A Short And Very Incomplete List of Cosy SFF Titles
And some cool things it suggests about the genre
As people may know, I attended this year’s Worldcon in Glasgow, known as Glasgow 2024, and had the honour and pleasure of appearing on a few panels alongside other amazing and extremely smart people.
One of those panels was The Rise of Cosy Fantasy and Science Fiction, moderated by Julia Rios where I got to geek out about cosy SFF with them and fellow panelists Nadia El-Fassi, Rachael K. Jones and Sarah Beth Durst. I may have gone a little overboard on the preparation for my panels, but none more so than this one. I think I had about 10 pages of notes along with me? They were colour-coded. I have never colour-coded anything in my life before. (I have now become unstoppable.)
And I promised people that I would write up some of those notes — the lists specifically — in a more accessible format than pictures of my chicken scrawl handwriting, so here we are. These lists and associated tidbits of cool stuff come with a few caveats.
First of all: these lists are not complete. By a long shot. (Seriously. You’d have more luck hitting the moon with a slingshot than this list has of being complete.) I just wanted to have a good sample of titles that I could use to spark my memory on the panel. Turns out other people also like having lists like this available.
Secondly: I fully expect there to be titles on here that people do not agree with, especially early on. This is a feature, not a bug. We can’t even agree on what the definition for high/low fantasy is, so cosy SFF stands no chance of a unified definition. (And then there’s genre mashing and figuring out where that story fits best etc.) Please do not yell at me that I’m doing lists wrong.
Relatedly: I am one, absolutely fallible person. I have done my best to list where I know a title needed a commentary note and to give a primer of how I define cosy SFF. The lists follow those definitions, but I’m not the end authority on those definitions. The closest I can come to claiming authority is that I’ve written about how other people’s definitions (and mine) match up and differ to see what aspects people talking about cosy SFF actually agreed on. That is less me and far more people’s collective efforts defining a new subgenre that has the added disadvantages of sounding very emotive and nebulous and running into being used as a marketing buzz word, so there are extremely fuzzy edges all around the definitions that are still being debated and discussed.
Thirdly: I such at era names, so someone please take these and make them something awesome instead.
I think that’s about it for the caveats, but please add any common sense ones I’ve missed as you are reading because I guarantee that forgetting to list them doesn’t negate that they apply. They will.
What Is Cosy SFF Anyway?
Briefly, because this is an ongoing conversation between people and because I go into more depth about people’s definitions (and mine!) in this piece, cosy science fiction and fantasy is a story centering small or low stakes, domesticity, community or relationships and has a Happily Ever After or Happy For Now ending. Different critics and different people will add more points or phrase them differently, but these are the core points.
Personally, for the purposes of this list, I divided the books into three rough eras in publishing, divided through specific milestone publications. I dubbed these eras:
Proto-cosy: the era before people were discussing cosy SFF as an existing genre. (??? to 2013)
Inter-cosy: the era before the exact term of cosy SFF (well, cosy fantasy) came to prominence as the term for this type of fiction. (2014–2022)
Cosy: the era we’re in now when cosy SFF became a more established and defineable thing that people wanted to talk about and were invested in. (2023-present)
Proto-Cosy
Proto-cosy covers from the time of writing until about 2013. None of the books in this section of the list are actual cosy SFF, but they do deal with many of the same themes or core traits as contemporary cosy SFF titles. Some authors have been explicitly cited as influences. Out of all three lists, this is the most incomplete and likely to contain titles people disagree with as cosy science fiction or fantasy.
Note that for certain authors (such as Pratchett) I elected not to write down their whole bibliography, but made selections.
For some authors (like Pratchett) I elected NOT to write down the whole series and instead selected what I suspect are the stronger influences on the genre today.
Bolded titles are of particular known influence on the genre.
Proto-cosy
1926: Lud-in-the-Mist, Hope Mirrlees
1937: The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien
1948: Iron & Gold, Hilda Vaughan
1949: The Smith of Wooton Mayor, J.R.R. Tolkien
1960: A Fine and Private Place, Peter S. Beagle
1978: Beauty, Robin McKinley
1983: Seaward, Susan Cooper
1986: Howl’s Moving Castle, Diana Wynne Jones
1987: Swordpoint, Ellen Kushner
1988: The Changeling Sea, Patricia A. McKillip
1988: Sorcery and Cecilia or The Enchanted Chocolate Pot, Caroline Stevermer and Patricia Wrede
1989: Guards! Guards!, Terry Pratchett
1989: StarBridge, A.C. Crispin[1]
1993: Deerskin, Robin McKinley
1998: The Vintner’s Luck, Elizabeth Knox
1998: The Dark Lord of Derkholm, Diana Wynne Jones
2000: Year of the Griffin, Diana Wynne Jones
2004: Going Postal, Terry Pratchett
2009: Heart’s Blood, Juliet Marillier
2010: Shades of Milk & Honey, Mary Robinette Kowal
2011: One Solstice Night, Elora Bishop[2]
2012: On A Red Station, Drifting, Aliette de Bodard
2013: One Imbolc Gloaming, Elora Bishop[2]
2013: One Ostara Rising, Elora Biship[2]
2013: Unbound and Free, Becca Lusher
2013: The Second Mango, Shira Glassman
[1] Originally this list features a book by M.C.A. Hogarth as an example of cosy scifi themes before 2014 because it was the one I had read and knew of. On August 15th 2024, it was brought to my attention that Hogarth had gone further into American Conservative radicalism and become a full-flung TERF in the same vein as another more popular SFF author. I asked for recommendations to replace her book on Bluesky because, while discussing the works of certain authors in an academic context can be unavoidable, they do not need to be on lists that will be taken as recommendations and endorsements by some. As such, based on the recommendations I got, her book has been replaced by one that is narratively similar in its Star Trek-type approach. You can find the other recommendations I got in the replies to this skeet if you’d like to see them.
[2] These novellas were republished as Under Her Spell by Bridget Essex in 2017. Under Her Spell has additional edits before it was republished.
Inter-cosy
The period I dubbed inter-cosy covers around 2014 to 2022. In these books the core traits of cosy SFF are starting to solidify into something concrete. Discussions around what type of fiction these stories are have begun to appear and proposed terms include things like cosybright, noblebright, slice-of-life, or gentle fiction. Despite this solidification in themes and traits, however, there is no concensus on what to call them and discussions still tend to centre on “vibes” as the main way to differentiate these stories from other SFF tales.
As before, this list is not complete but provides a general overview of what types of books to look for in discussing cosy SFF influences and history.
Bolded titles are of particular known influence on the genre.
Inter-cosy
2014: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, Becky Chambers
2014: The Goblin Emperor, Katherine Addison
2014: The Healer’s Road, S.E. Robertson
2014: The Mystic Marriage, Heather Rose Jones
2014: Climbing the Date Palm, Shira Glassman
2014: Velvet Lies, L. Shelby
2014: Cantate in Coral and Ivory, L. Shelby
2015: A Harvest of Ripe Figs, Shira Glassman
2015: Pavana in Pearl and Emerald, L. Shelby
2015: A Promise Broken, S.L. Dove Cooper
2016: The Cybernetic Tea Shop, Meredith Katz
2016: A Closed and Common Orbit, Becky Chambers
2016: Sea Foam and Silence, Dove Cooper
2016: The Olive Conspiracy, Shira Glassman
2016: The Aurora Circus, Viano Oniomoh
2017: Humanity for Beginners, Faith Mudge
2017: The Tea Dragon Society, K. O’Neill
2017: Old-Fashioned, K.A. Cook
2017: A Coup of Tea, Casey Blair
2017: Tea Set and Match, Casey Blair
2017: Royal Tea Service, Casey Blair
2017: Water into Wine, Joyce Chng
2018: Among the Glimmering Flowers, S.L. Dove Cooper
2018: The Ice Princess’s Fair Illusion, Dove Cooper
2018: Records of a Space-born Few, Becky Chambers
2018: The Dragon of Ynys, Minerva Cerridwen
2018: Werecockroach, Polenth Blake
2018: Spinning Silver, Naomi Novik
2018: A Glimmer of Silver, Juliet Kemp
2018: Help Wanted, J. Emery
2018: The Tea Master and the Detective, Aliette de Bodard
2018: Theory: Sienna Tristen
2018: A Harmony of Water and Weald, Dove Cooper
2019: A Knight to Remember, Ceillie Simkiss
2019: A Dead and Stormy Night, Steffanie Holmes
2019: The Tea Dragon Festival, K. O’Neill
2019: To Be Taught, If Fortunate, Becky Chambers
2020: Seance Tea Party, Reimena Yee
2020: Of Dragons, Feasts, and Murder, Aliette de Bodard
2020: Borderlanders, Gillian Polack
2020: The House in the Cerulean Sea, T.J. Klune[3]
2021: A Psalm for the Wild-built, Becky Chambers
2021: The Tea Dragon Tapestry, K. O’Neill
2021: The Galaxy, and the Ground Within, Becky Chambers
2021: Under the Whispering Door, T.J. Klune
2021: Structural Integrity, Tabitha O’Connell
2021: The Girl from the Sea, Molly Knox Ostertag
2021: The Thread That Binds, Cedar McCloud
2022: A Prayer for the Crown-shy, Becky Chambers
2022: So This Is Ever After, F.T. Lukens
2022: Phantom & Rook, Aelina Isaacs
2022: The House Witch, Delemhach
2022: Can’t Spell Treason without Tea, Rebecca Thorne
2022: The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches, Sangu Mandanna
2022: Practice, Sienna Tristen
2022: Legends and Lattes, Travis Baldree
2022: Of Charms, Ghosts and Grievances, Aliette de Bodard
2022: Feathered Friendship, Katie Silverwings
2022: Structural Strain, Tabitha O’Connell
[3] Klune has stated that what tied his book together was learning about the Sixties Scoop, which was a series of Canadian policies designed to separate Indigenous children from their families and communities that lasted from the 1950s to the 1980s, and how similar policies can be found globally. This knowledge of racist policies that occurred within living memory may impact whether readers think the book is cosy or not. It is one of the more influential and visible inter-cosy titles that led people to define the core traits of cosy SFF, however, and this impact should not be ignored.
Cosy SFF
Cosy science fiction and fantasy arguably became a recognised genre within the field at large with the publication of Legends and Lattes and its appearance on multiple award lists the following year. As such, I have posited that the start of cosy fantasy and science fiction as genres proper begins in 2023 when this recognition became widespread outside of the indie publishing sphere where these discussions had been happening for a number of years already.
Again, this is not a complete list of what is available in the genre. It is a list of the books I know of and that, under my criteria as outlined above, fit the genre.
Bolded titles are of particular known influence on the genre.
Cosy SFF
2023: Bard City Blues, Nathaniel Webb
2023: Sword & Thistle, S.L. Rowland
2023: Magic & Mead, Rachel Parisi
2023: Ales & Alchemists, Ashli Barnes
2023: The Tale That Twines, Cedar McCloud
2023: Bride of the Elven Innkeeper, Autumn Wolff
2023: The Orc and Her Bride, Lila Gwynn
2023: Heart of the Covenant, S.L. Dove Cooper
2023: Tell Me How It Ends, Quinton Li
2023: Flowerheart, Catherine Bakewell
2023: The Nameless Restaurant, Tao Wong
2023: The Bookshop and the Barbarian, Morgan Stang
2023: A Slice of Mars, Guerric Haché
2023: A Rival Most Vial, R.K. Ashwick
2023: An Uncommon Curse, Devan Barlow
2023: Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries, Heather Fawcett
2023: Drinks and Sinkholes, S. Usher Evans
2023: Dragon Soup, Patty Jansen
2023: In the Lives of Puppets, T.J. Klune
2023: Bookshops & Bonedust, Travis Baldree
2023: Cursed Cocktails, S.L. Rowland
2023: Of Books & Paper Dragons, Vaela Denarr and Micah Iannandrea
2023: The Princess and the Grilled Cheese Sandwich, Deya Muniz
2024: The Baker and the Bard, Fern Haught
2024: The Spellshop, Sarah Beth Durst
2024: Someone You Can Build A Nest In, John Wiswell
2024: Awakenings, Claudie Arseneault
2024: Flooded Secrets, Claudie Arseneault
2024: The Sea Spirit Festival, Claudie Arseneault
2024: House of Frank, Kay Synclaire
2024: Party of Fools, Cedar McCloud
2024: Star Pattern Traveller, Joyce Chng
2024: The Teller of Small Fortunes, Julie Leong
2024: A Pub in the Underworld, Harmon Cooper
2024: A Fellowship of Librarians and Dragons, J. Penner
2025: A Witch’s Guide to Magical Innkeeping, Sangu Mandanna
2025: Brewed With Love, Shelly Page
2025: Stories from the Deep, Claudie Arseneault
Note: I am personally very bad at keeping up with upcoming releases. This is likely the main reason why 2025 looks so sparse.
Bonus: The List of Ghibli
I know some attendees were sad that we didn’t mention Ghibli during the panel given their influence. To that end, I want to share the list of Ghibli titles that I think had an influence and I would like to point out that slice-of-life is both a common part of many episodic anime and a genre within anime and manga as it is. While Ghibli’s influence is no doubt important, it is likely only the one that people think of and a deeper study of the influences anime and manga as a whole had on cosy SFF writers would not be unwelcome. (It is also likely that Ghibli’s influence goes beyond the usual citations of Kiki’s Delivery Service and Spirited Away, given how many of their films are realistic.)
Anyway, the list! This list is entirely unscientific and based on having watched every Ghibli film except Earwig and the Witch and The Boy and the Heron.
Confirmed Influence Because People Cite These Titles Specifically
1989: Kiki’s Delivery Service
2001: Spirited Away
2004: Howl’s Moving Castle
Likely Influence But To My Knowledge Never Explicitly Cited As Such
1988: My Neighbour Totoro
1995: Whisper of the Heart
2002: The Cat Returns
2008: Ponyo on the Cliff
2010: Arietty
2013: The Tale of Princess Kaguya
2014: When Marnie Was Here
Potential Influence But Does Not Seem To Have Enough Overlap With Cosy Core Traits
Note: These could very easily fit into the previous category, but personally I found they drifted too far from what would lead to cosy for these titles specifically to be a likely influence. They’re just also definitely not NOT an influence.
1986: Laputa: Castle in the Sky
1991: Only Yesterday
1992: Porco Rosso
1993: Ocean Waves
1994: Pom Poko
1999: My Neighbours the Yamadas
2011: From Up on Poppy Hill
2013: The Wind Rises
Definitely Not An Influence Because These Are Not Cosy SFF
That said, I could probably argue half of them anyway. Some of these titles are the ones usually cited by people who want to refute that Ghibli films have anything cosy about them.
1988: Grave of the Fireflies
1997: Princess Mononoke
2006: Tales from Earthsea
2020: Earwig and the Witch
2023: The Boy and the Heron
It is likely that The Boy and the Heron will be an influence going forward, but obviously being released in 2023, it will not have had an influence on the start of the genre.
Honorary Mentions
Also known as The List of Things Related To Ghibli That Also Relate To Cosy SFF But Are Not Actually Ghibli. Most, I think, are Topcraft or related to Topcraft while Ghibli staff worked for them, but I may have misread or misunderstood some of the articles about them.
1969: Moomin
1971: Lupin III, Part 1
1977: Lupin III, Part 2
1979: Lupin III: The Castle of Cagliostro
1982: The Last Unicorn
1984: Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind
A fun note
The three films that are very definitely cited as influences on cosy SFF contain two films directly based on books written by women (Kiki’s Delivery Service and Howl’s Moving Castle) and one that was actively created to appeal to young girls (Spirited Away).
Of the remaining films, at least six others are also adapted from books or manga created by women.
I just wanted to share that because I thought it was neat and it seems a lot of people don’t know a number of Ghibli’s films are adaptations.
Bonus: Interesting Statistical Suggestions
Before leaving you to explore whether any of these titles appeal to you, I wanted to offer up a few tidbits suggested by this list. There are, as mentioned ages ago, some caveats here, such as that this is a very incomplete list and will not, in any way, stand up to scientific scrutinity. I invite and encourage people to make better lists with better data and get more cool statistics and tidbits and things.
Secondly, in writing up the list presented here I added a few titles that I knew were missing and did not redo the percentages. (I am bad at maths. It is incredibly warm. I originally tallied everything up by hand. And I have the data to explain the percentages I originally had. It’s just if you map that onto the list now you’ll go “But those numbers don’t add up”.)
Thirdly, there is a decent chance that my particular list skews queerer than the genre actually is because so much of my reading is some flavour of queer. It is, of course, also possible that cosy SFF is predominantly written by queer people. More research is needed, so someone good at statistics, please get on that.
So! The original list had 78 individual authors on it. (The new list has, like, 80, I think.) Of those 78 authors, 10 are men. That is 12.8% of the entire list. 3 of those authors are found in the Proto-cosy section (they’re Tolkien, Beagle and Pratchett, if you’re curious). That means in Inter-cosy and cosy combines, men make up only about 8.9% of the authors publishing in cosy SFF.
And yet when we talk about the origins of cosy SFF, we often do not cite Chambers and/or Addison, both of whom published their quintessential cosy scifi and cosy fantasy novel in 2014, a full six years before The House in the Cerulean Sea, and attribute the origins of the genre to Baldree and Klune. Legends and Lattes especially was a very strong example of a book being published at exactly the right time to just the right buzz and it absolutely should be counted as the originator of, at minimum, the popularity of that subtype of cosy SFF and the genre’s visibility and marketability bump. But it did not start the genre any more than that it sprang solely from a dislike for grimdark with no roots in what authors were reading in their formative years whatsoever.
To reiterate, if you map these numbers onto the list presented here they will shift slightly downwards. None of the authors whose names I added were men. It is not a conclusive number, only an indicative one because the sample size is big enough that we can tentatively say that the vast majority of writers in cosy SFF are women. (I did not write this number down because I only wanted a general suggestion to make the point above, but if I recall around 16% of the authors are nonbinary.)
It is, of course, also possible that I accidentally misgendered someone while compiling these numbers. I based it off people’s biographies as much as I could. I cannot stress enough that I would like someone who is good at and enjoys this type of statistical analysis to expand on this and have far more rigorous data than this initial suggestion.
Speaking of suggestions, keen-eyed readers may have noticed that 2023 is a significantly longer list of titles than any other year. I must again reiterate that the list is incredibly incomplete and it likely exaggerates the 2023 boom visible by a fair margin. What it likely does not exaggerate significantly is how many of the books published in 2023 and 2024 are directly influenced by Legends and Lattes. At least 10 out of the 35 titles in those two years follow at minimum the general title pattern and new shop owner becoming part of a community narrative structure. That is over a quarter (28.5% to be precise) of all the books published in those two years.
More research and better data would no doubt yield an incredibly interesting timeline of cosy SFF publications and trends within this subgenre.
Bonus: Extra Cool Stuff That My Fellow Panelists Shared
I regret that I did not manage to track who gave these recommendations, but I guarantee you that they were recommended by Julia Rios, Nadia El-Fassi, Rachael K. Jones or Sarah Beth Durst at the panel because I was furiously scribbling these titles and authors down so I wouldn’t lose them.
So please know you have them to thank for this last little bit of awesome. I would add who I think recced them, but I don’t want to accidentally get it wrong.
James White
Naomi Kritzer
R.S.A. Garcia
Worlds of Possibility (ed. Julia Rios)
Book of a Thousand Days by Shannon Hale
The Last Gifts of the Universe by Rory August
A Letter to the Luminous Deep by Sylvia Cathrall
The Darkness Outside Us by Eliot Schrefer
Small Miracles by Olivia Atwater
The Ornithologist’s Field Guide to Love by India Holton
Acknowledgements and Credits
I know I just did this, but I want to again give a huge shout-out to my fellow panelists for giving me so many new recommendations to check out. (I’m reasonably sure that Atwater’s Half A Soul was also mentioned and I’m 1100% sure Sarah Beth Durst also mentioned McKinley’s Beauty, but that was already on the list.)
Go give Julia Rios, Nadia El-Fassi, Rachael K. Jones and Sarah Beth Durst all the love and check out their works. It isn’t all cosy SFF, but it is all really good and awesome stuff. They’re all also really smart and have a lot of cool things to say about cosy SFF. (For example: Rachael pointed out that books like Anne of Green Gables are solid influences on cosy SFF and… they really are. There’s a whole genre of early 20th century sentimental novels — all written by women if you’re curious — that you could extremely easily adapt into an SFF setting, usually fantasy, and poof cosy SFF has been created. It is SERIOUSLY cool. (Maybe pick a book other than Anne of Green Gables to adapt, though. Part of that series is still in copyright.)
I also want to give a shout-out to Quartzen, Claudie Arseneault, Cedar McCloud, J. Emery and Matt Hope for being absolutely great sports and engaging in my rambles about cosy SFF (or just SFF in general) repeatedly. Claudie and Cedar in particular also get to deal with my grumbles about discussions and definitions that affect our books and the ability to discuss them in a way that helps them find readers.
Additional thanks go to Faranae for their correction on what exactly happened with The House in the Cerulean Sea and linking me to Klune’s original interview/guest post that sparked people’s outrage as it needed the clarification. The note was updated to reflect that on September 12, 2024.
Beyond them, I’d just like to thank all the critics and fans talking about cosy SFF because I would be floundering so much and have nothing at all to cite without you all being absolutely amazing.
I think that’s everything. I hope this covers everything people were hoping I would when I promised to share the list.
