Maybe you’ve heard of “cozy fiction”, which started off in mysteries, but spread to speculative fiction (science fiction, fantasy, and even horror) as well. Cozy is more of a vibe than a rule, but think of “adventures retire and run a tavern”, “a family takes in a lost robot”, “possessed but the demon becomes your best friend”. Cozy stories are often in dialogue with their non-cozy counterparts. For this post, the part of this dialogue that has my interest is "stakes".
Unlike their non-cozy counterparts, cozy stories embrace low stakes. You’re not saving the world, you’re trying to solve little problems for guests at your inn. You’re trying to revive an old garden. You’re trying to settle down into a new home. Dark lords and military inquests and colony ships from a dying planet, if they’re present, aren’t the focus.
This, I think, allows cozy stories to succeed where much of speculative fiction has fallen short.
See, sci-fi and fantasy love their stories about an individual or a small group of people going out and saving the world / universe. They kill an evil king, or find a powerful artifact, or master their superpowers, and bam. World is saved. These are also very easy stories to tell: the high stakes gets the blood pumping and drums up spectacle. A small number of people keeps the cast manageable and gives the audience time to really develop an attachment to the protagonist(s). The problem is, in real life, if we want to make big changes, there’s rarely a single powerful artifact that has the answer. If you kill one evil dude, there’s usually a whole evil system that continues their work; and power is unfortunately most likely to accumulate under the already powerful, not the well-meaning underdogs. Scifi and fantasies give us stories with happily ever afters, but they don’t transfer into the real world.
One answer to this dilemma is to dismiss the notion of “happily ever after” entirely. Largely this is the direction the literary scene has taken. Tragic endings or nihilism are fashionable, gritty, realistic, where happier ones are seen as naive, shallow, and unsophisticated. In some ways, I don’t entirely disagree—after all, I was just criticising macguffins and hero’s journeys and the myth of the good kings for exactly that. But I’m not willing to throw out the notion of happily ever after entirely - because this is where cozy stories come in.
Cozy stories, like mainline SFF, have small casts, but because of their smaller stakes, their victories are real, grounded, applicable to our lives, in the way heroism scifi fantasy isn’t. One person can’t unseat an evil empire, but they can bring a stranger into a community. They can help a friend work out through their trauma. They can make a warm, welcoming place for the neighborhood to gather and a community to come together. They can support someone else who’s trying to do the same. A cozy story ends happily ever after with an honesty that their uncozy counterparts do not.
But of course, big stakes exist. Evil empires need to be unseated, and fretting about whether or not it’s possible is a luxury that the people being crushed by them can ill afford. Lucky for us, history has shown us that it is possible to overthrow a dictator, to break evil systems and bend them for the better. It just takes a lot of people. More than you can know the names of. More than one person could even meet in a lifetime. More than you can fit in a novel.
You can tell our western storytelling practice is ill-fitted for big stakes because even when we talk about this history, we talk about it in terms of important individuals. Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Nelson Mandela. But none of those people could have achieved their goals, or even been able to have the reach they had, without the huge number of nameless, forgotten people who collectively supported them. All those people did important, vital work, and we barely even know what they did. They might’ve driven people to a protest. They might’ve let people meet in their homes. They might’ve put a hand on a shoulder when someone was feeling unsure. They might’ve just said “yes, this is worth doing.” But it couldn’t have happened without them.
I think, maybe. you can see where I’m going with this. Cozy stories aren’t just “realistic” in a way that heroic stories aren’t. They, in essence, form the basis of what it means to make real change. Not only that, it just shows that activism isn’t just big groups of people doing big things together, but it’s also small things that small numbers of people can do. Maybe you can’t throw the proud boys out of town by yourself, but you sure as hell can grab some friends and take down their flyers. You might not be able to stop ICE from doing raids, but you can be part of the chain that lets people know when they come around. You’re only one person when you go to a march, but that’s where you’ll meet the people trying to do more than one person could ever do alone.
As for the storytelling side of things, speculative or not, I think we owe it to our communities to find ways past the limitations of our current storytelling practices. All this focus on the interiority of the individual, the gargantuan efforts of a few people instead of the moderate effort of the many, leads us to a situation where our only options are wish fulfillment - where the happenstance of the universe gives us everything we need - and despair. I love character. I consider myself a character-focused writer. But there is no character arc that makes a person a savior all on their own. Plot, too - a rising and falling conflict, chained by cause and effect - doesn’t reflect how when one falters, another picks up the slack. Or how sometimes, the efforts of others meet you, and it manifests as luck or coincidence. Maybe also solutions live in different points of view - I’ve felt a strange compulsion to write both in first person plural and second person, both ways to tell stories about groups of people: collectives and the audience, respectively. If I have a prediction (a wish) for the writing innovations of the near future, it is that we recognize these conventions as boundaries, and find new ones that help us move past them.