think. You’re going to get a more nuanced storytelling with a universal understanding that we don’t have all the answers, and we’re still okay. But the certainty you will get is that even when the world seems huge and confusing, and has so many problems we think we need to solve overnight but can’t: you’re not alone.
I don’t know that I would have made it through childhood without books reminding me of that.
*me reading A Wrinkle in Time while on a camping trip with my grandfather in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado*
I was FASCINATED and enamored by The Littles.