Column Mark as Read

Coming to Terms With “Cozy” Fiction

Categories and genres are weird things. Sometimes they make perfect sense; sometimes they feel like mental sandpaper.

By Molly Templeton

|

Published on February 15, 2024

Photo by anotherxlife [via Unsplash]

45

Share

Photo by anotherxlife [via Unsplash]

If you say the word cozy to me I will, without any intention whatsoever, immediately picture the Sleepytime bear. Pajamas, a fireplace, a nice little cap—the only thing wrong with the bear is that his room is entirely too bright for a friend that, to all appearances, just wants to doze off by the fire. It’s a sweet image that I have been looking at since I was a tween. I kind of love it. And yet I have for a while now just groaned at the rise of cozy when applied to SFF.

The term, as I understand it, was lifted from the world of mystery, where it tends to mean somewhat gentle, small-town investigations undertaken by people who are probably not cops. Cozy mysteries arose, according to Novel Investigations, partly in response to the more hardboiled style of seedy underworlds and terrible humans.

So what happens when the world itself seems to be a seedy underworld, and too many terrible humans are in power? We start to want cozies—and in genres beyond mystery. We want comfort reads, books in which nothing bad happens, and competence porn. 

Still, one person’s comfort rewatch is another person’s disliked Battlestar Galactica episode in which people punch out their feelings, which is to say, I think comfort is a trickier subject than is sometimes addressed. But cozy is more like a subgenre—a style as much as a feeling. It can be comforting, but isn’t necessarily synonymous with “comfort reads.” Cozy tends toward witches and innkeepers, ordinary folks, unchosen ones, the regular-old crews of regular-old ships. It’s found families and unexpected magical inheritances, and stories about just trying to find one’s place in the world (or galaxy). And it’s been bubbling up for years and years, well before our current pandemic-shaped landscape.

So why did I bristle at the category? Why did I want to not read all the sweeter-sounding books, even though I went looking for exactly this kind of thing when I wrote a column, two years ago, called “What to Read When You Are Worn Out on World-Saving”? Why do I hate it when stories are called “low stakes” because they’re not about saving the world? The stakes for anyone, in their own life, are high. Can’t that reality play out in stories, too? Maybe “stakes” is just not a useful way to look at books.

Categories and genres are weird things. Sometimes they make perfect sense; sometimes they feel like mental sandpaper. I know I’m not the only person who has heard of a new subgenre that ends in -core or -punk and cringed, quietly, on the inside. Cozy has always elicited a similar response in me. It sounded too small. But I think, now, that I was caught up in a weird kind of semantics. I think that maybe it’s about something else altogether, something we just don’t always want to say on account of we might sound kind of mushy and sentimental.

Cozy, in SFF, just means it’s about people. 

There are other awkward words for this. Human-centric, maybe. Things that might once, or by some people, get called “soft SF,” in opposition to “hard SF,” a frustrating delineation that always felt like a ranking of the sciences to me. I haven’t heard these terms much in recent years, and I’m not sad about it. But that doesn’t mean the kinds of stories the awkward terms were trying to describe stopped existing. 

Cozy means we soft little creatures, the ones rattling around in tin cans in a galaxy that could kill us in minutes—we’re the point. Not the world, not the spaceship, not the neat wormholes or the super-cool magic sword or the things that need to be collected. Cozy is why I play The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom and never tackle the final battles, opting instead to run around visiting every village I can find, helping random people with their often very weird problems. Cozy is a whole genre of helping random people with their often very weird problems, you could say. There might be an epic battle against magical forces, but it’s over there. There are still people going about their days, collecting bugs, needing to get a rushroom fix, or trying to make their kid happy.

Yes, books with big epic quests and world-saving are also about people. Books are about people, generally speaking. But every storyteller prioritizes: Are you saying something all-encompassing or something intimate? Do you want to look deep into the hearts of a bunch of weirdos on a spaceship or do you want to trace the rise and fall of a dynasty? Do you want to do both? Can you do both? What do you want your readers to take away from a story?

What do you, as a reader, want to take from a story? Has it changed, at all, in the last five or eight years? Has it changed again in the last year?

An old friend pointed out another thing about cozies, and about comfort, the other week. She said the same thing I just said: that they’re about people. But her point was that they’re also not about machines, or sweet new technologies, or finding new ways to share on social media. They’re not about robots, or so-called AI; they’re about the things that the techbros can’t or don’t or won’t understand, in their quests to optimize and minimize and turn every narrative into a quickly digestible blog post. 

Cozy stories can be a kind of defiance. Their rise is a testament to what a lot of readers need—comfort, yes, but also connection, meaning, purpose, ritual, care, love, possibility. Not just the possibility of a single, lovely, charming story, but a reminder that it’s possible for our world to contain those things, again, in larger measure that it feels like it does right now. 

This doesn’t mean there’s no struggle, no difficulty in the character’s lives. But it does mean recognizing that not every struggle is against a demon king with a sword. What we’re struggling with, down here on the ground, with our muddy boots and our broken hearts—those struggles are just as valid. If the world is constantly questioning your right to exist, to be equal, to be heard, why would you not want a story that lets you live, however briefly, in a world where none of that happens? When you turn the last page, all the struggles are still real, from book bans to bombings. Escapism isn’t a dirty word, and it’s not just about leaving the world behind for a little while. It’s also about coming back better able to face what’s right in front of us.[end-mark]

The post Coming to Terms With “Cozy” Fiction appeared first on Reactor.

If you know what I’m talking about, you probably don’t require much convincing. If you don’t, I’ll break it down for you: What the hell is competence porn?

The term was coined by John Rogers, creator of the TV show Leverage—one of our best examples of this particular type of storytelling. If you’re not familiar with Leverage, the show is about four professional thieves with distinctive skill sets who team up with a mastermind planner to get revenge on rich and powerful assholes who take advantage of people and ruin their lives for profit. (It’s extremely gratifying.)

Rogers wanted a shorthand way to talk about the very specific kind of satisfaction that we feel when watching folks competently handle complex situations using the kinds of specialized skills and expertise that we can all appreciate (even if we can’t personally replicate them), and he came up with “competence porn.” It’s about both the process and the outcome, and the comforting safety net of knowing that whatever challenge arises, the whole thing is in, well, extremely competent hands. Of course there are different permutations and varieties and genres involved, but we can lay out some basic ground rules—a formula for the type of story we’re talking about, for the sake of discussion.

First of all, we need experts: People who are so good at their craft that they can improvise and rise to any challenge, adapting to any obstacles or changes in the plan. We start with our mastermind, the genius who sees how all the pieces fit together, the big picture-seeing visionary with the top-down view, who keeps everyone calm even when the shit hits the fan. This mastermind is watching out for the team and also for us, the audience, providing the safety net we need. Knowing that this genius is around, thinking ten steps ahead, we feel safe enough to commit to enjoying the antics that will play out, as suspenseful as they may be, and we can allow ourselves to invest in and care about the characters, in spite of the massive risks they’re taking.

Next we need a team of specialists. Sure, you can absolute argue for something like the John Wick franchise being competence porn based around a single character (he certainly is competent!), but I tend to prefer stories built around the satisfaction that comes from seeing a team or group of extremely competent people synthesizing their skills and learning to work together. It’s thrilling in the same way as watching a big dance number with complex choreography, or really great improv comedy acts, with everyone hitting their mark at the exact right time—or if they didn’t, their team covered seamlessly, and the audience will never know. Thought that was a fatal blunder? Think again—either the misstep will be revealed to be intentional, or it will be used to the team’s advantage, so that everything turns out even better than expected. There’s just something incredibly satisfying about watching a group of people so perfectly attuned to one another that they can accomplish something none of them could alone.

Now, these team members need to be people who can solve problems within their area of expertise by thinking outside the box and coming up with just the right trick, hack, or workaround. They’ve seen every iteration of how things could go, and they have all that experience to call upon, as well as the ability to improvise and quickly shift to new variations rather than sticking rigidly to one original idea or plan.

Oh and speaking of the original idea? Well, actually, there tend to be dozens of “original” ideas: Plans A through Z have been careful considered and will often come up in comical discussion between characters. In the very first episode of Leverage, computer expert Hardison asks if it’s time to go to plan B, and mastermind Nate tells him, “Technically, that would be plan G.” When Hardison asks how many plans there are, “Is there like, a plan M?” Nate assures him that yes, he has thought that far ahead, but unfortunately, “Hardison dies in plan M.” This kind of banter is de rigueur between team members, particularly when they’re under pressure—this light repartee graces the conversation of recent competent teams like the Crows in Shadow and Bone, or Lockwood and his associates in Lockwood & Co.

When it comes one-upsmanship with one another over who’s the MVP of a particular caper or which variation of the plan is best, it’s generally best to have a good dose of smartassery all around. There may be some examples of competence porn that don’t draw on this type of humor, but for me, there’s nothing drearier than a story that takes the action so seriously that nobody can ever crack a joke—no matter how high the stakes are, there should always be room for a little fun or a quick quip.

So, who do we need on our team? Well, it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. Leverage begins with a mastermind who brings together a hacker/tech expert, a hitter (the muscle), a master thief proficient in everything from cat burglary to safe-cracking to picking pockets, and a brilliant con artist (aka: the grifter). As is often the case in these stories, the team members start out as loners who don’t play well with others, but as they learn to cooperate professionally, they eventually find themselves growing into friends, and even family. The plots are often, but not always, capers (think The Italian Job, or Ocean’s Eleven). Depending on your goals, your ideal team might include a driver, a demolitions expert, a magician, a forger, or a really good librarian. Whatever the situation calls for, they’ll be the best in their field, and probably have a bone to pick with powerful (often corrupt) individuals and institutions.

Because “competence porn” isn’t quite a genre and examples that tick most of the boxes above aren’t marketed as such, it’s always a delight to recognize one of these types of stories—and perhaps it would be best to call it a team dynamic instead of a genre (depends on how strict you are about labels). I’ve seen examples spring up all over the place in newer science fiction and fantasy stories, and I couldn’t be happier. Hyper-competent Murderbot learns to work with others (multiple times) and everything comes together when they learn to trust each other in Martha Wells’ Murderbot series. Galadriel “El” Higgins, from Naomi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy, works her team of wizards hard because it’s the only way to stay alive—but together, they thrive. Even the day-to-day grind of working in local government that we see on Parks and Recreation is incredibly fun to watch because Leslie Knope and her team (regardless of their attitudes toward their jobs—looking at you, Ron Swanson…) are actually all fantastic at what they do.

There’s something so very gratifying about watching people live up to their full potential—getting to see all the hard work they put in pay off, not just in their private satisfaction but as part of a group of similarly talented, driven people who have dedicated themselves to their craft, and a shared goal. It’s not unusual to dream about being outstandingly good at something, and in the end there’s a level of pure enjoyment that comes from seeing someone doing something they love, perform flawlessly, and win the day.

As I mentioned up at the top, I’m always searching for new books, shows, movies (or anything else) that fits into the category of “competence porn,” so I’d love to hear your thoughts, suggestions, and favorite examples of hyper-capable teams of rogues, professionals, and/or unlikely heroes—please share in the comments.

Originally published July 2023

Rachel Ayers lives in Alaska, where she writes cabaret shows, daydreams, and looks at mountains a lot. She has a degree in Library and Information Science which comes in handy at odd hours, and she shares speculative poetry and flash fiction (and cat pictures) at patreon.com/richlayers.

The post The Comfort of “Competence Porn” Stories appeared first on Reactor.

It’s also weirdly comforting, which is another thing I am reluctant to confess. I do not generally find cop shows comforting, and the very idea of a fairy tale cop is gently hilarious to anyone who grew up on fairy tales, in which there are many things, but not usually cops. There are wolves and trolls and princes and witches and all manner of creatures, but at best there might be some sort of hapless authority figure who gets turned into a bear or something. (I’m using a loose definition of fairy tales here.)

But in each episode of Grimm, at least in the early and very episodic seasons, a fairy tale cop (who is also a regular cop) solves a crime generally committed by a person who is also a magical creature, of which Portland has a surprising abundance. (Bird people! Wolf people! Cat people! Spider people!) Sometimes the magical creature-people are misunderstood, sometimes they’re vicious, sometimes they’re just ordinary guys who make clocks and offer the fairy tale cop a beer. There is magic, and mundanity—and there is closure.

Obviously you can get closure, if that’s all you’re after, from any number of procedural shows, some of which rank much higher on the competence-porn index. (I recommend Elementary, as always.) But procedural + fairy tales + an occasionally accurate portrayal of the city in which one lives is a rare mix, and it is one so addictive to me, right now, that I had to ask why. What makes this alchemical blend so compelling? What makes it comforting to me in this moment? What makes any story comforting?

There are common elements to a lot of lists about comfort stories—happy endings, warm fuzzies, sweeping love affairs, lack of strife, familiarity, escapism—and I’ve written before about how those don’t often say “comfort” to me. When I want to escape and be comforted, I’ve sought out a specific kind of reassurance generally found in stories about people who are having a very bad time, a time much worse than anything I’ll ever have to deal with.

But it turns out that at a moment when my own life is full of uncertainty and anxiety, maybe I do want a certain kind of comfort. Not escape to somewhere strange, but a visit to somewhere familiar; not a story with a happy ending, necessarily, but one that offers both closure and change.

What I want is to be reminded that things can be different than they are right now.

The Night Circus, as it turns out, was also perfect for this. (Sometimes you really do save a book until exactly the moment when you need it.) I knew the book was about a circus and a love affair. I did not know it was also built out of other things I adore, among them the scent magic of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, the connection of a chosen and created family, and the transportive delights of immersive theater like Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More. There are countless other little signposts in this book to things that I love, from snow queens to labyrinths to Labyrinth to apple orchards, and, most of all, to the way a shared love can build a community. The circus is the circus; the people who love the circus make their own magical world, too. They are part of it. They help make it what it is.

The comfort comes from remembering that all these things are still out there. All these things will be possible again someday. Gathering with fellow fans. Opening every drawer in the McKittrick Theater or following the actors of Sleep No More up and down the stairs. Seeing a small immersive theater production or meeting other BPAL fans at a con or finding a magical circus—or something like it—in a field outside the city.

A lot of things I would do in a “normal” world aren’t accessible to me right now, from going to crowded opening night movies to going to book events to going to cons. I know I’m not alone in this. And it turns out what comforts me is revisiting those things in a story: a circus, a concert, an epic journey, a chance meeting in a strange bar or a card reading in a coffee shop. What comforts me is watching the characters in Grimm traipse all over Portland—Portland of a decade ago, Portland when I might just wander into these bars and venues and coffee shops (though probably not the warehouses and caves) and catch some mysterious happening. It’s the Portland I used to visit, rather than the one I live in now. It’s still damp and raining. But in that past, more of us can go wherever we want, surround ourselves with strangers, find comfort in community and catharsis in unexpected places.

Comfort looks different to everyone, and feels different, too. Sometimes you want a hug, sometimes you want to slap anyone who gets near you. Sometimes you want epic drama and sometimes you just want a story in which a hyper-capitalist dystopian future (or present) hasn’t even been dreamt up yet. Comfort can, to me, feel too easy, like something to be wary of: Sometimes it’s hard to let go of all the other things we could be paying attention to, all the horrors happening while we’re comforting ourselves in pages.

But you can’t see everything all the time, or be aware of everything all the time, or catch every single bit of heartbreaking news. You have to rest, physically and mentally and emotionally. When you need that rest, maybe ask yourself: What does comfort look like to me? What book (or show, or movie) tells the story I need to hear right now? What promises do I want it to make for me? What do I need to be reminded of?

Books can open doors, but they can also close them, softly and firmly, when you need to leave the world outside for a little while.

Originally published January 2023 as part of the Mark as Read column.

Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.

The post What Makes a Story Comforting? appeared first on Reactor.

The mid-’60s gave rise to a handful of fantasy sitcoms (sometimes called “magi-coms”) which included Bewitched (1964), I Dream of Jeannie (1965), The Addams Family (1964), and The Munsters (1964). These shows all have elements of the fantastical or the (comedically) monstrous playing out in real-world contexts. I think it’s fair to say I am not the only one fascinated by the way mid-’60s American sitcoms chose to highlight domestic magic and supernatural creatures for family at-home viewing—these shows are still fondly remembered (often thanks to syndication) over half a century later, and the fact that they all came out in 1964-5 is so wondrously specific.

Bewitched begins with a typical couple falling in love and getting married before the pilot narrator explains “…except it so happens that this girl is a witch” with Samantha, the witch in question, retrieving a brush with the twitch of a finger and floating it her way. I would describe the show as a whimsical, high feminine comedy about choosing to live a domestic life that centers on partnership. Samantha marries “a normal mortal human being” in defiance of her mother, and it’s clear that she is happy with the life she chose.

It would be another situation entirely if she was forced to live in the home, forbidden to do magic and ordered to do housework by her husband, but that is simply not the case. Samantha has plenty of power, she can do and be whatever she likes, and she enjoys being married. Her husband, Darrin, is pretty easily convinced that having a witch for a wife is just fine—mostly because Samantha is very good at convincing outsiders that she’s a non-magical suburban housewife, and they are in love. I still find it adorable. This ’60s sitcom still strikes me as funny and romantic, with most episodes focused on the way Samantha chooses to use her magic to improve her domestic, partnered life. The fantastical is present, but while other types of fantasy stories focus on world-ending stakes and all manner of magical threats, the fantasy here is more about finding, after a long night of entertaining, you can simply move your hands or twitch your nose and all your kitchen cleaning is done. These characters happily reject the larger world and instead choose to live contained lives with their extended families or found families with an unassuming level of determination.

I Dream of Jeannie is another sitcom where a regular, shmegular guy (albeit an astronaut) has a supernaturally powerful love interest. As you can see from the original opening credits above, Jeannie was trapped inside a bottle on a desert island until Captain Tony Nelson unwittingly released her. The astronaut frees Jeannie from any kind of servile contract, and she chooses to surreptitiously hitch a ride and come home with him (much to his surprise). I should note here that the exoticized costume and Persian she speaks in the first episode have aged very poorly (and were problematic even at the time), instantly calling to mind Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism—this aspect of I Dream of Jeannie has been explored at length elsewhere, and it’s an issue any discussion of the show must address upfront.

Following their initial meeting, Jeannie becomes a chaotic sexy menace as soon as she’s granted her freedom and it’s glorious. First, she sabotages Nelson’s engagement and makes his commanding officers think he’s having girl-in-bottle-related delusions, and then she berates him for not listening to her. The premise of the series is that she essentially forces her way into the life of a regular guy who was already happily engaged, and I admit that, again, the show should not be given a pass just because it was framed as a joke in 1964. However, the themes the show was centered on are relevant to this discussion: Jeannie is an incredibly powerful, 2000-year-old magical being and all she wants is to stay with the person who made her happy and showed her kindness. She uses her infinite, ancient power to craft her perfect domestic space because she can and while hijinks might ensue, they make it work (with the help, and some interference, from their circle of friends and family).

Of course, the fantasy sitcom trend didn’t only focus on romantic relationships, with both The Addams Family and The Munsters centered around two oddball American families giving normal a try (or at least, redefining “normal” on their own terms). Both the Addamses and the Munsters see themselves as perfectly normal and tend to view their non-supernatural family members or more conventional neighbors as being a bit peculiar. They enjoy a cozy, cordial home life with a large extended family. Sure, their houses might be filled with cobwebs and decorated like it’s Halloween all year round, but it’s clear that they all care deeply about one another and have a great time without worrying about outside opinions. Give me a witty, magical found family yesterday, please…

I think it’s important to note that, even though these series were intended to be slightly satirical, all of these shows celebrate the frankly wonderful idea that all kinds of families—even those that with very obvious or hidden differences that might set them apart or make them seem strange to outsiders—can still claim a life full of love, happiness, and acceptance. The shows make fun of the straight-laced American families that surround our protagonists while reaffirming the idea love, friendship, partnership, and family are valuable and desirable. Because shows like Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, The Addams Family and The Munsters center family values and partnership, they can make jokes about stodgier aspects of American life while still embracing the familial stability at the center of it all, in their own unconventional ways.

Historians who study Sixties-era America can tell you far better than I can, but even a relative novice like me has a base-level understanding that a countercultural movement was rising up to challenge many of the traditional values and assumptions prevalent at that time. These sitcoms were appealing to both sides of the American public—the radical and the traditional—by gently presenting magical others who, deep down, wanted to live a normal, happy life. Readers of today’s cozy fantasy fiction will likely recognize that the subgenre has picked up these thematic threads and questioning of “normalcy,” while embracing a more radical insistence on inclusivity and celebrating difference in a way these older shows never could.

 As the outside world has become more hectic and disruptive, the appeal of living happily contained domestic lives seems to become more and more appealing, at least for some of us. Who doesn’t want to spend more time at home with a warm drink of your choice and a hobby to keep you occupied? A personal mantra of mine for 2023 is to “say no and do less”: I don’t want to #girlboss my way through life, thank you very much. I want to do a manageable amount of work, get a reasonable amount of sleep, and talk to friends and family often enough. If I could blink and have my laundry done and dinner ready, I promise you I would. These goals, while they’re not the kind of things that never rate a mention in more epic fare, are the kind of thing that cozy fantasy books understand and tend to revel in.

During the pandemic, there was increased interest in crafting, home improvement, and cooking. It is fair to say that aesthetics like cottagecore, cottagegore, and goblincore, which all embrace the relaxing nature of homemaking, also experienced a bit of a boom. These trends support a reclaiming of home space activities as restorative, and an extension of important self-care that anyone can engage with and enjoy. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that I’ve noticed similar kinds of narrative focus on magic as a tool for homemaking or family in the recent boom in cozy fantasy books.

Although “cozy fantasy” as a category wasn’t in widespread use before 2022, the subgenre has seen an undeniable uptick in interest among fantasy readers. Bookish tiktokers like @megstearoom and @books.with.lee have done quite a lot to help define and promote the cozy fantasy genre (and the tag has more than 18 million views). Your exact definition of what constitutes cozy fantasy might differ from another reader’s, but we can generally agree that books that earn the label tend to spark warm, “cozy” feelings with relatively low stakes, spinning feel-good stories that center community building or maintenance (so family, found family, and/or friendship). Just a few recent standouts include Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne, Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree, Witchful Thinking by Celestine Martin, and The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna, which all explore the fantastical in narratives that focus on domesticity.

Buy the Book

Bookshops and Bonedust

Buy Book

Bookshops and Bonedust

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

A wave of interest was sparked by Baldree’s independently published Legends & Lattes (subtitled “A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes”) following the book’s release in February 2022. The sapphic cozy fantasy novel was lauded for creating a high fantasy world where a former mercenary decides to hang up her weapons and follow her dream of opening her own coffee shop. The gentle but compelling narrative hook drew readers in, exploring how one creates a small business after living a life as an adventurer and the surprising relationships that can be forged along the way. Although the sitcoms discussed above mainly focused on the at-home applications of the fantastical, Baldree’s novel’s small business also doubles as a home, fostering a cozy found-family environment.

Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne is another wonderful example of a sapphic cozy fantasy that features a home business. In this case, it’s a bookshop that serves tea, set up by a couple instead of an individual, but the vibes are similar to Legends & Lattes. The book imagines what it would be like to run away with the person you love: “Run away with me, the mage had said, her eyes alight. You like tea. I like books. Let’s open a shop somewhere remote and forget the world exists.” It’s wondrously romantic to imagine one of the Queen’s guards, fed up with her bloody job, joining forces with the most powerful mage in existence—both of them giving it all up to live a quiet, comfortable life together. Much like the protagonists of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, the two central characters are powerful, potentially dangerous people who want nothing more than to cultivate a home and be in love.

I would tend to trace this shift from magic in the home to magic in the home business to the frankly disappointing state of affairs in corporate America, paired with the appeal of the Hallmark-esque dream of moving to a small town and opening your very own successful small business. Think about it: First, in this scenario, you are only paying to live and work at one location that you own outright—in a world with sky-high housing prices, the idea that you can wholly own your home business is a bit of a fantasy in and of itself. Second, you love and are loved by everyone you work and live with—just as in our ’60s sitcoms, you have chosen your family/ found family/ friends wisely, and it has paid off. Third, some of the work required, like getting your stock in on time and or the labor needed to get your business ready to open, can be made easier and less time-consuming by the use of your fantastical strength and/or magic. Taken together, you have the ideal components for a cozy high fantasy world.

That is not to say the low fantasy worlds (basically our world, but with a bit more magic) seen in ’60s sitcoms are a thing of the past: Witchful Thinking by Celestine Martin and The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna both have that covered. Both books are specifically cozy fantasy romance novels about witches just trying to do their best as magic infiltrates the worlds around them. They channel the same vibes as The Addams Family and The Munsters, featuring supernatural found families supporting each other and living their own version of “normal” life.

When I say Sangu Mandanna’s The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches is one of the cutest things I’ve ever read I am not exaggerating (and trust me when I say I’ve read a lot of very cute fiction). Mika Moon, orphaned and adopted at a young age, grew up mostly alone with limited access to friends and family because the more witches there are in one place, the more dangerous it is for the witches in question. Now she is an influencer pretending to be a witch online (that is, she is pretending to be a fake witch who claims to do magic—she doesn’t think anyone watching would believe her spells are real). Luckily, when a group of non-magical people trying to raise three adopted witches come across her videos, they reach out to her and ask if she can tutor their kids in witchcraft. This is a gentle, lovely story that prioritizes child safety, community, and happiness above all else, while challenging the adult characters to unpack their own childhood traumas in order to be the best mentors and parents they can be to these adopted children.

Mandanna’s novel reinforces the idea that all children—even the ones who might feel that they are different or strange, powerful or powerless—deserve to have adults in their lives who want you to feel safe and loved. You can say what you’d like about the Addams family’s casually murderous or macabre sense of humor, but the Addams parents unconditionally love and encourage Wednesday and Pugsley. It truly is adorable and praiseworthy and I for one am happy to see these offbeat-but-nurturing familial relationships getting more attention in the cozy fantasy world once more.

Martin’s Witchful Thinking imagines a small coastal town in New Jersey where small bits of magic and magical creatures are everywhere. The fantasy romance centers on Lucinda, a schoolteacher and witch who desperately wants her life to be a bit more exciting and fulfilling than it is. Lucy finds herself longing to reach a few new milestones, including finding a new house and a new soul mate. And then suddenly, her high school friend/merman/photographer Alex, who has been busily traveling the world, comes back home to celebrate his birthday. This novel is all about learning how to grow roots in a place full of people you love and how to experience adventure even when you don’t travel too far. In a way, it reimagines a kind of neighborhood life similar to the world of The Munsters, where the supernatural exists contentedly beside the everyday.

Cozy fantasy books make room for magic homemaking in regular, everyday life in a way not many works of fiction tend to do. Cozy, much like horror or comedy, is an emotional genre. The books are written to evoke warmth and comfort, and while the process can be subjective and responses might from person to person and over time, certain key elements tend to remain the same. We can see some of the DNA of the ’60s fantasy sitcom mirrored in this new wave of cozy fantasy because we still respond to those elements—the comforts of home, family, friendship, and security, with just enough magic to keep things interesting and add a bit of comforting escapism into the mix.

There is a kind of reclamation happening when it comes to domesticity, and it’s a cyclical pattern, extending far beyond the connection with the kooky sitcoms of the 1960s to stretches of literary and artistic fascination with the homey, the small, and the pastoral throughout history. Sometimes we just want to wax romantic about nature and farms and cozy small lives where nothing horrible happens and think about the magical or mystical side of everyday life, and these sorts of stories fulfill that yearning in the best possible way.

Fantasy sitcoms showed us that magic can be fun and funny and comfortingly domestic, while making TV a little stranger and more interesting. They told us that being weird could be just as valid as being conventional, at the end of the day, and let us dream of doing magic instead of laundry. Clearly, cozy fantasy books are responding to the same kinds of desires, and this new wave of authors are ready, willing, and able to skillfully set these familiar beats to a new tune for an audience in need of whimsical comfort.

Originally published May 2023.

R. Nassor is a senior contributing writer at Book Riot who covers Fantasy, Science Fiction, Romance, and YA books. She graduated with a double major in English and Psychology and a Dance minor from The George Washington University and is completing an M.A. in the English program at Georgetown University where she looks at medievalism in feminine-focused fantasy. She’s also been known to throw a mug or two in her quest to write about myth, pop culture, and genre at large.

The post Supernatural Sitcoms and the Rise of Cozy Fantasy appeared first on Reactor.

To be fair, though, couldn’t every chapter be called “The Problem of Setheris”? 

This week’s section saw Maia trying (and largely failing) to mourn his father, reawakening the Court of the Elflands, visiting the Master of Royal Signets, and meeting a charming young opera singer, Min Nedaö Vechin. Plus poor Csevet is still trying to cajole his new Emperor into courting a potential Empress, but poor Maia is still a very awkward 18-year-old boy. 

Heavy Is The Head Etc.

A Rare Rejection of Pettiness

Thoughts for the Victims

The subtle hints of Maia’s father’s cruelty continue!

A Night at the Opera

Maia has never seen an opera before, so it’s maybe a little bit mean to sit him in the front row for one of the greatest singers in his land’s history—and then to expect him to talk to her?

Signets!

The trip to the Signet warehouse if one of most enchanting sections of the book. The Signet Master, Dachensol Habrobar, is an ancient, wizened elf who has somehow lived for centuries. He shows Maia an overwhelming collection of royal signets, and Maia, being Maia, is flustered at the thought of designing his own. But Habrobar intuits the young Emperor’s mindset, and presents him with his mother’s signet, an attempt at a union between cats featured in the Drazhada family crest, and her own family’s, the serpent. Chenelo was never allowed to use her design (unsurprisingly, Maia’s father hated it) but that means that Maia can adopt it as his own. After being alone for a decade, his new life as Emperor has given him another connection with her.

When we asked about your signet choice, some people’s thought turned to the sea:

Some people thought of amphibians:

Some preferred birds:

And some readers were reminded of Harry Potter:

Tell us all about your signets in the comments!

And join us next Wednesday at 2pm EST when #TorDotReads will discuss Chapters 17-22: “Dinner with the Goblin Ambassador”, Varenechibel’s Legacies”, Thara Celehar’s Grief”, “The Proposal of the Clocksmiths of Zhaö”, “Mer Celehar Goes North”, and “The Bridge over the Upazhera”—Maia’s finally meeting his grandfather, The Great Avar of the Goblins! 

The post Signet Party! Highlights From #TorDotRead’s Third Discussion of The Goblin Emperor! appeared first on Reactor.

There was also, predictably, much general squeeing about our favorite Goblin. We’ve rounded up a few highlights below!

Let’s start with a reader request:

Agreed on all counts!

Buy the Book

The Goblin Emperor

Buy Book

The Goblin Emperor

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

Family Reunion

Maia meets his family as they swear undying fealty to him, and it’s very awkward! His family is also huge because his father married five times, so we put together a handy guide for most of them:

(Unfortunately Nemriän’s husband, Marquess Imel, didn’t quite fit into the character count, but it’s not much of a spoiler to say the Marquess (while possibly a fine and noble Elf) is a non-entity in this book.) Maia’s lack of family connection seemed to make more an impact on our readers this week than the coronation itself—although that makes sense, since this is literally the first time he’s meeting most of his relatives.

And as with all things Maia, the family meeting is weighted with loneliness and lost opportunities:

Fun with Genre!

On rereading the book, one genre element leapt out in a way that never seemed obvious before:

Buy the Book

The Angel of the Crows

Buy Book

The Angel of the Crows

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

Petty Empresses

And speaking of Empresses, this week Csoru Zhasanai got some love:

And Finally We Present Emperor, And We Cannot Stress The Enough, Cinnamon Roll:

Join us on Twitter on Wednesday at 2:00 PM, EDT (#TorDotReads!), when we’ll discuss Chapters 11-16, “The Funeral and the Wake,” “The Princess and the Witness,” “Bargaining,” “Min Nedaö Vechin,” “The Problem of Setheris,” and “News from Barizhan.” We can’t wait to talk about Maia some more—and we can’t wait for you to meet Nedaö Vechin!

The post “I wish for fanart.” Highlights From #TorDotRead’s Second Discussion of The Goblin Emperor! appeared first on Reactor.

If you’re struggling with what to listen to, here’s a short list to get you started: a mix of fiction and nonfiction podcasts, some unmistakably SFF and others a degree separated from the genre yet still connected by your favorite writers and poets lending their voices as well as their words. One was created for this particular moment, while others take on new meaning in our current context. Plug in, close your eyes, and let these SFF creators speak, read, and/or sing to you. We’re in this together.

Our Plague Year

I led with the one podcast that’s specifically about this point in time so that if that’s not your jam, you can scroll right past. But if anyone were to guide us through our period of self-isolation, wouldn’t you want it to be the folks behind Welcome to Night Vale?

Joseph Fink carves out a space with Our Plague Year, a new podcast that he admits is a bit of an experiment. But even if he doesn’t yet know its complete form, its intent is clear: “It’s a scary time right now, for so many reasons, but it doesn’t have to be scary alone,” he says in the first episode. “This is the show where we live this terrifying year together, and together get to the other side.” Joining him are authors like Nisi Shawl and Cory Doctorow, reading essays as candid and vulnerable as Fink’s poetic, emotional narration. There are far worse ways to count the number of weeks we’ll spend like this, and this way we’ll all be counting together.

The Slowdown

“OK, so what are you going to do next time you get upset? I ask my son. ‘I’m going to use my words.’ And what else can you do? ‘I can breathe.’”

Tracy K. Smith, our favorite SFF poet, hosts a weekly podcast in which she reads poems from Walt Whitman to Wang Xiaoni, framing each piece with her own brief commentary. These bite-sized episodes (all less than 6 minutes) are a gift from a writer whose words already convey us into the stratosphere, whose voice helps recenter us back on terra firma.

The Amelia Project

What’s more escapist than faking one’s own death? The Amelia Project is a secret agency that definitely doesn’t exist, and certainly doesn’t devote its James Bond-level resources to helping desperate callers disappear from their lives. While the Interviewer, with his penchant for cocoa and non-sequiturs, seems like he’s come straight from a Monty Python sketch, he nonetheless gets to the heart of why cult leaders, influencers, sentient AIs, and even Santa would want to start over fresh.

The soothingly episodic first season is like a comforting mug of cocoa to curl your hands around over and over… then things get a little spicy. Like if you threw some cinnamon or even pepper into that hot chocolate, because after a few weeks you want to change things up. The series begins to subvert and invert its own formula, while still providing surprising insights into the human condition.

LeVar Burton Reads

“The one thing that we can be certain of in these very uncertain times is that change is indeed upon us,” Burton says in the opening to his latest episode, and like some Pavlovian response you will already feel just a little bit better. “Not just what we do, but how we do it. So my message is, be kind. To yourselves, and to each other.” One surefire bit of self-care is listening to Burton continue to read SFF stories; this season includes works by N.K. Jemisin, Ken Liu, Genevieve Valentine, Max Gladstone, and more. “The only thing these stories have in common,” he says, “is I love them, and I hope you do too.”

The Strange Case of Starship Iris

Shouting out a personal favorite because the crew of the Rumor are basically in lockdown with one another for weeks at a time and manage to thrive despite the isolation of space. (Bringing on a surprise new crew member and fleeing an intergalactic conspiracy probably help keep things exciting.) In particular, the audio drama’s use of music, from Irish folk songs like “Whiskey in the Jar” to original pieces written by creator Jessica Best, really cements the space pirate feel. Having the crew sing to one another, in times of despair and hope, provides a small manner of comfort.

MonkeyTales

Like its serialized audio drama Moonbase Theta, Out, this new anthology series from Monkeyman Productions is unabashedly hopepunk. But instead of one narrative doled out in lunar communications, the MonkeyTales are standalone SFF/speculative shorts featuring one or two voices: nonbinary lovers from parallel universes whispering sweet nothings over the phone; a sidewalk Superman struggling to connect with his alter ego; and more stories of impossible connection. Hopefully they’ll make you feel less alone.

What are your podcast comfort listens?

Natalie Zutter used to save podcasts for doing dishes, but now each day she’ll have a little Slowdown, as a treat. Share your podcast recs with her here and on Twitter!

The post 6 Comfort-Listen Podcasts to Transport You Beyond Your Living Room appeared first on Reactor.

The Goblin Emperor—Katherine Addison

Katherine Addison’s delightful novel is about many things, but at its (lovable) heart it’s a story about realizing that sometimes your quirks are your greatest strengths. Maia, half-elven, half-goblin, becomes Emperor when his father and three elder brothers are assassinated. He has to learn how to rule a distrustful kingdom while he investigates the murder, navigates the byzantine politics of his (primarily Elven) court, and, hardest of all, stays true to himself. The story doesn’t shy away from the horrors of executions or the ugliness of prejudice, but it also focuses on the power of compassion to bridge social differences and effect change.

Buy the Book

The Goblin Emperor

Buy Book

The Goblin Emperor

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

The Face in the Frost—John Bellairs

A wizard named Prospero (not that one) teams up with his old friend, the adventurer Roger Bacon (OK, maybe that one), to confront an evil power attacking their kingdom. They know going into the fight that they’re outmatched, but what else can they do? Bellairs’ story, like all of his work, juggles truly effective horror with quirky humor. The book gives weight to both elements, owning up to the terror that would come with a fight against evil, but also never wallowing in that terror to the point of overwhelming the humanity of the book.

Buy the Book

The Face in the Frost

Buy Book

The Face in the Frost

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• IndieBound
• Target

The House in the Cerulean Sea—TJ Klune

Linus Baker is proud to be an agent of the Department in Charge of Magical Youth. He follows the rules. He believes in bureaucracy. If there is book to be by, he is by it. And when a directive comes down from Extremely Upper Management that he is to go and investigate the Marsyas Island Orphanage—a home to six of the most dangerous magical children on record—he sets off determined to do his best, even if it’s hard.

Does “his best” mean condemning the children? Can he report them back to DICOMY when they include a teen boy who transforms into a small, shivery dog when he’s startled? What about the indistinct blob of uncertain parentage, whose life’s dream is to become a bellhop? What about the wyvern??? And what about Arthur Parnassus, the children’s devoted (and, if Linus is being honest, rather charming) guardian? Is there any way for Linus to reconcile the joys of middle management with the stirrings of his heart?

Buy the Book

The House in the Cerulean Sea

Buy Book

The House in the Cerulean Sea

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

The Night Circus—Erin Morgenstern

The circus arrives without warning. And with it, too, comes the most beautiful magic. Morgenstern’s modern classic story begins with the white and black striped tents of Le Cirque de Rêves, a traveling show that opens only at night and travels all throughout the world bringing experiences and illusions to its patrons. Except they aren’t really illusions — the circus is powered by magicians, who have been unknowingly locked in a deadly competition since they were children.

What unfolds is a tremendous love story with lives at stake. Magicians Celia Bowen and Marco Alisdair hold the circus’ well-being in their hands like a tiny bird, each manipulating and creating magic, each trying to out-do each other. Here’s the thing: it does get dark. Being magically bound in a competition that only ends with a death is not a great situation to be in for two young lovers. But what The Night Circus provides is the hope that past mistakes can be mended, that the old rules can be broken to make way for a better system, and that magic and love can power an entire circus for centuries and centuries on.

Buy the Book

The Night Circus

Buy Book

The Night Circus

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

The Copper Promise—Jen Williams

Williams’ novel combines some of the tropes of grimdark, e.g. mercenaries, torture, and tragic backstories, with some of the higher ideals of sword and sorcery. Best of all, it treats what could have been a slog through brutal battles as a lighthearted adventure. This bright tone, combined with a biting sense of humor, make the book fun as well as epic. The fallen knight is more complicated than we think, the swordswoman-for-hire is as handy with snark as she is with a sword, and… what’s this? The main character’s arc is one of rediscovering his humanity after a horrible trauma, rather than a slow degradation into despair? Is it possible?

Buy the Book

The Copper Promise

Buy Book

The Copper Promise

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

Riftwar Series—Raymond E. Feist

Several denizens of Twitter suggested Feist’s work as an antidote to grit! The central conceit of the Riftwar books are the rifts themselves—they can join worlds, but those who travel through them can seek communication and exploration, or war and conquest, and the series explores many permutations of these choices. Sure, it has has war right there in the name, but it also has characters who are willing to sacrifice themselves for the greater good, who take chances on trusting each other (and have that trust rewarded), rulers who choose mercy over murder, and candidates for the throne who abdicate so that better people can lead. We’re a long way from Westeros when we’re reading Feist.

Buy the Book

Magician: Apprentice

Buy Book

Magician: Apprentice

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

Shannara Series—Terry Brooks

These are more high fantasy style, involving hero quests in addition to mundane acts of heroism. As he says in his 2003 book Sometimes the Magic Works, his “protagonists are cut from the same bolt of cloth as Bilbo and Frodo Baggins. It was Tolkien’s genius to reinvent the traditional epic fantasy by making the central character neither God nor hero, but a simple man in search of a way to do the right thing….I was impressed enough by how it had changed the face of epic fantasy that I never gave a second thought to not using it as the cornerstone of my own writing.”

Buy the Book

The Sword of Shannara

Buy Book

The Sword of Shannara

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

Chrestomanci Series—Diana Wynne Jones

All of Diana Wynne Jones’ books could be on this list, but we’ll stick with the Chrestomanci Series, and particularly, The Lives of Christopher Chant. People die, parents split up, and villainous uncles trick nephews into nefarious schemes, but Wynne Jones still gives us characters to root for and dashes of hope. Christopher Chant himself is good-hearted (occasionally bitchy, but good-hearted), going out of his way to help a young goddess, and forging a friendship with the awesomely-named Throgmorten the Cat.

Buy the Book

The Lives of Christopher Chant

Buy Book

The Lives of Christopher Chant

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars—Steven Brust

Brust’s novel is about a painter creating oil paintings and putting an art show together. It’s also a retelling of the Hungarian tale of Taltos, who uses expert-level trickster skills to con the sun, moon, and stars away from the monsters who own them. The stories parallel each other in fascinating ways, but much of the weight is given to the modern story of a person who is part of both an artistic community and a supportive relationship. This allows the book to work as an inspiring tale of the value of art, rather than just another quirky fairytale mashup.

Buy the Book

The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars

Buy Book

The Sun, the Moon, and the Stars

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• IndieBound
• Target

Range of Ghosts—Elizabeth Bear

Range of Ghosts, the first book in Bear’s Eternal Sky trilogy, gives us an epic fantasy world influenced by Central Asian culture. Temur, a grandson of the Great Khagan, and Samarkar, the former princess of the Rasa dynasty who abdicated her royalty to become a wizard, must stand together against the hidden cult that has caused civil war throughout the empires of the Celadon Highway. While this is a complex book, with layers of religious tradition and political intrigue, Bear also focuses on the characters at the story’s center, and, as Liz Bourke said in her review, “the significance of a single life, united with other single lives,” and “moments of kindness and stillness amidst the horror of war,” creating an epic with a beating, human heart.

Buy the Book

Range of Ghosts

Buy Book

Range of Ghosts

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

The Dragon’s Path—Daniel Abraham

The Dragon’s Path is epic fantasy that picks up after the dragons have gone, leaving behind thirteen races who were bred to serve them. Now those races squabble and war with each other as they try to map an economy and political destiny. While there is a lot of page-time spent on pseudo-Renaissance banking systems, Abraham also takes the time to give us several point-of-view characters that enrich the story with humanity. He chooses to focus on a higher-class couple who would probably be the villains in most books, but here are made worthy of empathy.

Buy the Book

The Dragon’s Path

Buy Book

The Dragon’s Path

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

Miranda in Milan—Katharine Duckett

With Miranda in Milan, Katharine Duckett gives us a sequel to Shakespeare’s Tempest that is both more optimistic, and, somehow, even more queer than the Bard’s original. Miranda is doing her best to create a new life for herself in Milan, but the locals treat her like a monster, the family castles seems more a prison than a home, and her father—of course!—has secreted himself away in the depths of the castle to work his forbidden magic. He expects Miranda to dance, a puppet on his string. And at first she focuses on the future, marrying Prince Ferdinand before his family, and ruling Naples beside him. She must learn the ways of Italy and prepare to be Queen.

But the more time she spends in Milan the more of her father’s lies she uncovers. And the longer she lives in Milan, the more often she finds herself gazing at Dorothea, a Moroccan magician who is her only friend and ally. But is there magic enough in this brave new world to allow two women to spurn society and declare their love?

Buy the Book

Miranda in Milan

Buy Book

Miranda in Milan

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

Little, Big—John Crowley

Little, Big unfolds over nearly a century, as the Drinkwater clan builds an intricate relationship with the world of faerie. We meet the human family, hear rumors of magical beings, visit a dystopian City, and spend some time with a Grandfather Trout who might be a cursed prince. Crowley isn’t afraid to slow down and ponder heady subjects like free will and fate, or to tell his story through intricate detail and gorgeous language, which led to a novel that Ursula le Guin said, “…all by itself calls for a redefinition of fantasy,” and Thomas Disch called “the best fantasy novel ever. Period.”

Buy the Book

Little, Big

Buy Book

Little, Big

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

Lyonesse Trilogy—Jack Vance

This trilogy melds Arthurian stories, chivalric tropes, and Celtic mythology into a story of a despotic king, his daughter, and her lover. Since Vance took elements from several different medieval periods and used those elements to bring life to his own magical lands, he can play around with references to stories and echoes of themes, such as the fall of Atlantis, without being tied to an expected narrative. While the story itself is not exactly lighthearted, it does feature plenty of humor, fun, and romance. He also uses the Atlantean references to tinge the whole story with melancholy—how long can Lyonesse last? Does the possibility of the Kingdom’s end overshadow the joy that can be had in the moment?

Buy the Book

Suldrun's Garden

Buy Book

Suldrun's Garden

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• IndieBound
• Target

Silver in the Wood—Emily Tesh

I will never stop singing the praises of this book, because it is a very specific dream of mine: enchanted forest? Check. Sassy dryad friend? Check. Extremely tall and hot man who lives as steward of said enchanted forest? HELLA CHECK. Who doesn’t want to live in that world for a while? And with the sequel, Drowned Country, coming in June, you’ll have even more of this world to get lost in.

At the heart of Emily Tesh’s novella is a love story: folklorist Henry Silver comes to Greenhollow forest chasing a myth; the myth of a man who haunts and keeps the Wood. He finds Tobias Finch (the aforementioned “tall and hot”), and a romance blossoms. As happens to all of us, sins of the past arise to screw it all up, but Tesh manages to weave a tale that is stunning to read. It’s a book that feels like radiant sunlight piercing through a dense ceiling of tree branches, and will leave you aching for a forest of your own. And maybe a hot lover to spend eternity with too.

Buy the Book

Silver in the Wood

Buy Book

Silver in the Wood

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

The Innkeeper’s Song—Peter S. Beagle

We talk about The Last Unicorn a lot on this site, because The Last Unicorn is fucking awesome. But! Peter S. Beagle did so much more! So when a Twitterer mentioned Beagle’s work, I decided to highlight The Innkeeper’s Song. Beagle jumps across multiple points of view to weave several different quests together. Tikat pursues his childhood love, whom he saw resurrected by magicians. Lal and Nyateneri, the magicians, are racing to save their old mentor from his powerful but evil student. Lukassa, the resurrected girl, has her own path to pursue. And the Innkeeper himself must take them all in, even though he knows they bring trouble with them. Through nested quests and elegant language, Beagle tries to get to the heart of death, love, and duty.

Buy the Book

The Innkeeper's Song

Buy Book

The Innkeeper's Song

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• IndieBound
• Target

The Curse of Chalion Series—Lois McMaster Bujold

This series is a melding of fantasy and theology informed by elements of medieval Spanish history and mysticism, especially the reign of Ferdinand and Isabella in the late 15^th Century. The Curse of Chalion follows Lupe dy Cazaril, who returns home after war and enslavement to try to live a quiet life, but instead finds himself working to lift the curse that lays on the royal family that has acted as his patron. A little bit epic, a little bit slice of (imaginary, alternate universe) life, the series takes questions of morality and duty seriously, without succumbing to endless bouts of violence or despair.

Buy the Book

The Curse of Chalion

Buy Book

The Curse of Chalion

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

So, this is our list, but we’re sure there are more upbeat fantasies out there—give us your suggestions! Do you want some light to cut through the darkness, or are do you prefer your fantasy as gritty as possible?

An earlier version of this post published in April 2014.

The post 17 Optimistic Fantasies to Brighten Your Reading Life appeared first on Reactor.

The stories I have been returning to for comfort over the past few years are Martha Wells’ Books of the Raksura. The series begins with The Clouds Roads and contains five novels, two collections, and a bunch of shorts posted on Wells’ Patreon. Until recently, I had never given much thought to why these books are my go-to comfort read, mostly because they feel, on one level, like the very definition of escapist literature. They are about a cast of non-human shapeshifting winged predators in a world that looks nothing like our world, offers none of the usual cultural analogues, and builds character relationships within unique social structures. The stories are also fun, adventurous, and wildly imaginative. Every reread is like taking a vacation into the most gloriously impossible locations, where the locals are diverse and interesting, the geography includes floating islands and trees that house entire cities, and a lot of things want to eat you…all very good ways to escape the real world for a while!

But lately I’ve been thinking there’s more to it than that. I certainly don’t believe that there’s anything at all wrong with seeking pure escapism in your reading and other media. (Example: When the world gets especially rough, I sometimes pass an evening helping a friend search for Korok seeds in Breath of the Wild, an activity which requires no effort and has absolutely no stakes.) But there is value in considering why certain stories comfort us during times of fear and uncertainty. We are getting something from those stories, whatever form they take, and I want to think about what that something might be and why it is so important.

Buy the Book

The Cloud Roads

Buy Book

The Cloud Roads

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

When we first meet Moon, the main character of the Raksura series, he is lying to everybody he knows. He’s lying to the villagers he lives and works alongside. He’s lying to the women who share his home and his bed. And he’s lying to himself. He’s lying to himself about what he desires, how he wants to live, what he would like his future to look like, what makes for a satisfying and contented life. He’s lying about how desperately lonely he is. He’s been lying to himself for so long he doesn’t even recognize it anymore. He calls it coping. He calls it acceptance.

As a story opener, this is catnip to me. It was when I first read The Cloud Roads, and it remains so now that I’ve read the entire series multiple times. It takes only a few pages before I’m thinking, “Well, okay, I’m in the mind of a magical scaly flying lad who talks about his wings and disemboweling claws the same way we talk about our legs and hands. Awesome. Let’s go with it.”

It is a testament to Wells’ clarity of writing and skill with world-building that none of this is confusing or alienating, but it also works because of the shape of the story itself. At the beginning of the series, not only do we have no idea what Moon is, but he has no idea himself. The only family he ever knew was killed when he was very young, and he’s never met anybody like himself in thirty-some years of wandering his big, strange world. The one and only time he has tried to find people like him taught him that there are other kinds of scaly shapeshifting winged predators out there, and they’re awful, and everybody will try to murder him if they discover he’s similar to that.

That’s where the lying to everybody he knows comes into it. He lies to protect himself in the most fundamental sense: he doesn’t want everybody he meets to try to kill him.

But that’s also where the lying to himself comes in. Moon has given up on being able to trust anybody. Ever. He thinks of it as a wholly practical approach to life. They’ll hate him if they find out what he is, so they can’t find out. It’s that simple. He tells himself he’s fine with that. (Narrator: He is not fine with that.)

Then two things happen in quick succession that upend the entire lonely, careful, secretive life Moon has been living.

First: His worst fear comes true. The people he’s living find out he’s not like them, and they try to kill him. He’s not particularly surprised; this is what he’s spent his entire life waiting for every time he’s tried to make a home.

Second: Somebody saves him. Somebody who knows what exactly what he is. A stranger who is the same kind of scaly winged magical shapeshifting predator as Moon. His name is Stone, he calls what they are “Raksura” and, hey, he wants Moon to come with him to meet a whole society of others like them.

This is all set up in the first two chapters—I’m not spoiling you. (Go read the series so you stop worrying about spoilers, and because it’s so good! But I’m not spoiling you.) What I’m describing is the premise, the story that happens before the story. It’s not an info-dump; we certainly don’t understand everything from the start. Just go with it. It’s remarkably easy to be carried along for the ride as the cast and world grow in delightful and unexpected ways. Wells is frequently and rightfully praised for her breathtaking worldbuilding, but I’m going to save a discussion of the world for another essay. There is quite a lot of it, and I want to give it its due.

For now, I just want to explore the richly emotional story woven into that weird and wonderful world. I mean, look, I’m not going to lie. I just want to talk about Moon and his feelings. Because the more I think about it, the more convinced I am that the imaginative, unabashed alienness of the Raksura characters and world is what makes it possible for the emotional arc of the story to wriggle its way under the skin so easily. My theory is that the very fact that they are nothing like me is why they provide so much lasting comfort.

Let me back up a little to provide some context…

Lonely heroes in search of connection and understanding are all over all literature, especially science fiction and fantasy, and there’s a good reason for that. There are quite a lot of good reasons, in fact, including the reality that it’s just plain fun to stick a loner into a variety of situations that require them to connect with, trust, and maybe even kinda sorta like other people. It works in everything from Artemis Fowl to Mad Max: Fury Road. We want the ragtag group of outcasts to find each other. We want the shy wallflower to make friends. We want the tragic warrior to reveal a bit of themselves to an unlikely ally. We want the samurai space bounty hunter to adopt the tiny baby alien.

These kinds of stories get their hooks into us because the act of engaging with a story is, in its own way, a choice to seek connection. Sometimes what we want is a gentle and amusing diversion to take our minds off the real world for a while. Sometimes we want something deeper and lasting, an experience that will continue to shape our perspective for years to come. Most of the time we don’t know what we want and don’t even think of it in terms of wanting anything beyond a good story to enjoy. And that’s fine! The most powerful stories are often the ones that give us things we don’t even know we’re looking for.

It is also true, however, that many of these stories about finding family, home, and connection tend to fall into well-worn story paths.

The tiresome trope about the tough man being softened by the love of a good woman may inspire a lot more eye-rolling these days, but it’s still extremely common in all forms of media. More and more stories may be turning away from adherence to traditional family structure as the ultimate goal and toward more variable found families, but quite a lot of them still somehow end up with a male head-of-family as their leader. More stories, especially in SFF, are now acknowledging non-heteronormative romantic relationships, but even those diverse stories still frequently accept it as given that the natural end goal is for everybody to be paired up two-by-two in exclusive, sexual relationships. There are a depressingly large number of stories out there, in every genre and medium and age group, in which the only legitimate roles for female characters are still primarily caregivers and nurturers.

Each of these well-worn story paths rely on a lot of assumptions about the structure of a family, about the nature of friendship and romance, about gender roles within families and societies, about who is expected to provide nurturing and who deserves to receive it, about what it means to find a family, about how you’re supposed to change when you do.

It is very easy to become inured to such patterns in literature and other media when they also make up the fabric of the world we live in. It is very easy to internalize those patterns without question. Sometimes we don’t even know we’re so comfortable with them until we read something that takes everything we’ve been assuming about how people connect to each other and transforms it into something that feels both natural and new.

So let’s get back to the scaly winged shapeshifter predator people and their feelings.

One of the reasons I revisit the Raksura series over and over again is that the unusual nature of the characters and their world allows freedom from many common assumptions and tropes about how people connect to one another. For example, the Raksura, as a culture, are agrarian, communal hunters with no concept of commerce or currency and divisions of labor that do not map onto any kind of class division; the people who tend the crops are as important as the people who raise the children, and both are as important as the warriors who protect the community. They are matriarchal, polyamorous, and pansexual, and have very few taboos relating to sex or intimate relationships. So right from the start a whole lot of the hang-ups that drive human-centered stories of connection are turned on their heads. On the other hand, Raksura society is rigid in other ways, with leaders defined by their biology, its own confining gender dynamics, almost no mobility between social roles with the community, elaborate rules and manners for official interactions, and the lives of entire populations often depending on the whims of temperamental queens who will literally fight each other to the death to assert power.

Nothing is smooth or easy or simple, and watching the characters find out how they fit together is all the more satisfying for it. The first people Moon meets of his own species are a community on the verge of collapse; they are suffering from a number of external and internal traumas that started long before he came along. They aren’t in agreement about what to do to protect themselves; they aren’t in agreement about whether they want somebody new hanging around; they aren’t even in agreement about how to survive.

Moon may have found a home, the beginnings of a family, several friendships and relationships, and a community that takes care of its members, but a lifetime of trauma and loneliness can’t be overcome overnight. Moon’s years alone may have taught him how to survive tough situations, but those years have also given him some really, really deeply unhealthy coping mechanisms. He’s distrustful of everyone and everything, constantly terrified of making a mistake that will get him killed, frequently lies when honesty would serve him better, never expects people to treat him well, doesn’t ask questions when a simple answer would solve a lot of problems, and tends to assume that everybody is assuming the worst about him at any given time.

There is nothing ennobling or dignified about the trauma Moon has suffered. It has fucked him up in ways he has to deal with even when things are going well.

And while it would take an entire thesis to get into all of the details, this is also true of the other characters in the series. Their experiences might have made them better at fighting monsters who want to eat them, but a lifetime of fighting for one’s life doesn’t make a person better at all the non-fighting parts of living. There is a queen whose inability to protect her people has caused her to sink into a deep depression and another who is still fighting battles she won at great cost decades ago. There are young people who are war orphans of both allies and enemies now trying to find out where they fit in the world. There are a lot of people who simply don’t like each other for reasons both petty and serious. There are characters who are despondent, others who are clearly suffering from PTSD, quite a few who are desperate for change but afraid to push for it, and some who are just so lost and angry it overpowers everything else in their lives.

There are not characters whose jagged edges are neatly filed off by the right combination of friendship and found family, because this is not a story interested in easy solutions to complex problems. The world they live in, with all its violence, sickness, distrust, betrayal, doubt, and people who want to eat them, has done a number on everyone, but they still learn to make decisions, get along, change, grow, disagree, and compromise on every level, from private, interpersonal relationships between individuals to political relationships between large populations who don’t like each other and don’t want cooperate.

And that, I think, is the true reason I find this series so comforting in times of unending fear and uncertainty. I love a lot of stories in which the right friendship, relationship, family, or ragtag group of outcasts can provide what a lonely character needs to be happy—but it’s hard to get past the fact that I’m always aware that it isn’t really enough. What good are heroism, romance, and grand battles against terrible enemies if there is nobody to grow the food or teach the children or unplug the drains? A lovely aspect of the Raksura series is that the people engaging in those former dramatic storylines are also the people taking care of the latter mundane tasks.

Moon’s story, over the course of the entire series, is not only the story of a young man finding a family and a home, but of learning what it means to be part of a communal society that exists in a complex, diverse world. He begins at a place of one-man-against-the-world, but over the course of the series he becomes part of a world he could only ever glimpse from the outside before. It’s a story that acknowledges that we all need friendships and family, we need personal safety and emotional healing, we need safety and home and love—but we also need something more than that. We need community. We need to take care of each other, not only on the individual scale, but on the scale of how we structure our entire societies. And we need to do it even when it isn’t easy or convenient or safe.

Kali Wallace studied geology and earned a PhD in geophysics before she realized she enjoyed inventing imaginary worlds more than she liked researching the real one. She is the author of science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels for children, teens, and adults. Her most recent novel is the science fiction thriller Salvation Day. Her short fiction has appeared in Clarkesworld, F&SF, Asimov’s, Tor.com, and other speculative fiction magazines. After spending most of her life in Colorado, she now lives in southern California.

The post Comfort, Connection, and Community in Martha Wells’ Books of the Raksura appeared first on Reactor.

Yotsuba&c! (manga, usually pronounced “Yotsuba etcetera”): A charming energetic five-year-old girl has been adopted and brought to Japan by her new dad. As she explores the excitements of a new neighborhood, her loving father, his friends, and neighbors including several older girls of different ages (middle school, high school) enjoy her delight in exploring the world and getting to do the kinds of playful things that you do with little kids, like ride a hot air balloon or make cardboard toys. It’s an absolutely charming exploration of how friendships across age groups can be so rewarding to all.

What Did You Eat Yesterday? (manga): Lovely middle-aged gay men and their friends eat delicious food, talk about their delicious food, and love each other very much. Some of the younger ones have a little relationship drama occasionally, so their more mature friends help them with it, and then cook more delicious food. They worry about how best to take care of their aging parents, and handle it well. <3 <3 <3  Brilliantly written and illustrated by Fumi Yoshinaga, author of the Tiptree-winning Ōoku and definitely one of the best mangaka working today.

A Man and His Cat (manga): A cat in a pet shop is sad because it isn’t very cute and no one buys it for a long time, but then a very nice man comes and buys it and gives it a great home! The man is sad because he recently lost his family, but his wife had wanted a cat so he follows her suggestion and gets the cat, and the man and the cat make each other very happy. Touches of melancholy around the edges resolve into simple vignettes of love and cuddles.

Otherworldly Izakaya Nobu (manga): Some lovely Japanese people have discovered a portal to a Medieval-like vaguely-German fantasy planet, so they decide to use the portal to open a Japanese Izakaya (pub restaurant) to let the poor Medieval people taste delicious amazing Japanese food! Loving detail on how different Japanese dishes are cooked, combined with good food helping people bond and overcome minor social friction, like a man being nervous marrying his beloved because her dad is a squid fisherman and he hates squid.

Even better, the presence of this new food establishment in the town eventually starts to actually have second-order consequences! It’s technically an isekai (portal-to-another-world fantasy) but so different from most of them, filled with human kindness and fried burdock root instead of elf girlfriends and ancient demons.

Venice, by Jiro Taniguchi (single volume manga): Renowned manga author Jiro Taniguchi walks around Venice and draws beautiful pictures of Venice. That’s it. It’s just walking through Venice. It’s sort of like his earlier work The Walking Man, which is a man taking a walk through his neighborhood just looking at things, only this time it’s Venice. And Venice is just lovely.

Junji Ito’s Cat Diary: Yon & Mu (single-volume manga): Like “A Man and His Cat,” this is just vignettes of life with cats, but drawn by horror master Jiro Taniguchi who loves to hilariously exaggerate the ways in which cats are creepy: cats move like liquids, leap out at you unexpectedly, stare at you with their glowing eyes from the dark, inexplicably won’t play with you when you want to but insist on playing when you don’t want to—they’re soooooo creeeepy! And you know how when cats yawn their heads turn inside-out and look like aliens? A purely whimsical cat reflection reveling in using the visual techniques of horror to explore why people love such strange creatures as cats!

Oishinbo (manga): Food manga can be a great go-to for nothing-bad-happens, though not all food manga are that way since some of the more competitive ones (like Drops of God or Food Wars) have moments of crushing defeat, villainous opponents, or characters with dire backstories. Oishinbo is an older classic food manga, whose main character is a food critic journalist who fights like cat and dog with his father, who’s a world-famous gourmet. In pretty much every story our hero is visiting some restaurant or other discussing miso soup when his father bursts in declaring “YOU WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND THE TRUE MEANING OF MISO SOUP!!!!” and there ensues a miso soup battle, or rice ball battle, or sushi battle between father and son, but with no stakes, just “will he understand the true nature of miso soup or not?!”

Lots of great detail (often hilariously over-the-top or propagandistic) about Japanese food culture is mixed with low-stakes challenges like trying to figure out why this one ramen shop’s ramen isn’t as good as it used to be.  To make the drama even lower and sillier, the US release is only excerpts from the very long original, and they’ve reorganized the individual issues into volumes themed by food (a rice volume, a fish volume), and the stories appear sequentially within each volume, so each volume starts with the hero vaguely flirting with the girl he likes, then dating her, then engaged, then planning the wedding, and in the next volume it starts over with flirting, then dating, so the slightly-suspenseful romance is transformed into simply repeating the happy process of two people who love food getting together.

Shingu: Secret of the Stellar Wars (anime): This is a mecha (giant robot) series, and while it has the usual dramatic attacks where our pilot must defend the world from aliens, imagine Evangelion except Gendo is the best dad ever and comes home to cook curry for his family every time he can take a break from his job defending Earth from aliens, and the whole village is so supportive and wonderful even the space aliens care deeply about rooting for the kids in the school sports festival, and it’s all about the supportive loving community with no real suspense about the fights, and the giant robot is made of origami paper and is so Japanese that when it defeats the monsters cherry petals blow by even if they’re in the vacuum of space!

Even at its most tense, it feels like lying in a hammock in summer sipping lemonade watching kids play. Bonus points for the wide variety of excellent aliens, and the character called Aloha-san is especially awesome.

Hare+Guu, aka Everything was Fine in the Jungle then Along Came Guu, aka Jungle wa Itsumo Hare Nochi Guu (anime): This surrealist wacky comedy is either stressful or stress-free depending on your perspective.  Everything was fine in young Hale’s Hawaii-like jungle paradise home until his carefree mother adopts Guu, a pink-haired little girl exactly Hale’s age who is OBVIOUSLY A SINISTER GODLIKE SPACE ALIEN!!!!…but no one believes Hale when he points this out.

Guu uses her mysterious reality-warping powers to create all sorts of bizarre situations with the pure goal of teasing Hale, and everyone else pretty much just chills out and doesn’t mind. While Hale’s life is an endless series of stressful situations, it’s clear that Guu really just wants to play and would never actually hurt him or anyone, and just takes delight in the ridiculous. Thus while it involves watching a little boy run around in a panic a lot, there’s never for a moment the feeling that anything genuinely bad can or would happen when our playful sister can rewind time with a thought.

In the same spirit as Guu, i.e. series where there are episodic threats but the overall mood and structure makes it clear that all will be well so you never actually fear anything genuinely bad will happen, I’ve often found times of stress are perfect for revisiting classics like Ranma ½ (martial arts gender-switching comedy so ridiculous that one time they were trapped on Watermelon Island which is populated only by savage! wild! watermelons! and I realized I was in actual suspense despite it being the third watermelon-related story arc!), the hilarious and rarely-dark competitive bread-baking comedy masterpiece Yakitate! Japan (is your bread delicious enough to let you travel through TIME?!), and-or feel-good classics like Great Teacher Onizuka (GTO) (anime in which warm-hearted ex-punk teacher makes sad kids happier, manga also even better but out of print), the mecha Gundam/Evangelion parody Martian Successor Nadesico (“Get in the giant robot.” “But I just want to be a chef!”), or Satoshi Kon’s heartwarming standalone film Tokyo Godfathers.

On the subject of manga/anime and self-care, this is a good moment to remember that what we usually read isn’t necessarily the best for these interesting times. VIZ just published Junji Ito’s magnificent manga adaptation of Osamu Desai’s 1948 semi-autobiographical novel No Longer Human, a detailed depiction of an artistic life destroyed by depression and mental illness. It’s a magnificent adaptation which I’ve been looking forward to for ages, and I love Junji Ito, but it’s a perfect example of how NOW IS NOT A GOOD TIME TO READ IT!  I READ THE FIRST HALF AND IT’S SO GOOD BUT SO NOT THE RIGHT THING TO READ NOW!!

It will remain on the shelf for cheerier days. Now is the time for things a little more cheering! Though if you’re interested in uplifting manga depicting mental illness or neuroatypical characters, consider this a strong recommendation for Komi Can’t Communicate (girl with communications disorder working on making friends with help from supportive classmates) and Genkaku Picasso (boy with depression uses his magical ability to draw mindscape portraits of his friends to help them with their depression and troubles too, with brilliant art plus an extremely uplifting chapter about a trans kid coming out.)

And finally something a little weirder, but useful to reflect on…

It’s a strange thing to put on this (or any) list, but in many ways the happiest anime I’ve ever seen is the street-fighting anime Air Master. It was made by some of the Dragonball Z crew when they were given a late night slot, a big budget, and permission to do whatever they wanted, and what they wanted was lovingly animated fight scenes with absolutely no plot. I first started watching it ironically, because the first four episodes are filled with such intolerably annoying characters that one professional reviewer began his review “I would rather pour burning hot acid into my eyes than watch another episode of Air Master!” and the character Renge was nominated the Most Annoying Character in All of Anime. But if you’re patient with it, it turns suddenly into a bizarrely happy story where a bunch of people who love street fighting get to do what they love.

You know how in a lot of fighting anime the hero wants to fight the bad guy but first they have to chase him all the way across the continent, and fight a whole series of other people to get there, and there’s this huge long drama just to get to the fight? Here people meet each other and say “Hey, you wanna fight?” and the other says “Sure!” and then they do it RIGHT AWAY and they really enjoy it. That’s it. There’s no stakes, no motive…it’s fighting for pure love of fighting. There are some weird and annoying characters (the school friends especially) and some with sad backstories, but they’re all made happier by getting to fight! And they just do it! And do it again! With great fight animation and some deeply weird but strangely engaging characters (notably Sakiyama Kaori and Sakamoto Julietta) it’s somehow one of the happiest shows I’ve ever seen. Everyone actually spends their time doing what they want to do.

You can also feel the creators enjoying the liberty of fast-paced fluffy action after years animating DBZ. There’s even (no exaggeration) an episode where some of the characters are having Korean BBQ and talking about how much they love it, and a man we’ve never met overhears and comes in to talk about how much he loves Korean BBQ and THE ENTIRE EPISODE IS JUST PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT HOW MUCH THEY LOVE KOREAN BBQ! THAT’S IT! NO PLOT! NO FIGHTING! JUST BBQ PHILOSOPHY FOR 20 STRAIGHT MINUTES! It’s a little bit like the brilliant samurai manga Vagabond, another story where people fight for the joy of fighting, a stark contrast to other samurai-era works like Lone Wolf and Cub which is equally brilliant but less joyous, since there are deep matters of honor and revenge structuring all.

Air Master, and lots of stories on this list, are great examples of how sometimes what’s most emotionally exciting about fiction isn’t a high-stakes plot but rich, passionate characters, and how what can often be distressing in fiction is not necessarily success or failure but long stretches of characters not getting to do what they want to do.

Another neat recent example of this is Ran and the Gray World, a stunningly-illustrated fantasy about a girl from a magic family that defends Japan from demonic magic, but while there are threats and crises, the story is much more about supportiveness and love, and spends fewer pages on the giant magic battle than on everyone from the magic village cooking and sharing a banquet afterward to feel better, and meeting with the magic therapist to take care of their magic mental health. It even manages to deal with the issue of little girl crushing on an older man (something many manga treat very problematically) in a carefully examined & emotionally affirming way that keeps coming back to family and friendship.

So as you think about which fiction to plunge into during this exhausting crisis, and as you make your own recommendations to friends, this is a good time to ask yourself how much of the story is characters being stressed or unsatisfied vs. how much of the story people doing things that bring them joy, whether that joy comes from street fighting or sharing ice cream.

Because for the moment, I think it’s time for ice cream…

Ada Palmer is a novelist and historian. Her first novel “Too Like the Lightning” (book 1 of Terra Ignota) came out in 2016 and was a Hugo finalist; Seven Surrenders and The Will to Battle came out in 2017 and the series finale, Perhaps the Stars is due out in early summer 2021. She studies the history of censorship, radical thought, atheism, science, books and printing, and heresy,  well as manga, anime and Japanese pop culture. She teaches at the University of Chicago, writes the blog ExUrbe.com, and composes SF & Mythology-themed music for the a cappella group Sassafrass.

The post Manga and Anime in Which No Bad Things Happen appeared first on Reactor.

Keep reading, because I do actually think of some.

Children’s books, suggests one friend.

Ha ha, no. Apart from the fact that some of the scariest things I’ve ever read have been children’s books—Catherine Storr’s Marianne Dreams and William Sleator’s Interstellar Pig for example—I realised some time ago that I am never going to be able to read Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy without crying. I mean I am never going to be grown up enough to get over it, there is no mature state in which I am still me where I will be able to read Ole Golly’s letter without bawling. Gary Schmidt, a children’s writer I discovered recently, is absolutely wonderful, but terrible, terrible things happen in his books, and it’s not even reliably all right at the end. He’s the person who made me think you have to earn your unhappy endings just as much as your happy ones. And William Alexander—again, terrific writer, terrible things happen.

There are some children’s books that almost qualify. One of my comfort reads is Arthur Ransome. He wrote a long series of books about kids messing about in sailboats on lakes in England in the 1930s, and nothing actually bad happens—except there’s a fog on the hills once, and there’s the time when the boat sinks in Swallowdale and John is so humiliated, and there is the scary bit where they get swept out to sea in We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea. (And it’s the 1930s, so their father in the Navy is going to be in WWII, and every adult in the books is complicit in appeasement and there are terrible things happening in Germany already…) But just on the surface, thinking about that little sailboat sinking, it makes me think you have to have bad things to overcome or you have no story.

So how about picture books for tiny kids?

Nope. In Martin Waddell and Barbara Firth’s Can’t You Sleep, Little Bear? the Little Bear can’t go to sleep and the Big Bear consequently can’t settle down and read his book, and all this is because Little Bear is afraid of the dark. Being scared of the dark is a bad thing, even if it gets happily fixed by the end of the story. In Penny Dale’s The Elephant Tree the elephant gets sadder and sadder on his quest to find his tree, until the children make a tree for him and make him happy. Don’t even think about Dr. Seuss and the terrible anxiety of having your house turned upside down by the Cat in the Hat or being forced to eat icky things by Sam-I-Am. (I don’t believe he actually liked them. I used to lie like that all the time when forced to eat things as a kid.) Then there’s Raymond Briggs The Snowman, which confronts you with mortality and the death of friends, thank you very much no. When I think of the picture books that are actually fun to read, they all have conflict and bad things. They certainly come into my category of “all OK in the end,” but they definitely have bad things.

Incidentally, apart from the fact they’d be very boring stories, I think kids need those bad things to learn from, and sometimes those awful moments are the most vivid and memorable—there’s a moment in Susan Cooper’s The Grey King which will be with me always, and it’s a bad moment.

But there are some stories that qualify, I think.

Romance. Pretty much all genre romance is “everything is OK at the end” but bad things happen in the meantime. But some Georgette Heyer has plots that work because bad things seem about to happen and are averted—this is different from everything being all right in the end, the bad things never occur, they are no more than threats that pass over safely. Cotillion does this. Two people are separately rescued by the heroine from iffy situations that could potentially become terrible, but they don’t. I think this counts. (It’s funny too.) That makes me think of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey in which the worst thing that happens is somebody exaggerates and somebody else has to go home alone on a stagecoach…that’s really not very bad. Right up there with the bear who can’t go to sleep.

Then there’s “Good King Wenceslas.” Somebody notices an injustice and sets out to redress it and succeeds. (OK, the page gets cold, but that also gets instantly fixed.) Zenna Henderson’s “Love Every Third Stir” is a version of this, though what the story is about is discovering the magic. I’m sure there are also old clunky SF versions of this. I want to say Clarke’s Fountains of Paradise. But I think there are others: person invents thing, everything is solved. Mostly more sophisticated versions of this are “it creates new problems.”

Utopia—somebody visits utopia and it really is. So More’s Utopia and Bacon, and Callenbach’s Ecotopia and other early naive utopias of this nature. Which makes me think about Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge but the way that book works without being naive is to have the actual story be sad—the softball team loses, the boy doesn’t get the girl, the old man dies in a storm. The worst thing that happens is gentle regret, but that’s bad too. But check out older utopias.

And now, my one actual real solid in-genre example of a book where nothing bad happens!

Phyllis Ann Karr’s At Amberleaf Fair is about a far future where people have evolved to be nicer, and there’s a fair, and a woodcarver who can make toys come to life, and there is sex and love and nothing bad happens and everything is all right. It’s gentle and delightful and I genuinely really like this odd sweet little book, and unless I’m forgetting something I don’t think anything bad happens at all.

If you have any suggestions please add them in comments—there’s at least one person actively looking for them.

Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published two collections of Tor.com pieces, three poetry collections, a short story collection and thirteen novels, including the Hugo- and Nebula-winning Among Others. Her fourteenth novel, Lent, was published by Tor in May 2019. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here irregularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal. She plans to live to be 99 and write a book every year.

The post Books in Which No Bad Things Happen appeared first on Reactor.

If you know what I’m talking about, you probably don’t require much convincing. If you don’t, I’ll break it down for you: What the hell is competence porn?

The term was coined by John Rogers, creator of the TV show Leverage—one of our best examples of this particular type of storytelling. If you’re not familiar with Leverage, the show is about four professional thieves with distinctive skill sets who team up with a mastermind planner to get revenge on rich and powerful assholes who take advantage of people and ruin their lives for profit. (It’s extremely gratifying.)

Rogers wanted a shorthand way to talk about the very specific kind of satisfaction that we feel when watching folks competently handle complex situations using the kinds of specialized skills and expertise that we can all appreciate (even if we can’t personally replicate them), and he came up with “competence porn.” It’s about both the process and the outcome, and the comforting safety net of knowing that whatever challenge arises, the whole thing is in, well, extremely competent hands. Of course there are different permutations and varieties and genres involved, but we can lay out some basic ground rules—a formula for the type of story we’re talking about, for the sake of discussion.

First of all, we need experts: People who are so good at their craft that they can improvise and rise to any challenge, adapting to any obstacles or changes in the plan. We start with our mastermind, the genius who sees how all the pieces fit together, the big picture-seeing visionary with the top-down view, who keeps everyone calm even when the shit hits the fan. This mastermind is watching out for the team and also for us, the audience, providing the safety net we need. Knowing that this genius is around, thinking ten steps ahead, we feel safe enough to commit to enjoying the antics that will play out, as suspenseful as they may be, and we can allow ourselves to invest in and care about the characters, in spite of the massive risks they’re taking.

Next we need a team of specialists. Sure, you can absolute argue for something like the John Wick franchise being competence porn based around a single character (he certainly is competent!), but I tend to prefer stories built around the satisfaction that comes from seeing a team or group of extremely competent people synthesizing their skills and learning to work together. It’s thrilling in the same way as watching a big dance number with complex choreography, or really great improv comedy acts, with everyone hitting their mark at the exact right time—or if they didn’t, their team covered seamlessly, and the audience will never know. Thought that was a fatal blunder? Think again—either the misstep will be revealed to be intentional, or it will be used to the team’s advantage, so that everything turns out even better than expected. There’s just something incredibly satisfying about watching a group of people so perfectly attuned to one another that they can accomplish something none of them could alone.

Now, these team members need to be people who can solve problems within their area of expertise by thinking outside the box and coming up with just the right trick, hack, or workaround. They’ve seen every iteration of how things could go, and they have all that experience to call upon, as well as the ability to improvise and quickly shift to new variations rather than sticking rigidly to one original idea or plan.

Oh and speaking of the original idea? Well, actually, there tend to be dozens of “original” ideas: Plans A through Z have been careful considered and will often come up in comical discussion between characters. In the very first episode of Leverage, computer expert Hardison asks if it’s time to go to plan B, and mastermind Nate tells him, “Technically, that would be plan G.” When Hardison asks how many plans there are, “Is there like, a plan M?” Nate assures him that yes, he has thought that far ahead, but unfortunately, “Hardison dies in plan M.” This kind of banter is de rigueur between team members, particularly when they’re under pressure—this light repartee graces the conversation of recent competent teams like the Crows in Shadow and Bone, or Lockwood and his associates in Lockwood & Co.

When it comes one-upsmanship with one another over who’s the MVP of a particular caper or which variation of the plan is best, it’s generally best to have a good dose of smartassery all around. There may be some examples of competence porn that don’t draw on this type of humor, but for me, there’s nothing drearier than a story that takes the action so seriously that nobody can ever crack a joke—no matter how high the stakes are, there should always be room for a little fun or a quick quip.

So, who do we need on our team? Well, it depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. Leverage begins with a mastermind who brings together a hacker/tech expert, a hitter (the muscle), a master thief proficient in everything from cat burglary to safe-cracking to picking pockets, and a brilliant con artist (aka: the grifter). As is often the case in these stories, the team members start out as loners who don’t play well with others, but as they learn to cooperate professionally, they eventually find themselves growing into friends, and even family. The plots are often, but not always, capers (think The Italian Job, or Ocean’s Eleven). Depending on your goals, your ideal team might include a driver, a demolitions expert, a magician, a forger, or a really good librarian. Whatever the situation calls for, they’ll be the best in their field, and probably have a bone to pick with powerful (often corrupt) individuals and institutions.

Buy the Book

System Collapse

Buy Book

System Collapse

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

Because “competence porn” isn’t quite a genre and examples that tick most of the boxes above aren’t marketed as such, it’s always a delight to recognize one of these types of stories—and perhaps it would be best to call it a team dynamic instead of a genre (depends on how strict you are about labels). I’ve seen examples spring up all over the place in newer science fiction and fantasy stories, and I couldn’t be happier. Hyper-competent Murderbot learns to work with others (multiple times) and everything comes together when they learn to trust each other in Martha Wells’ Murderbot series. Galadriel “El” Higgins, from Naomi Novik’s Scholomance trilogy, works her team of wizards hard because it’s the only way to stay alive—but together, they thrive. Even the day-to-day grind of working in local government that we see on Parks and Recreation is incredibly fun to watch because Leslie Knope and her team (regardless of their attitudes toward their jobs—looking at you, Ron Swanson…) are actually all fantastic at what they do.

There’s something so very gratifying about watching people live up to their full potential—getting to see all the hard work they put in pay off, not just in their private satisfaction but as part of a group of similarly talented, driven people who have dedicated themselves to their craft, and a shared goal. It’s not unusual to dream about being outstandingly good at something, and in the end there’s a level of pure enjoyment that comes from seeing someone doing something they love, perform flawlessly, and win the day.

As I mentioned up at the top, I’m always searching for new books, shows, movies (or anything else) that fits into the category of “competence porn,” so I’d love to hear your thoughts, suggestions, and favorite examples of hyper-capable teams of rogues, professionals, and/or unlikely heroes—please share in the comments.

Rachel Ayers lives in Alaska, where she writes cabaret shows, daydreams, and looks at mountains a lot. She has a degree in Library and Information Science which comes in handy at odd hours, and she shares speculative poetry and flash fiction (and cat pictures) at patreon.com/richlayers.

The post Competence Porn Is Comforting — Where Can I Find More of It? appeared first on Reactor.

More than 90 percent of the time, I find that escape in the form of a many-volume epic sci-fi or fantasy story. Once in a while, though, I need something more subtle and nuanced—a book or a story that speaks to my need for calm and comfort and allows—even encourages—my mind to take a break from my anxieties and find a new perspective.

It takes a special kind of book by a special kind of author to ease my mind in exactly the right way, and today I’m happy to share five of my favorites with you. These books and stories are all at the top of my list whenever I need to take a break, reflect, and focus on what’s important in life…

The Monk & Robot Series by Becky Chambers

The more I read Becky Chambers, the more I’m convinced that no working SFF author is better at capturing the human experience on the page—extra props for doing it through a sentient robot on a distant planet’s small moon.

Monk & Robot contains two novellas: A Psalm for the Wild-Built and A Prayer for the Crown-Shy. Both follow a monk, Sibling Dex, as they venture to villages serving tea and hearing people’s stories. Eventually, Dex’s journey brings them to the Wilds, where they meet Mosscap. The plucky robot joins Dex, and together they learn and grow while trying to gain a better understanding of themselves and humanity.

Chambers crafts a low-stakes adventure and slots her themes neatly into the novel’s characters. Monk & Robot eschews deadly space battles and rigid galactic politics. Instead, the series offers a personal and intimate take on what it means to be yourself and grow as a person. I pick up these therapeutic wonders of science fiction whenever I need to feel okay, even when it seems like problems are piling up around me.

“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin

Various Tor.com contributors have written at length about “Omelas” over the years. Consider this my plea to anyone who hasn’t heard of this short story: read it!

The story takes maybe 30 minutes to read, and it’s worth returning for multiple rereads and reconsiderations. I’m not going to spoil anything here; the story’s too quick and focused for me to spill any details ahead of time. I suggest you go in with no prior knowledge (or, if you’ve encountered the tale in the past, try revisiting it with fresh eyes).

I read “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” whenever I feel the weight of the world’s problems pressing down on me. How far will we go in allowing others to suffer? What would it take for us to abandon comfort and convenience in the pursuit of justice and equality? Le Guin’s slippery narrative forces the reader to face these questions and many others, and sparks reflection unlike any story I’ve read before. Be warned, however: “Omelas” is as heartbreaking as it is thought-provoking. Have a box of tissues handy.

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy

With little nuggets of wisdom and inspiration delivered alongside with fluid, deeply touching illustrations, Charlie Mackesy’s book garnered instant acclaim, and has been adapted into an Oscar-winning animated short film.

The book doesn’t nestle into a single genre. Still, fantasy fans will connect with its whimsy and its pithy, resonant quotes. It feels like it could fit comfortably in Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood, a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, and a quiet corner of Narnia all at once.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?” reads one page, above a drawing of the boy and the mole perched on a tree branch; the response comes beneath it: “‘Kind,’ said the boy.”

Little moments like this one grace every page of the book, which you could read in an hour or less. The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse is the perfect antidote to a grim or gloomy day. It serves as a warm, wise reminder to have the courage to be kind to yourself and others.

Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh

My previous picks can make you smile, cry, think deeply and reflect. This last one’s meant to make you laugh. Hyperbole and a Half features gut-busting stories from Allie Brosh’s childhood and adult life, as well as chronicling her struggles with depression and anxiety. As someone who deals with those issues myself, I found a unique sort of solace in Brosh’s work. Some of her tales are positively ridiculous—one involving an entire birthday cake sticks strongly in my memory—and others are honest, visceral takes on the effects of mental illness.

Even with a heavy subject matter, Brosh handles her stories with a deft hand, walking the line between comedy and serious anxiety without flaw. Her illustrations break the tension and fill in the visual moments of her anecdotes. Every page brims with laugh-out-loud

Allie Brosh’s work fits into the humor and autobiography categories more so than fantasy or sci-fi, but Hyperbole and a Half and the sequel—Solutions and Other Problems—are ideal picks for anyone who wants to feel seen and understood while also enjoying frequent bouts of chuckling.

Everyone’s a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too by Jomny Sun

Jonny (aka Jomny) Sun has written for BoJack Horseman and the current Peacock series Mrs. Davis. He’s also known for his delightful Twitter presence, where he shares funny and uplifting bits of goodness. His book Everyone’s a Aliebn When Ur a Aliebn Too, is as charmingly (and deliberately) misspelled as its title.

Everyone’s a Aliebn follows an adorable extraterrestrial exploring Earth long past the days of humanity. This is about as SFF as the book gets. The alien’s sojourn across our planet is filled with wonderful encounters between the main character and the beings that still inhabit Earth. On one page, the alien rests under a tree. The quote across from the drawing reads:

“I’ve been wondering why the lonely ones make the most beautiful music and I think it’s because they’re the ones most invested in filling the silence.”

Almost every page is poster-worthy, offering an affirmation, a reminder that it’s okay to feel sad. It’s okay to enjoy the good times. It’s okay to feel a multitude of things at once. Even if you feel like you’re an “aliebn,” chances are you aren’t the only one.

I also recommend Jonny Sun’s Goodbye Again: Essays, Reflections, and Illustrations.

***

I hope these picks help to ease your mind whenever you need a break, a laugh, or a good cry. If you have any favorite mental health-related or mindful reads, please recommend them in the comments!

Cole Rush writes words. A lot of them. For the most part, you can find those words at The Quill To Live or on Twitter @ColeRush1. He voraciously reads epic fantasy and science-fiction, seeking out stories of gargantuan proportions and devouring them with a bookwormish fervor. His favorite books are: The Divine Cities Series by Robert Jackson Bennett, The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, and The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune.

The post Five Books That Help Me Face Anxiety and Feel Better About the World appeared first on Reactor.

Of course, what exactly constitutes a comfort read will vary from person to person but here are five that reliably make me smile. Perhaps you will smile as well.

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)

Orphaned at nineteen, Flora Post embodies “every art and grace save that of earning her own living.” Without any other means at hand, she goes to live with distant relatives: the Starkadders, whose homestead, Cold Comfort Farm, is in the depths of rustic Sussex.

Flora intends to earn her living. The rural melodramas of such luminaries as Mary Webb (Gone to Earth) assure Flora that her unfortunate rural relatives must languish under a myriad of troubles that their simple rustic minds are incapable of solving. Indeed, each Starkadder struggles with issues so profound as to seem parodic. Flora, on the other hand, is a very modern, very organized girl. What seem like insurmountable challenges for her kinfolk are to her simple challenges easily solved.

Readers who know Cold Comfort Farm only from the otherwise exemplary 1995 film adaptation—”There’ll be no butter in hell!”—may be surprised to learn that Cold Comfort Farm was a science fiction novel of sorts. The 1932 text references the Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of ’46, establishing that the book takes place in what is now an alternate history.

The Butterfly Kid by Chester Anderson (1967)

In a 1970s where the Summer of Love never ended, Greenwich Village is home to a diverse and colourful counterculture. Artists, authors, pornographers, and retired spies call the Village home; the squares are pleased to let them have it. It is very nearly an American utopia, save for Sean’s butterflies.

What protagonist Chester Anderson takes for a skillful magic trick is closer to true magic: naïve Sean can create butterflies through sheer act of will. Sean is no super-powered Child of the Atom but rather a beneficiary of Laszlo Scott’s reality pills. This would be a marvelous development except for the fact Scott is a scoundrel. He is not doling out reality pills out of charity. Rather, Scott is doling out reality pills because he is working for malevolent aliens.

It’s only a matter of time before reality pills end up in the digestive tract of some paranoid whose hallucinations will depopulate Earth. All that stands between humanity and certain doom is an assortment of hippies, whose courage may not be backed up by any sort of competence.

Mirabile by Janet Kagan (1991)

The human colonists who settled Mirabile came armed with cutting-edge biotechnology. Hidden within the genes of their animals was the engineered potential for each creature to spawn other species. It was a marvel of compactness and efficiency that provided the colonists with a far greater number of species than could have otherwise fit into their generation ships.

The problem with this ingenious arrangement was two-fold. Firstly, a mishap erased the records of which animals had what potentials. Secondly, the conditions on Mirabel provoked unforeseen emergent properties in the technology. Rather than enjoying a bounty of lifeforms, the colonists often found themselves surprised, inconvenienced, and endangered by the so-called Dragon’s Teeth.

Annie Jason “Mama Jason” Masmajean is a roving trouble-shooter, investigating each Dragon’s Teeth outbreak and determining how best to deal with them. Each scientific mystery is more delightful than the last!

Aria by Kozue Amano (2001–2008)

Human efforts to terraform Mars have been what might be described as excessively successful. Not only has Mars been transformed into a verdant life-bearing world, the once Red Planet, now named Aqua, has been transmuted from world desert to a global ocean.

Akari Mizunashi arrives on Aqua, determined to become a gondolier (or “undine,” as they are known in her adopted city of Neo-Venezia). One does not become an undine simply by wishing it so; long, arduous training waits for Akari. However, this is a case where not only is the prize worth the effort, so are the experiences Akari and her fellow Undines in training will have along the way.

Natsume’s Book of Friends by Yuki Midorikawa (2005–present)

Friendless Reiko Natsume could have mastered social skills. However, being possessed of prodigious spiritual skills, she chose a different path. She stalks supernatural beings, steals their names, and binds them to her. Each being whose name is inscribed in Reiko’s Book of Names is compelled to do her bidding. Close enough to friendship for Reiko.

This would be a grim tale if the protagonist were Reiko. The protagonist is in fact her orphaned grandson Takashi. As friendless as Reiko, Takashi’s reaction on discovering the nature of the Book of Names is not to embrace slavery as a substitute for friends. Instead, the kind-hearted young man sets out to free his grandmother’s victims, regardless of the personal danger that the angry, newly freed supernatural beings might pose to their victimizer’s grandson.

***

There are of course many works I could have mentioned—Legends & Lattes, for example, and A Psalm for the Wild-Built as well, were only passed over because Cole Rush beat me to them in Five Fantasy Cafes I’d Love To Visit.

Originally published July 2022.

In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021 and 2022 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.

The post 5 Feel-Good Comfort Reads appeared first on Reactor.

The mid-’60s gave rise to a handful of fantasy sitcoms (sometimes called “magi-coms”) which included Bewitched (1964), I Dream of Jeannie (1965), The Addams Family (1964), and The Munsters (1964). These shows all have elements of the fantastical or the (comedically) monstrous playing out in real-world contexts. I think it’s fair to say I am not the only one fascinated by the way mid-’60s American sitcoms chose to highlight domestic magic and supernatural creatures for family at-home viewing—these shows are still fondly remembered (often thanks to syndication) over half a century later, and the fact that they all came out in 1964-5 is so wondrously specific.

Bewitched begins with a typical couple falling in love and getting married before the pilot narrator explains “…except it so happens that this girl is a witch” with Samantha, the witch in question, retrieving a brush with the twitch of a finger and floating it her way. I would describe the show as a whimsical, high feminine comedy about choosing to live a domestic life that centers on partnership. Samantha marries “a normal mortal human being” in defiance of her mother, and it’s clear that she is happy with the life she chose.

It would be another situation entirely if she was forced to live in the home, forbidden to do magic and ordered to do housework by her husband, but that is simply not the case. Samantha has plenty of power, she can do and be whatever she likes, and she enjoys being married. Her husband, Darrin, is pretty easily convinced that having a witch for a wife is just fine—mostly because Samantha is very good at convincing outsiders that she’s a non-magical suburban housewife, and they are in love. I still find it adorable. This ’60s sitcom still strikes me as funny and romantic, with most episodes focused on the way Samantha chooses to use her magic to improve her domestic, partnered life. The fantastical is present, but while other types of fantasy stories focus on world-ending stakes and all manner of magical threats, the fantasy here is more about finding, after a long night of entertaining, you can simply move your hands or twitch your nose and all your kitchen cleaning is done. These characters happily reject the larger world and instead choose to live contained lives with their extended families or found families with an unassuming level of determination.

I Dream of Jeannie is another sitcom where a regular, shmegular guy (albeit an astronaut) has a supernaturally powerful love interest. As you can see from the original opening credits above, Jeannie was trapped inside a bottle on a desert island until Captain Tony Nelson unwittingly released her. The astronaut frees Jeannie from any kind of servile contract, and she chooses to surreptitiously hitch a ride and come home with him (much to his surprise). I should note here that the exoticized costume and Persian she speaks in the first episode have aged very poorly (and were problematic even at the time), instantly calling to mind Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism—this aspect of I Dream of Jeannie has been explored at length elsewhere, and it’s an issue any discussion of the show must address upfront.

Following their initial meeting, Jeannie becomes a chaotic sexy menace as soon as she’s granted her freedom and it’s glorious. First, she sabotages Nelson’s engagement and makes his commanding officers think he’s having girl-in-bottle-related delusions, and then she berates him for not listening to her. The premise of the series is that she essentially forces her way into the life of a regular guy who was already happily engaged, and I admit that, again, the show should not be given a pass just because it was framed as a joke in 1964. However, the themes the show was centered on are relevant to this discussion: Jeannie is an incredibly powerful, 2000-year-old magical being and all she wants is to stay with the person who made her happy and showed her kindness. She uses her infinite, ancient power to craft her perfect domestic space because she can and while hijinks might ensue, they make it work (with the help, and some interference, from their circle of friends and family).

Of course, the fantasy sitcom trend didn’t only focus on romantic relationships, with both The Addams Family and The Munsters centered around two oddball American families giving normal a try (or at least, redefining “normal” on their own terms). Both the Addamses and the Munsters see themselves as perfectly normal and tend to view their non-supernatural family members or more conventional neighbors as being a bit peculiar. They enjoy a cozy, cordial home life with a large extended family. Sure, their houses might be filled with cobwebs and decorated like it’s Halloween all year round, but it’s clear that they all care deeply about one another and have a great time without worrying about outside opinions. Give me a witty, magical found family yesterday, please…

I think it’s important to note that, even though these series were intended to be slightly satirical, all of these shows celebrate the frankly wonderful idea that all kinds of families—even those that with very obvious or hidden differences that might set them apart or make them seem strange to outsiders—can still claim a life full of love, happiness, and acceptance. The shows make fun of the straight-laced American families that surround our protagonists while reaffirming the idea love, friendship, partnership, and family are valuable and desirable. Because shows like Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie, The Addams Family and The Munsters center family values and partnership, they can make jokes about stodgier aspects of American life while still embracing the familial stability at the center of it all, in their own unconventional ways.

Historians who study Sixties-era America can tell you far better than I can, but even a relative novice like me has a base-level understanding that a countercultural movement was rising up to challenge many of the traditional values and assumptions prevalent at that time. These sitcoms were appealing to both sides of the American public—the radical and the traditional—by gently presenting magical others who, deep down, wanted to live a normal, happy life. Readers of today’s cozy fantasy fiction will likely recognize that the subgenre has picked up these thematic threads and questioning of “normalcy,” while embracing a more radical insistence on inclusivity and celebrating difference in a way these older shows never could.

 As the outside world has become more hectic and disruptive, the appeal of living happily contained domestic lives seems to become more and more appealing, at least for some of us. Who doesn’t want to spend more time at home with a warm drink of your choice and a hobby to keep you occupied? A personal mantra of mine for 2023 is to “say no and do less”: I don’t want to #girlboss my way through life, thank you very much. I want to do a manageable amount of work, get a reasonable amount of sleep, and talk to friends and family often enough. If I could blink and have my laundry done and dinner ready, I promise you I would. These goals, while they’re not the kind of things that never rate a mention in more epic fare, are the kind of thing that cozy fantasy books understand and tend to revel in.

During the pandemic, there was increased interest in crafting, home improvement, and cooking. It is fair to say that aesthetics like cottagecore, cottagegore, and goblincore, which all embrace the relaxing nature of homemaking, also experienced a bit of a boom. These trends support a reclaiming of home space activities as restorative, and an extension of important self-care that anyone can engage with and enjoy. So perhaps it’s unsurprising that I’ve noticed similar kinds of narrative focus on magic as a tool for homemaking or family in the recent boom in cozy fantasy books.

Although “cozy fantasy” as a category wasn’t in widespread use before 2022, the subgenre has seen an undeniable uptick in interest among fantasy readers. Bookish tiktokers like @megstearoom and @books.with.lee have done quite a lot to help define and promote the cozy fantasy genre (and the tag has more than 18 million views). Your exact definition of what constitutes cozy fantasy might differ from another reader’s, but we can generally agree that books that earn the label tend to spark warm, “cozy” feelings with relatively low stakes, spinning feel-good stories that center community building or maintenance (so family, found family, and/or friendship). Just a few recent standouts include Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne, Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree, Witchful Thinking by Celestine Martin, and The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna, which all explore the fantastical in narratives that focus on domesticity.

Buy the Book

Legends and Lattes

Buy Book

Legends and Lattes

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

A wave of interest was sparked by Baldree’s independently published Legends & Lattes (subtitled “A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes”) following the book’s release in February 2022. The sapphic cozy fantasy novel was lauded for creating a high fantasy world where a former mercenary decides to hang up her weapons and follow her dream of opening her own coffee shop. The gentle but compelling narrative hook drew readers in, exploring how one creates a small business after living a life as an adventurer and the surprising relationships that can be forged along the way. Although the sitcoms discussed above mainly focused on the at-home applications of the fantastical, Baldree’s novel’s small business also doubles as a home, fostering a cozy found-family environment.

Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne is another wonderful example of a sapphic cozy fantasy that features a home business. In this case, it’s a bookshop that serves tea, set up by a couple instead of an individual, but the vibes are similar to Legends & Lattes. The book imagines what it would be like to run away with the person you love: “Run away with me, the mage had said, her eyes alight. You like tea. I like books. Let’s open a shop somewhere remote and forget the world exists.” It’s wondrously romantic to imagine one of the Queen’s guards, fed up with her bloody job, joining forces with the most powerful mage in existence—both of them giving it all up to live a quiet, comfortable life together. Much like the protagonists of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, the two central characters are powerful, potentially dangerous people who want nothing more than to cultivate a home and be in love.

I would tend to trace this shift from magic in the home to magic in the home business to the frankly disappointing state of affairs in corporate America, paired with the appeal of the Hallmark-esque dream of moving to a small town and opening your very own successful small business. Think about it: First, in this scenario, you are only paying to live and work at one location that you own outright—in a world with sky-high housing prices, the idea that you can wholly own your home business is a bit of a fantasy in and of itself. Second, you love and are loved by everyone you work and live with—just as in our ’60s sitcoms, you have chosen your family/ found family/ friends wisely, and it has paid off. Third, some of the work required, like getting your stock in on time and or the labor needed to get your business ready to open, can be made easier and less time-consuming by the use of your fantastical strength and/or magic. Taken together, you have the ideal components for a cozy high fantasy world.

That is not to say the low fantasy worlds (basically our world, but with a bit more magic) seen in ’60s sitcoms are a thing of the past: Witchful Thinking by Celestine Martin and The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna both have that covered. Both books are specifically cozy fantasy romance novels about witches just trying to do their best as magic infiltrates the worlds around them. They channel the same vibes as The Addams Family and The Munsters, featuring supernatural found families supporting each other and living their own version of “normal” life.

When I say Sangu Mandanna’s The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches is one of the cutest things I’ve ever read I am not exaggerating (and trust me when I say I’ve read a lot of very cute fiction). Mika Moon, orphaned and adopted at a young age, grew up mostly alone with limited access to friends and family because the more witches there are in one place, the more dangerous it is for the witches in question. Now she is an influencer pretending to be a witch online (that is, she is pretending to be a fake witch who claims to do magic—she doesn’t think anyone watching would believe her spells are real). Luckily, when a group of non-magical people trying to raise three adopted witches come across her videos, they reach out to her and ask if she can tutor their kids in witchcraft. This is a gentle, lovely story that prioritizes child safety, community, and happiness above all else, while challenging the adult characters to unpack their own childhood traumas in order to be the best mentors and parents they can be to these adopted children.

Mandanna’s novel reinforces the idea that all children—even the ones who might feel that they are different or strange, powerful or powerless—deserve to have adults in their lives who want you to feel safe and loved. You can say what you’d like about the Addams family’s casually murderous or macabre sense of humor, but the Addams parents unconditionally love and encourage Wednesday and Pugsley. It truly is adorable and praiseworthy and I for one am happy to see these offbeat-but-nurturing familial relationships getting more attention in the cozy fantasy world once more.

Martin’s Witchful Thinking imagines a small coastal town in New Jersey where small bits of magic and magical creatures are everywhere. The fantasy romance centers on Lucinda, a schoolteacher and witch who desperately wants her life to be a bit more exciting and fulfilling than it is. Lucy finds herself longing to reach a few new milestones, including finding a new house and a new soul mate. And then suddenly, her high school friend/merman/photographer Alex, who has been busily traveling the world, comes back home to celebrate his birthday. This novel is all about learning how to grow roots in a place full of people you love and how to experience adventure even when you don’t travel too far. In a way, it reimagines a kind of neighborhood life similar to the world of The Munsters, where the supernatural exists contentedly beside the everyday.

Cozy fantasy books make room for magic homemaking in regular, everyday life in a way not many works of fiction tend to do. Cozy, much like horror or comedy, is an emotional genre. The books are written to evoke warmth and comfort, and while the process can be subjective and responses might from person to person and over time, certain key elements tend to remain the same. We can see some of the DNA of the ’60s fantasy sitcom mirrored in this new wave of cozy fantasy because we still respond to those elements—the comforts of home, family, friendship, and security, with just enough magic to keep things interesting and add a bit of comforting escapism into the mix.

There is a kind of reclamation happening when it comes to domesticity, and it’s a cyclical pattern, extending far beyond the connection with the kooky sitcoms of the 1960s to stretches of literary and artistic fascination with the homey, the small, and the pastoral throughout history. Sometimes we just want to wax romantic about nature and farms and cozy small lives where nothing horrible happens and think about the magical or mystical side of everyday life, and these sorts of stories fulfill that yearning in the best possible way.

Fantasy sitcoms showed us that magic can be fun and funny and comfortingly domestic, while making TV a little stranger and more interesting. They told us that being weird could be just as valid as being conventional, at the end of the day, and let us dream of doing magic instead of laundry. Clearly, cozy fantasy books are responding to the same kinds of desires, and this new wave of authors are ready, willing, and able to skillfully set these familiar beats to a new tune for an audience in need of whimsical comfort.

R. Nassor is a senior contributing writer at Book Riot who covers Fantasy, Science Fiction, Romance, and YA books. She graduated with a double major in English and Psychology and a Dance minor from The George Washington University and is completing an M.A. in the English program at Georgetown University where she looks at medievalism in feminine-focused fantasy. She’s also been known to throw a mug or two in her quest to write about myth, pop culture, and genre at large.

The post Sixties Fantasy Sitcoms and the Rise of Cozy Fantasy appeared first on Reactor.

For me, this kind of comfort reading goes beyond escapism. There are lots of books that can give me a temporary escape from reality, but comfort reads give me sustenance. They remind me about the flow of friendship and the reassurance of people who understand. Not only do the characters feel like friends, but specific scenes that I like feel like friends. The jokes that I know are coming are still funny. These books refresh me and leave me smiling at the end.

Even though these books feel like a safe space, they’re not necessarily “cozy” in the genre sense. My comfort reads have a surprisingly high body count, and often deal with serious issues. But the characters, the settings, the wit and whimsy of the prose, and the powerful assertions of resilience, community, competence, and justice leave me feeling strengthened rather than shaken.

As I was coming up with and writing my new novella, The Mimicking of Known Successes, I wanted it to be a comfort read of this kind. Here are five books that inspired—and comforted—me along the way.

Think of England by KJ Charles

Almost every book in Charles’s considerable oeuvre feels like slipping into a perfectly warm bath: the assured writing, the rich characters and historical detail, the moments of hilarity, the ensembles of friends and family who support each other through differences and difficulties. Oh, and the excellent comeuppances for richly deserving evil-doers.

Think of England is a particular favorite of mine (and a good entry point, since it’s more or less standalone). It combines suspense, romance, and sharp social commentary into a superbly paced plot with nods to pulp classics and country-house mysteries. Reeling from emotional and physical trauma, Archie Curtis determines to take advantage of a party in a remote mansion for some espionage that he knows he’s not suited for. Meeting Daniel Da Silva, a dandified poet entirely foreign to Archie’s experience, only confounds him further, even as the hints of conspiracy gets more and more sinister.

While I love the perfectly timed unfolding of the suspense, what really makes this book a comfort to me is the delicious portrayal of a character slowly reassessing his first impressions and discovering easy communion in the place he least expected. The addition of several unexpected new friends and a fine balancing of cleverness and violence—which solves at least one problem nicely—make this a brilliant read, with some equally comforting companion books in the same world if you’re looking for more.

The Best of All Possible Worlds by Karen Lord

This book begins with an apocalyptic disaster and is built around the experiences of galactic refugees trying to integrate—or not—in a new society, but while it doesn’t shy away from the trauma and hardship, it is also a fun, comforting, hopeful read. In part this is because it is set on a planet eager to welcome refugees, and government-employed biotechnician Grace Delarua, is eager to support the process. It’s also because of Delarua’s voice: direct, colloquial, relatable, curious, and warm, Delarua is the perfect narrator to lead us on a picaresque journey through the many cultures of Cygnus Beta, commenting and experiencing adventures as she does.

The novel draws from anthropology and folklore, delves into the ethics of telepathy and the metaphysics of time-travel, and sets the stage for intergalactic intrigue that continues through the sequels. There is action, comedy, and a slow-burn, vastly appealing romance between Grace and her magnetic counterpart, Dllenahkh, along with the growing camaraderie among a whole team of government and academics entirely dedicated to supporting the grieving remnants of a powerful civilization. It’s a beautiful story, but I think the main reason I return to it again and again is to spend more time with Delarua.

The Beekeeper’s Apprentice by Laurie R. King

Sometimes the way we feel about a book is tied to when we first read it. Rereading The Beekeeper’s Apprentice always reminds me of college and long book discussions with roommates, but even without those associations I think I would still find it a comfort read.

Mary Russell is a bereft teenager, alone and traumatized; her neighbor is a cranky, erudite, middle-aged man who happens to be the world’s greatest detective. Through training, early cases, and a cataclysmic confrontation with a vicious enemy, the book follows Russell and Holmes as they evolve into a relationship of equal partners. Along the way we get the classic Holmes paraphernalia—disguises, minute clues, smelly chemical experiments, explosions, unlikely escapes—as well as nineteen-teens London and Oxford.

It’s a fun ride (and definitely one of the inspirations for my approach to Holmesian elements in The Mimicking of Known Successes), and I think what makes such a comforting reread for me is the sense of Mary growing into her own strength and confidence—with a demanding but stalwart partner there to support her. There’s a scene in which Mary, returning home tired and late, has to decide on the basis of the smallest of hints whether to climb the wall of her building in a snowstorm. It’s a great example of how reading about uncomfortable adventures can make us feel cozier even as we enjoy the thrills—and it doesn’t hurt that afterwards there’s reliably a blazing fire, tea or maybe whiskey, and deductive reasoning as a digestif.

Swordheart by T. Kingfisher

This book is like a perfectly aligned D&D campaign, with exactly the right balance of adventure, travel, snarky companions, surprising creatures, and satisfying victories, with a lovely romance to make it even more fun.

Halla has just inherited a lot of money, making her the target of her unscrupulous in-laws. Fortunately, she learns that she’s also inherited a magic sword, which releases an enchanted man, Sarkis, to protect her. The task doesn’t seem too difficult at first—Halla’s in-laws are not up to the standard of the armies Sarkis has fought before, but as they search for a way to save Halla’s modest inheritance, they end up facing multiple complications, not the least of which is the cultural gulf between them.

Halla and Sarkis—and Zale and Brindle—have top-notch banter skills and a refreshingly practical approach to adventuring. There are plenty of bad people in this book, but there are also a lot of examples of care, community, and thoughtfulness from even brief side characters, not to mention an entire religion based around helping people as efficiently as possible. The entire book is a delight.

All Systems Red (really the whole Murderbot series) by Martha Wells

This last example probably seems like the unlikeliest to be comforting. It’s about a terrifying killing machine and also about not wanting to talk to anyone, ever and… honestly both of those are great? The killing machine part because of a strong sense of retributive justice and also competence porn, and the not wanting to talk to anyone because it’s just so relatable. The Murderbot series deals with capitalist exploitation and surveillance and the question of who gets to be a person, but underlying it all we have the safety net of knowing that Murderbot is very good at its job and that while we’re reading we don’t have to talk to anyone.

Murderbot is a security cyborg who managed to hack its way out of corporate control but is content to keep doing its job while watching lots and lots of media on the side until the researchers it’s protecting are threatened by uncalled-for attacks. Getting them out of the crisis means going beyond its job and, terrifyingly, figuring out that it might want something more than lots of shows to watch. I find Murderbot’s voice instantly comforting in its clarity, humor, and above all, familiarity.

Please share your favorite comfort reads in the comments. I’m always looking for more!

Buy the Book

The Mimicking of Known Successes

Buy Book

The Mimicking of Known Successes

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

Malka Older is a writer, aid worker, and sociologist. Her science-fiction political thriller Infomocracy was named one of the best books of 2016 by Kirkus, Book Riot, and the Washington Post. The Centenal Cycle trilogy, which also includes Null States (2017) and State Tectonics (2018), is a finalist for the Hugo Best Series Award of 2018.

The post Comfort Reading With Malka Older appeared first on Reactor.

It’s also weirdly comforting, which is another thing I am reluctant to confess. I do not generally find cop shows comforting, and the very idea of a fairy tale cop is gently hilarious to anyone who grew up on fairy tales, in which there are many things, but not usually cops. There are wolves and trolls and princes and witches and all manner of creatures, but at best there might be some sort of hapless authority figure who gets turned into a bear or something. (I’m using a loose definition of fairy tales here.)

But in each episode of Grimm, at least in the early and very episodic seasons, a fairy tale cop (who is also a regular cop) solves a crime generally committed by a person who is also a magical creature, of which Portland has a surprising abundance. (Bird people! Wolf people! Cat people! Spider people!) Sometimes the magical creature-people are misunderstood, sometimes they’re vicious, sometimes they’re just ordinary guys who make clocks and offer the fairy tale cop a beer. There is magic, and mundanity—and there is closure.

Obviously you can get closure, if that’s all you’re after, from any number of procedural shows, some of which rank much higher on the competence-porn index. (I recommend Elementary, as always.) But procedural + fairy tales + an occasionally accurate portrayal of the city in which one lives is a rare mix, and it is one so addictive to me, right now, that I had to ask why. What makes this alchemical blend so compelling? What makes it comforting to me in this moment? What makes any story comforting?

There are common elements to a lot of lists about comfort stories—happy endings, warm fuzzies, sweeping love affairs, lack of strife, familiarity, escapism—and I’ve written before about how those don’t often say “comfort” to me. When I want to escape and be comforted, I’ve sought out a specific kind of reassurance generally found in stories about people who are having a very bad time, a time much worse than anything I’ll ever have to deal with.

But it turns out that at a moment when my own life is full of uncertainty and anxiety, maybe I do want a certain kind of comfort. Not escape to somewhere strange, but a visit to somewhere familiar; not a story with a happy ending, necessarily, but one that offers both closure and change.

What I want is to be reminded that things can be different than they are right now.

The Night Circus, as it turns out, was also perfect for this. (Sometimes you really do save a book until exactly the moment when you need it.) I knew the book was about a circus and a love affair. I did not know it was also built out of other things I adore, among them the scent magic of Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab, the connection of a chosen and created family, and the transportive delights of immersive theater like Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More. There are countless other little signposts in this book to things that I love, from snow queens to labyrinths to Labyrinth to apple orchards, and, most of all, to the way a shared love can build a community. The circus is the circus; the people who love the circus make their own magical world, too. They are part of it. They help make it what it is.

Buy the Book

The Crane Husband

Buy Book

The Crane Husband

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

The comfort comes from remembering that all these things are still out there. All these things will be possible again someday. Gathering with fellow fans. Opening every drawer in the McKittrick Theater or following the actors of Sleep No More up and down the stairs. Seeing a small immersive theater production or meeting other BPAL fans at a con or finding a magical circus—or something like it—in a field outside the city.

A lot of things I would do in a “normal” world aren’t accessible to me right now, from going to crowded opening night movies to going to book events to going to cons. I know I’m not alone in this. And it turns out what comforts me is revisiting those things in a story: a circus, a concert, an epic journey, a chance meeting in a strange bar or a card reading in a coffee shop. What comforts me is watching the characters in Grimm traipse all over Portland—Portland of a decade ago, Portland when I might just wander into these bars and venues and coffee shops (though probably not the warehouses and caves) and catch some mysterious happening. It’s the Portland I used to visit, rather than the one I live in now. It’s still damp and raining. But in that past, more of us can go wherever we want, surround ourselves with strangers, find comfort in community and catharsis in unexpected places.

Comfort looks different to everyone, and feels different, too. Sometimes you want a hug, sometimes you want to slap anyone who gets near you. Sometimes you want epic drama and sometimes you just want a story in which a hyper-capitalist dystopian future (or present) hasn’t even been dreamt up yet. Comfort can, to me, feel too easy, like something to be wary of: Sometimes it’s hard to let go of all the other things we could be paying attention to, all the horrors happening while we’re comforting ourselves in pages.

But you can’t see everything all the time, or be aware of everything all the time, or catch every single bit of heartbreaking news. You have to rest, physically and mentally and emotionally. When you need that rest, maybe ask yourself: What does comfort look like to me? What book (or show, or movie) tells the story I need to hear right now? What promises do I want it to make for me? What do I need to be reminded of?

Books can open doors, but they can also close them, softly and firmly, when you need to leave the world outside for a little while.

Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.

The post What Makes a Story Comforting? appeared first on Reactor.

The following is a list of works—from fairy tales and post-apocalyptic comics to science fiction and children’s books—that distracted me during a recent bout of fever, along with stories I’ve turned to when I wanted to take a break from my life and lose myself in a feel-good world where I don’t have to overthink everything, where I can just sit back and let the words take over…

Stand Still, Stay Silent by Minna Sundberg

It’s 90 years in the future, almost a century since a “rash illness” broke out. Barring the Scandinavian countries, the world has been rendered uninhabitable because of the beasts, giants, and trolls that this illness produced. Into this “silent world” venture our protagonists: a crew of bored and desperate people looking for a change, adventure, or well, money, by hunting for books left behind by the countries the illness wiped out.

The crew’s journey and funny character dynamics aside, what I love most about Stand Still, Stay Silent are Sundberg’s sweeping landscape illustrations, which combine the beautiful and the eerie, revealing a hushed world full of abruptly abandoned cities and nature, with strange creatures lurking under the blanket of snow, the waters of a lake, or in the corridors of a supermarket. This contrast makes it a cozy and comforting tale that is perfect for slowing down and for binge-reading, which was somehow the very thing I needed when I was down with a fever a few months ago.

The webcomic began in 2013 and updates consistently every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. The first adventure finished in 2018 and we’re 460 pages into the second one, so there’s a lot of content to enjoy.

The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo

Kate DiCamillo’s homely fairy tale starts with the birth of a very tiny mouse with very big ears. But it also starts before that, when a rat living in the dark dungeons of a castle discovers light, and before that, when a girl is told again and again that no one cares what she wants, and even before that, when a princess loses her mother at a banquet. The Tale of Despereaux is the story of how all these people and light and darkness and revenge and love (and soup!) come together.

I read the book—which I’d initially ignored at a thrift shop—when I was much older than the intended audience. But despite that, it was the first book that made me feel quite so many things; I loved it so much that if my house were ever on fire, this is one of the first books I’ll rescue. It’s the ultimate comfort read for lonely days, days when you could do with a hug, a nice blanket, and a warm bowl of soup.

The Tea Dragon Society by Kay O’Neill (sometimes credited as Katie or K. O’Neill)

Imagine a world where tea leaves grow on the horns of dragons—leaves that store memories of the dragon and the people it loved—but the art of taking care of these dragons is disappearing. Within this unique world, O’Neill explores, with their colorful illustrations and honest dialogue (with some characters speaking in sign language) themes such as identity crisis, loss of memory and purpose, finding new purpose, and the realization that sometimes things don’t go as planned, but that doesn’t mean alternative outcomes cannot be just as fulfilling. While this may sound like heavy stuff, everything about these books—from the cheerful landscapes to the cozy tea-making rituals and the adorable, cuddly dragons—feels like a reassuring hug, like someone speaking comforting words that you didn’t realize you needed to hear.

Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman

One more children’s book, yes—but when it’s Neil Gaiman telling that story, the age of the reader becomes irrelevant. Because, honestly, what person wouldn’t want to go on a time-travel adventure with a dragon in a hot-air balloon every time they stepped out to buy milk? If you’re having a day when you’re not feeling great but also don’t have a lot of time to take a break to rest, this is the perfect book to pick up, or listen to—the audiobook is narrated by Gaiman himself and is barely an hour long.

The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Sometimes Mostly, life doesn’t make sense. For times when this feeling is particularly strong, Douglas Adams’s classic Hitchhiker books are a good distraction. They’re funny, they’re ridiculous, they’re philosophical, and they’re a weirdly emotional reminder of why this world is worth living in and protecting.

They’re also immensely reassuring—for, when you’re done reading and return to the real world, you’ll be glad that, as tough as this day might be to get through, at least you don’t have to save the entire universe.

The View from the Cheap Seats: Selected Nonfiction by Neil Gaiman

Okay, so this is not SFF but a book about SFF, among other things. Gaiman writes with honesty, kindness, and deep love, whatever the topic—these include his famous ‘Make Good Art’ speech, his credo on good and bad ideas and freedom of expression, portraits of authors and artists, and reflections on the books and events that have inspired him over the years. Reading this collection is like getting the chance to fangirl about books and movies and music alongside the author.

I flip through my copy and reread the quotes I’ve underlined every time I’m feeling uninspired or lost. Gaiman comes across to his readers as the kind of person who seems to understand you without ever having met you. It’s impossible to read this book and not feel excited about making and consuming art and reveling in all the marvelous things that humanity has produced, even if you’re not an artist yourself. As Caitlin Moran states in her cover quote, “If this book came to you during a despairing night, by dawn you would believe in ideas and hope and humans again.” And isn’t that a good feeling to have when you’re not feeling your best?

Originally published August 2021.

Ratika Deshpande’s (she/her) work has appeared in Flash Fiction Magazine and Every Day Fiction. She has also written for Submittable’s blog, Discover. She’s good at summarizing long conversations, better at finishing work before the deadline, and best at making bad jokes. She lives in New Delhi, India, and is currently pursuing a Bachelor’s in Applied Psychology.

The post 6 SFF Works to Brighten Gloomy Days appeared first on Reactor.

Keep reading, because I do actually think of some.

Children’s books, suggests one friend.

Ha ha, no. Apart from the fact that some of the scariest things I’ve ever read have been children’s books—Catherine Storr’s Marianne Dreams and William Sleator’s Interstellar Pig for example—I realised some time ago that I am never going to be able to read Louise Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy without crying. I mean I am never going to be grown up enough to get over it, there is no mature state in which I am still me where I will be able to read Ole Golly’s letter without bawling. Gary Schmidt, a children’s writer I discovered recently, is absolutely wonderful, but terrible, terrible things happen in his books, and it’s not even reliably all right at the end. He’s the person who made me think you have to earn your unhappy endings just as much as your happy ones. And William Alexander—again, terrific writer, terrible things happen.

There are some children’s books that almost qualify. One of my comfort reads is Arthur Ransome. He wrote a long series of books about kids messing about in sailboats on lakes in England in the 1930s, and nothing actually bad happens—except there’s a fog on the hills once, and there’s the time when the boat sinks in Swallowdale and John is so humiliated, and there is the scary bit where they get swept out to sea in We Didn’t Mean To Go To Sea. (And it’s the 1930s, so their father in the Navy is going to be in WWII, and every adult in the books is complicit in appeasement and there are terrible things happening in Germany already…) But just on the surface, thinking about that little sailboat sinking, it makes me think you have to have bad things to overcome or you have no story.

So how about picture books for tiny kids?

Nope. In Martin Waddell and Barbara Firth’s Can’t You Sleep, Little Bear? the Little Bear can’t go to sleep and the Big Bear consequently can’t settle down and read his book, and all this is because Little Bear is afraid of the dark. Being scared of the dark is a bad thing, even if it gets happily fixed by the end of the story. In Penny Dale’s The Elephant Tree the elephant gets sadder and sadder on his quest to find his tree, until the children make a tree for him and make him happy. Don’t even think about Dr. Seuss and the terrible anxiety of having your house turned upside down by the Cat in the Hat or being forced to eat icky things by Sam-I-Am. (I don’t believe he actually liked them. I used to lie like that all the time when forced to eat things as a kid.) Then there’s Raymond Briggs The Snowman, which confronts you with mortality and the death of friends, thank you very much no. When I think of the picture books that are actually fun to read, they all have conflict and bad things. They certainly come into my category of “all OK in the end,” but they definitely have bad things.

Incidentally, apart from the fact they’d be very boring stories, I think kids need those bad things to learn from, and sometimes those awful moments are the most vivid and memorable—there’s a moment in Susan Cooper’s The Grey King which will be with me always, and it’s a bad moment.

But there are some stories that qualify, I think.

Romance. Pretty much all genre romance is “everything is OK at the end” but bad things happen in the meantime. But some Georgette Heyer has plots that work because bad things seem about to happen and are averted—this is different from everything being all right in the end, the bad things never occur, they are no more than threats that pass over safely. Cotillion does this. Two people are separately rescued by the heroine from iffy situations that could potentially become terrible, but they don’t. I think this counts. (It’s funny too.) That makes me think of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey in which the worst thing that happens is somebody exaggerates and somebody else has to go home alone on a stagecoach…that’s really not very bad. Right up there with the bear who can’t go to sleep.

Then there’s “Good King Wenceslas.” Somebody notices an injustice and sets out to redress it and succeeds. (OK, the page gets cold, but that also gets instantly fixed.) Zenna Henderson’s “Love Every Third Stir” is a version of this, though what the story is about is discovering the magic. I’m sure there are also old clunky SF versions of this. I want to say Clarke’s Fountains of Paradise. But I think there are others: person invents thing, everything is solved. Mostly more sophisticated versions of this are “it creates new problems.”

Utopia—somebody visits utopia and it really is. So More’s Utopia and Bacon, and Callenbach’s Ecotopia and other early naive utopias of this nature. Which makes me think about Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge but the way that book works without being naive is to have the actual story be sad—the softball team loses, the boy doesn’t get the girl, the old man dies in a storm. The worst thing that happens is gentle regret, but that’s bad too. But check out older utopias.

And now, my one actual real solid in-genre example of a book where nothing bad happens!

Phyllis Ann Karr’s At Amberleaf Fair is about a far future where people have evolved to be nicer, and there’s a fair, and a woodcarver who can make toys come to life, and there is sex and love and nothing bad happens and everything is all right. It’s gentle and delightful and I genuinely really like this odd sweet little book, and unless I’m forgetting something I don’t think anything bad happens at all.

Originally published March 2020

Jo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published two collections of Tor.com pieces, three poetry collections, a short story collection and thirteen novels, including the Hugo- and Nebula-winning Among Others. Her fourteenth novel, Lent, was published by Tor in May 2019. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here irregularly. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal. She plans to live to be 99 and write a book every year.

The post In Search of Books in Which Nothing Bad Happens appeared first on Reactor.

So today, I’d thought I’d discuss some brands and flavors of instant noodle, then pair them with classic and contemporary SF/F works. In this way, I hope to share some love for these books and this magical food.

“Why are there so many
Folks who love ramen?
I know that lots of you do.
Ramen is filling
And perfect for chilling
And ramen is really cheap, too.

Some like the spicy, and some like the chicken
And some like to read when they eat–
I know we share it
The Ramen Connection
Our tasty, high-sodium treat!”

***

Maruchan Soy Sauce Flavor & Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon

I buy Maruchan for one of two reasons: either it’s cheap, or I am tired of Top Ramen, but don’t want to think too hard.

Maruchan Soy Sauce Flavor is perfect for those times in the pandemic when you’ve not only lost track of which COVID variant we’re on—you don’t even know what month we’re on.

On nights like this, pair Maruchan Soy Sauce Flavor with Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men. Forget variants of COVID—here are eighteen variants of humans: rising, falling, killing each other, losing their minds, finding them, to be once again crushed by despair.

Maruchan Soy Sauce flavor. Simple and clean. Every meal, individually packed. The noodles are sterile, the flavor packet is sealed, and everything goes into boiling water. When it’s done, you breathe in, think yes, you can smell.

You read about the next human species. They rise. They fall. As does the next.

How long has it been? You could be on a spaceship. You could be the last of your kind.

Will anyone remember you?

You take your first bite. You still have taste. You still have time.

Top Ramen Chicken Flavor & Your Favorite SF/F Paperbacks

I’ve eaten this all my life and will continue to do so. Sometimes, I don’t even notice when I’m making them. I can go years without Top Ramen Chicken Flavor, but one day, there they are.

I know what they taste like. I have a favorite style of bowl. I’ll add some green onion. An egg.

Why am I eating Top Ramen? Maybe I lost a teaching gig. Maybe I had a breakup. And now, in these COVID times, Top Ramen Chicken Flavor is as affordable and familiar as it’s always been.

Now, what to read? I suggest your favorite SF/F paperbacks. Mine are the Star Trek books. What are yours? Anyway, you know where they are—they’ve been with you since elementary school, dragged from one closet to another, maybe in the basement, or a small place on your bookshelf.

They’d probably be collectors’ items if they weren’t dog-eared and torn. My Star Trek #7 has water damage from when I got the bright idea that Captain Kirk taking on a freaking Greek god would make the perfect bathtub reading.

How long has it been since you’ve read them?

It seems like only yesterday, doesn’t it?

Cup (O’) Noodles Shrimp Flavor & George Lucas’ Stars Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (Director’s recut. Remastered. New scenes added. Han shoots second.)

Cup O’ Noodles was a special treat because the noodles came in their own cup (they were also more expensive than Top Ramen).

Cup O’ Noodles Shrimp Flavor was even more special because there were a couple or so freeze-dried shrimp that looked a little like broken Lucky Charms. And there were some dehydrated peas, carrots—and egg, I think.

But a few years ago, I noticed something terrible. Cup O’ Noodles was no more. Somewhere along the way, Nissin Foods decided to drop the “O’” and just call them “Cup Noodles”

WTF, Nissin? That’s like calling Flannery O’Connor “Flannery Connor.” Or The Story of O just “The Story of.”

Why don’t you just rename Top Ramen “TP Ramen” and sell it by the roll?

It’s like what George Lucas did to Star Wars (yes it was just “Star Wars”). Suddenly the barren landscape is full of squooshy aliens, the Death Star explodes more elegantly, and what is up with Greedo?

I know it’s not a book, but “Star Wars Episode IV: ‘Whatever the Newest Hope Is’” perfectly complements “Cup Noodles” for an evening spent railing at creators who can’t stop messing with our most cherished memories.

It was Han! Han shot first! And Cup O’ Noodles! Cup O’ Noodles!

Shrimp Flavor, please. And they still did Porkins wrong.

Nongshim Shin Ramyun & Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu

Yes, I have my usual noodles, and they are fine… usually.

But is it wrong to wonder how my fish cake and soft-boiled egg might taste in another bowl?

Nongshim Shin Ramyun is different from my usual noodle—packaged in rich and stylish red, and emblazoned with a bold 辛. Spicy, picante, hot—however one understands it, this noodle promises more than a nice lunch.

Nongshim Shin Ramyun is for those stretches of pandemic when I want temptation, obsession, and more than a hint of danger. Inside are two flavor packets. One holds a mélange of dried vegetables…

And the other? How much spice can I take? How much am I willing to endure?

Oh, but the satisfaction.

My pair for this is Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. Those of you who follow BL (Boys’ Love) probably know this manhua (or web novel, or anime, or live action drama). But to those unfamiliar with the story, Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation is a tale of lust, misunderstanding, seduction, redemption, and oh so much 辛.

Beautiful warrior musicians falling in love. Delicate doomed siblings. Exquisite spirits and demonic corpses. Badass mothers with purple snake whips. Incredible magic and action sequences and all the flowing hair and silk you can imagine.

Nongshim Shin Ramyun and Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation may challenge what you thought you preferred. They will enthrall you, enchant you—and may even lead you to a few temptations of your own.

Nissin UFO Yakisoba & Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! by Sumito Owara

A UFO? It’s a UFO! OMG! But why so quiet? Let’s pry open the hatch. Hmmm…the crew seems to be in some sort of suspended animation.

How to revive them? Ah—they have re-animation instructions on the side! Adjust for temperature, re-hydrate, leave them for 2 minutes and—OH NO! Tentacles!!!

No, wait—they’re noodles? Alien noodles! Flying Spaghetti Monster! We have to defend ourselves—it’s eat or be eaten! We have to—wait!

Why are these noodles so yummy? Why is the sauce so delicious? Why aren’t they fighting back?

Could this be a misunderstanding? Perhaps these aliens knew we weren’t ready to trust them, so they offered their lives as a sign of goodwill…

Nissin UFO Yakisoba seems designed for people like me who make up stories about their food. And so does Sumito Owara’s Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!

Three girls live in a postapocalyptic future, and all they want to do is make anime full of hope, new understanding, and dreams.

They draw pictures. They visit old buildings. They get laughed at. But they work—and work and work and work.

And they create robots, aliens, forgotten races under the sea.

Nissin UFO Yakisoba and Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! are for those nights when you are questioning the path you chose—a reminder that becoming you was never a choice to begin with.

Maruchan Gold & She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

Sure, it’s in GOLD packaging. Sure, it costs ten times more than regular Maruchan. Sure, some people will question your judgment, even call you ostentatious for purchasing “craft ramen noodles.”

And sure, people will whisper, play upon your insecurities.

But you know what? Screw them. You deserve the best. You are the best. And let no one stop you from attaining your radiance.

Maruchan Gold. Pair this with Shelley Parker-Chan’s incredible She Who Became the Sun. Blow upon the succulent noodles, so supple and delicate. Pull them tight, then dip them into the waiting, fragrant broth. Swirl them slowly before taking them, welcoming them completely into your mouth.

Yes. Yes.

A queer re-imagining of the birth of China’s Ming Dynasty, She Who Became the Sun is sensual, beguiling, yet stormy and sometimes cruel. But more than anything, this is a tale of determination, of the drive to overcome anything that stands between where one is and a future one knows they deserve.

Zhu Chongba and General Ouyang revel in their destinies and desires.

And so should you, my radiant Emperor. So should you.

Sapporo Ichiban Original Flavor & The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny

Effortless, delicious, sooo easy to finish. Sapporo Ichiban Original Flavor is not as popular as some of the everyday brands, and it costs a little more–but this ramen is why I fell in love with instant ramen in the first place.

Sapporo Ichiban Original Flavor is the good stuff. The noodles are a little chewier. The broth is a little more flavorful.

No other ramen connects with the better parts of my childhood in quite the same way.

As a companion, I recommend the first five books of Roger Zelazny’s The Chronicles of Amber (yes, I know that’s five books, but you can get a Sapporo Ichiban family pack). The first book, Nine Princes in Amber, introduces Prince Corwin, from a family of what are essentially royal demigods. Corwin struggles with his brothers to control Amber, the one true reality in an ocean of alternate Shadows.

The Chronicles of Amber were a revelation. For all their wacky, alternate-universe expanse (in one reality Corwin and his brother eat “Kentucki Fried Lizzard Partes”), each of Corwin’s adventures is rendered clearly, deeply, with insight and even love.

In the second book, The Guns of Avalon, there is a passage about a woman called Lorraine, in a land called Lorraine, and as Corwin loves and loses her, I can see the words and smell the pages without even needing to take the book from my shelf—because Zelazny so beautifully portrayed the weariness of trust and betrayal.

And even though I was much younger, I knew that I was very tired, as well.

And all I will ever be as a writer is one who tries to craft words that can give my readers the music and wonder that Zelazny’s words gave to me, right there.

Sapporo Ichiban Original Flavor. The Chronicles of Amber.

Yes. The good stuff.

Samyang Spicy Hot Chicken Flavor & The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

Warning: Samyang Spicy Hot is epic. This is not a ramen to eat lightly. The journey will not be without pain—sometimes agonizing beyond compare. However, it will also be satisfying and delicious—and don’t forget the lovely endorphin high.

What separates Samyang Spicy Hot from so many super spicy ramens is that its payoff—its amazing taste—is worth the agony.

And so, its companion can only be something as equally agonizing, epic, and rewarding: J.R.R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

With the first whiff of danger, this trilogy will match your ramen experience stride-for-stride—from the Gandalf’s smoke rings, to Moria and Durin’s Bane, to riding like Rohan, to the fiery final confrontation, as your precious ring is precariously perched over the molten crevices of Mt. Doom.

Yes, you’ll be covered in sweat like Gandalf. Yes, you’ll be screaming “You shall not pass!” But inside, you know that you will have to bear this burden this to the end.

Just watch your fingers, and don’t forget to scour the Shire, afterward.

Culley’s World’s Hottest Ramen & Marvel’s Iron Fist

Finally, looking at the packaging and marketing, I can just imagine the thinking that came up with Culley’s World’s Hottest Ramen.

Dude, those Chinese noodles are all right, but what if we take ours to the next level?

Yeah! Let’s kick it up a notch by making ours more extreme—Carolina Reapers, dude! The world’s hottest!

Then we slap a ninja on these bad boys—because fuck yeah ninjas!

Bro! Cash money! Fist bump! Fuck yeah!

This vaguely Asian-inspired instant noodle was recently discontinued. Judging from the reviews, I suspect this was a case of the makers not comprehending that most of us eat instant ramen because it’s cheap and pleasant—not because it lacks taste, character, or any conceivable purpose, other than to test our endurance and tolerance for pain.

If you can find it, serve this with Marvel’s vaguely Asian-inspired and recently discontinued Iron Fist. This is not a book, but a TV series about a billionaire trust fund kid who is also a Buddhist monk and Kung Fu expert—except the creators ditched the Buddhism and Kung Fu and added racism and sexism because why the hell not?

Spend the night with these before you send someone an unsolicited dick pic. The pandemic has spawned a lot of questionable decisions, and this a good pairing for those times when you need reminding that even the dumbest ideas can seem pretty reasonable when it’s late and your baseball cap is on too tight.

Buy the Book

Light From Uncommon Stars

Buy Book

Light From Uncommon Stars

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

Originally published February 2022

Ryka Aoki (she/her) is a poet, composer, teacher, and novelist whose books include He Mele a Hilo and two Lambda Award finalists, Seasonal Velocities and Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul. Ryka’s work has appeared or been recognized in publications including Vogue, Elle, Bustle, Autostraddle, PopSugar, and Buzzfeed. Her poetry was featured at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, and she was honored by the California State Senate for “extraordinary commitment to the visibility and well-being of Transgender people.”

The post Comfort Reading With Comfort Food appeared first on Reactor.

A little over a month ago, I started playing a game called Cozy Grove. Cozy Grove is like Animal Crossing without the capitalism. (Mostly.) You still buy things and craft things and get flowers and trees and a lot of stuff. (There are cats, and they really like stuff.) But helping the ghost bears who live on the island of Cozy Grove is the heart of the game, and it makes a huge difference in how it feels. You run their errands, find their stuff, listen to their stories (or conspiracy theories), help them figure out who they were and what they need. It’s a game of small kindnesses and big feelings, a place where figuring yourself out, mistakes and all, is key.

In that way, it’s kind of like a Becky Chambers book. It’s a world where flawed people deserve love and connection, where kindness and hope spring eternal, where you can make interspecies friendships and find adventures through small gestures. These are the kind of worlds I want to live in, right now—worlds that give us permission to be human, in the sense that to be human is to be flawed and imperfect and full of messy feelings that don’t always have anywhere to go. To want and need and love and struggle and hope on a human scale, one that rarely concerns the fate of worlds or the actions of a chosen one. To walk through a world—ours or another—more gently.

This feeling always existed in Chambers’ work, but has reached new heights in her Monk and Robot books. The premise is simple: in a thriving, harmonious world, Sibling Dex has a bit of a crisis. “Sometimes,” A Psalm for the Wild-Built begins, “a person reaches a point in their life when it becomes absolutely essential to get the fuck out of the city.”

It’s a beautiful, wonderful city—the only City—but Dex needs something new. They decide to become a tea monk, traveling around listening to people’s problems and serving them tea. Out in the wild world, Dex encounters something truly unexpected: a robot named Mosscap. Robots, in this world, gained sentience centuries ago and took off into the wilderness. They haven’t spoken to humankind since. But Mosscap has returned to ask one simple and difficult question for humanity: What do people need?

What do people need? Dex doesn’t know. Dex doesn’t even know what they themself want, exactly. (Dex is extremely relatable.) In Psalm, Dex and Mosscap have a lot of conversations about people and the world we live in. Things that we take for granted, things that humanity has, generally speaking, really fucked up—these things are fascinating to the robot, who is “wild-built,” made out of the parts of previous generations of robots. Mosscap has never experienced people. Mosscap has never experienced a lot of things. Everything is fascinating. Everything is wonderful. This could, if you were Sibling Dex, get a little exhausting. But Chambers knows how to pace a story, knows how to give just enough of Mosscap’s endless curiosity so that we’re reminded just how many things there are to be curious about—how many things we walk past, in any ordinary day, and yet don’t understand.

In the second Monk and Robot book, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, Dex and Robot make their way back to the towns of Panga so that Mosscap can pose his question to other people. What do they need? People need help with chores and tasks. They need small things, mostly. Practical things. This society trades for necessities and people look out for each other in ways big and small. The harder question is one Mosscap doesn’t really know how to frame: What else do you need when your basic needs are met? Do you really need more? What kind of more?

And what does a robot need?

Little things happen in these books, and they feel momentous. Mosscaps learns about the world’s trading system. It marvels at trees, reads everything, stops for every flower. On a very good day, I can feel a little like Mosscap, walking around my neighborhood with an eye out for every hummingbird, every new bloom of lilac, every creaking crow and stranger’s garden; the way one house has a plastic pony tied up out front and another offers a “creature swap,” a shelf full of small toys for the local kids to trade. On a bad day I just see the weeds and the gloom, dripping gutters and mossy roofs, potholes and low-hanging clouds.

This specificity, this understanding of the small, often intangible things that make a day good or bad, hopeful or bleak, has run through Chambers’ work since The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. I picked up The Long Way up for a quick brush-up and before I knew it, I was 150 pages in and entire re-engrossed in the lives of Rosemary Harper and the rest of the crew of the Wayfarer, a ship full of people (of several species) with a job to do and a lot to talk about. The galaxy, in this series, is not a place colonized and dominated by humans. We’re just kind of … there, among all the other, more powerful species. We are small and argumentative and unimportant. We are not saving the universe.

It’s really very refreshing. Haven’t we ordinary folks got enough problems of our own? And aren’t those problems—the personal ones, as well as the big ones—valid and meaningful? Do we not deserve adventures and found families and new kinds of freedom even if we aren’t “heroes” and superstars? Every one of Chambers’ books says yes, both for her characters and for people, in general. Every story is an epic; every person is a galaxy.

And then there’s To Be Taught, If Fortunate, a book that will very gently tug at your every heartstring until they’re all singing and you feel like you’re vibrating at a whole new frequency. It follows the journey of a quartet of astronauts who blasted off from Earth in a future wracked by climate change, but also shaped by collaboration. Their company is funded by everyone who believes in space travel, from the very wealthy down to the people who just donated their beer money to the cause. Ariadne, Jack, Elena, and Chikondi are on a mission to visit planets, study their native species while leaving no footprint, then travel to the next planet to do it all again.

It’s simple. It’s endlessly complicated. The book is narrated by Ariadne, an engineer, who’s speaking to us—an “us” she can’t really define or know—from an uncertain future. It’s a story, but it’s also a report on their mission, and it becomes more or less personal at different times, more or less intimate, more or less focused on the science or the people. But throughout, it’s a story about connection, grief, isolation, and how feeling trapped and lost in your own life can feel like being stuck inside a spaceship that’s being gnawed on by screaming alien rats.

Where The Long Way was very focused on its crew, To Be Taught is as much about everyone who isn’t aboard the Merian. It’s about those left behind, those whose fates are unknown. Us, basically: the people of the past, whose future is still a big looming question mark. What will we choose for this world, which is still the only world we have, no matter how many other amazing planets are out there? How do we hold onto hope in the face of the unknown?

Chambers is a genius at recontextualizing what matters, what’s hard, what affects us, what we have to endure and who we are when we come through it. A spaceship is a home; a ship’s crew is a family; a robot is the only being capable of asking us a question we might have forgotten to ask ourselves. And part of the reason she can explore all these things so deftly is that she creates worlds in which just being ourselves is a given. Everyone is different—species, sexual desires, cultures, habits, quirks, appearances—but none of these things are issues. Often, they aren’t even defined. People just are who they are. In these worlds, we don’t have to explain ourselves. But we still need to understand ourselves. Her work asks its own question: What would a better world look like? How can we work toward it?

“I write the stories that I need to hear,” Chambers said in an interview last year. “The harder things in my own life are, the more likely I am to lean into writing about people who grow and heal.”

Buy the Book

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

Buy Book

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

And they’re not just stories about people who grow and heal, but stories that center that growth and healing. The Long Way is about growing up and growing into yourself (among other things); To Be Taught is about facing loss and grief and finding ways to heal and hope and keep growing despite everything. The Monk and Robot books feel like fables about a kind of growing and healing that goes beyond ourselves and into our worlds and communities—making Chambers’ work all one process, a growing up and out, a way of becoming more ourselves, but still human, and still with all our flaws.

These stories make me feel like it’s okay: okay to be human, okay to be confused, okay to make mistakes and missteps on the endless journey of figuring shit out. It’s okay to be human, with all that entails: ignorance and selfishness and secrets and shame right alongside love and empathy and curiosity and the promise that there is always something new, something more out there. There’s always a new way to understand who and what we are.

If there is one thing I feel slightly weird about in saying that Chambers’ books give us permission to be human, it’s that word: human. It’s a key part of her storytelling that we aren’t the center of things—not the planet, not the universe, not the story of this world. But there’s humanity, and then there’s the idea of “being human,” which to me means a lot of complicated and messy things: being fallible, self-aware, imperfect, hopeful, and full of potential. Part of what makes Chambers’ work so expansive, so open and loving and welcoming and big, is that none of these traits are specific to humanity itself. Robots, AIs, alien species, even plants and weird screaming alien rats are all treated with the same respect—and awe. Every new life form is a source of wonder to the scientists of To Be Taught. Every tree is a source of wonder to Mosscap. It’s amazing that any of these things exist.

It’s amazing every single one of us exists. To say that might sound impossibly hokey, like a sci-fi greeting card. But viewed through Chambers’ sharp eye and rigorous mind, it becomes something else—something that encompasses the role of science, the need for clarity and kindness and inquisitiveness, and the simple fact of human smallness, the fact that we’re just clinging to this rock for a brief time. It becomes wise and reassuring, a reminder as big as the galaxy and as small and comforting as a hot cup of tea.

It’s amazing that we exist, no matter how flawed, no matter how imperfect, no matter how many times we stumble. It’s amazing what we, as a species, still might do—and still might mess up. Hopefully we’ll learn to be wrong. We’ll learn to step back and sit down. We’ll learn, eventually—along with Mosscap, along with Dex, along with all the troubled bears of Cozy Grove—what we actually need.

Originally published July 2022

Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.

The post The Refreshing Hopefulness of Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot Books appeared first on Reactor.

Today, we turn our sights to Travis Baldree’s Legends & Lattes, a fascinating viral indie success that bypasses the “epic” lane of fantasy and sets off on its own road, leaving readers with warm and fuzzy feelings from dawn to dusk.

Of course, Legends & Lattes isn’t the first cozy fantasy to carve out a niche in the SFF scene. Still, the novel certainly took book Twitter and other bookish spaces by storm, scratching our collective itch to enjoy a satisfying story without dire drama or world-ending stakes.

Indeed, it often feels as if we’re swimming in grim, dangerous tales. House of the Dragon treats lives—particularly the lives of those outside of the ruling class—as disposable inconveniences. Rings of Power requires the world to be saved from an evil force of evil that is evil because it’s evil. (I’m being glib, of course, but there’s an inkling of truth to it.) At the same time, world-shaking stakes can brew intense personal stories, and I flock to them just as much as the next SFF fan.

And yet, sometimes SFF fans want to kick back and breeze through a delightful tale without worrying about what dark power lurks in the shadows waiting to destroy everything we love. Travis Baldree has treated us to such a story in Legends & Lattes, which makes the book a unique and potentially enchanting candidate for adaptation.

The Story So Far

Travis Baldree, audiobook narrator and erstwhile game developer, first published Legends & Lattes as an independent release. He completed the draft during National Novel Writing Month (lovingly abbreviated NaNoWriMo by those who follow and participate), and the final product would eventually become his debut novel.

Buy the Book

Legends and Lattes

Buy Book

Legends and Lattes

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

Legends & Lattes soon garnered the attention of reviewers, creators, and other SFF authors. Seanan McGuire praised the book on Twitter, giving it a nice boost in readership. Legends & Lattes became the proverbial talk of the town in some circles, and Baldree’s success careened into an eventual publishing deal from Tor. A new edition of Legends & Lattes just hit bookstores, and includes a never-before-published additional in-universe story.

Baldree is already hard at work on a second book. Same universe, different characters, though he promises a few cameos. Thus far, there’s no evidence pointing to a Legends & Lattes adaptation, but Baldree’s cozy fantasy deserves the on-screen treatment. I’ll tell you why in just moment, but if you need if you need a quick primer on the book itself, check out my Legends & Lattes review at The Quill To Live.

Cozy Coffee Shop Vibes

The story begins when Viv, an Orc Barbarian, hangs up her axe and opens a coffee shop. Armed with a Scalvert’s Stone (a mystical object removed from the head of a monstrous, spider-like Scalvert Queen), Viv travels to Thune and buries the Stone underneath her newly purchased lot. Placing a Scalvert’s Stone near intersecting ley lines is said to bring luck and fortune, and Viv hopes it will translate to success for her new cafe endeavor.

Viv’s business venture introduces her to helpful comrades. Tandri, a succubus, and Thimble, a rattkin baker, are among the charming cast.

Baldree’s novel follows Viv and her pals as they deal with the day-to-day operations required of a local coffee shop. There’s an overtone of humor to the proceedings because the fantasy village of Thune hasn’t ever seen, smelled, or heard of coffee… Marketing, therefore, becomes quite a challenge. A local protection racket provides a looming conflict, but Legends & Lattes smartly avoids getting bogged down in the local politics of Thune. Instead, Baldree weaves an elegant yarn about a protagonist seeking to redefine herself and reframe her ideas of success.

Legends & Lattes strikes just the right tone with the story it’s choosing to tell. It’s “a novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes,” as the original tagline states. As a limited animated series, I think it would make for perfect lazy Sunday viewing, watching episode after episode (maybe with a warm mug of coffee and some pastries to set the mood).

TV viewers are fickle, though, and the story might require minor tweaks to make it more viable for a streaming platform. Not to worry: I have a few ideas that wouldn’t compromise the narrative’s cozy integrity…

Expanding On Excellence

For Legends & Lattes to become a screen project and succeed, Baldree must be deeply involved in the adaptation. A few expansions to the source material would make sense to bring the story to a TV audience.

First, I’d recommend juxtaposing Viv’s former life with her entrepreneurial coffee-shop journey. We get tidbits of her former life in the book, mainly in the prologue and via run-ins with former battle companions. To understand Viv’s ambitions in opening the cafe, we’d need a more extended look at her adventures in walloping and slicing up monsters.

Now, I’m not suggesting we split the show between a hyper-violent depiction of Viv’s former life and the present in which she pursues her heartwarming second career. Instead, I think the story would benefit from the occasional scene that shows us—with careful restraint—the moments that motivated the change and drove Viv to pursue her passion. We don’t even need to see the aforementioned walloping and slicing. Perhaps flashbacks to quiet conversations huddled around the campfire would do, or to a tense interaction with a rival raiding party. Baldree drops plenty of glimpses into Viv’s past in the novel. An adaptation could widen our perspective and better understand her as a character.

Beyond Viv as the central protagonist, an adaptation could further explore the Legends & Lattes cast and their relationships. (Super minor spoiler, but there’s a subtle romance brewing alongside the coffee, and the show could delve into that element of the story to a greater extent…)

More Pendry the shy bard? Cal the hob carpenter? Sign me up. A Legends & Lattes adaptation would be a wonderful opportunity to expand on everything that’s great about Baldree’s already-impeccable narrative.

Vibrant, Colorful, Animated

If you haven’t picked up on it yet, I hope any eventual adaptation of Legend & Lattes will be animated. Baldree’s novel bursts with color and impressive diversity, and a strong team of animators could breathe magical life into the world it creates. Top off the brew with some top-notch voice actors, and you’ve got a recipe for success.

On the other hand, imagine the budget that would be required for Viv and Tandri costumes. Thimble would need to be animated anyway, so a live-action version seems like a non-starter. Legends & Lattes deserves an all-star animation team behind the wheel.

Outlook: It’s A Longshot

I earned my writing chops in the gambling industry, so I know when a bet is spicy. I’d say this one’s pretty dang spicy, in my opinion—but an adaptation sometime in the near future is not a complete impossibility.

At this point, I think Legends & Lattes needs some time to steep. Now that the new edition is available, I imagine it’ll find new readers and there will be a resurgence of buzz. Perhaps the expanded fanbase will pine for an adaptation, and studios will take notice… But whether or not Legends & Lattes eventually makes it to our screens, I can assure you of one thing: the book itself is absolutely worth a read. Let me know your thoughts on a potential animated or live-action version, who you’d cast, and which elements and arcs you’d most like to see expanded!

A version of this article was originally published in September 2022.

Cole Rush writes words. A lot of them. For the most part, you can find those words at The Quill To Live or on Twitter @ColeRush1. He voraciously reads epic fantasy and science-fiction, seeking out stories of gargantuan proportions and devouring them with a bookwormish fervor. His favorite books are: The Divine Cities Series by Robert Jackson Bennett, The Long Way To A Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, and The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune.

The post Legends & Lattes Is the Warm, Cozy Fantasy We All Need Right Now appeared first on Reactor.

“There’s a special class of comfort fictions whose appeal is that as badly as my day might be going, at least it’s not as bad as the protagonists’ day. Threads, for example.”

This might seem counterintuitive (or perhaps not: a lot of people enjoyed Garbage’s “Only Happy When It Rains” and perhaps you are one of them). I assure you that this coping mechanism definitely works. Not only that, but speculative fiction authors have your back in the matter of stories that start off bleak before rapidly becoming bleaker.

Consider these five tales.

The Last Man by Mary Shelley (1826)

Set in a 21^st century oddly similar to the 19^th in which the book was written, Shelley’s apocalyptic novel begins optimistically enough. The British monarchy falls. England is a republic once more. Despite the usual sort of foreign wars plaguing the world on the other side of the channel, it seems England at least can hope for political progress in the days to come.

This is a sadly misplaced hope.

The characters’ inability to avoid personal entanglement in overseas conflicts are the least of their problems. A new and deadly pathogen is sweeping the world. Just as the Black Death made it across the channel, so too does the new plague. Unlike the Black Death, the plague does not leave survivors in its wake. Will our heroes be able to find some sufficiently isolated hiding place to wait out doomsday? Consider the title of the work….

“All Summer in a Day” by Ray Bradbury (1954)

This very much pre-Mariner 2 version of Venus is a tropical world continually beset by nearly endless rainstorms. Having never seen the sun, children raised on Venus do not appreciate what they are missing. Earth-born Margot does, remembering the blue skies of the planet of her birth.

The important term is “nearly endless.” Every seven years the skies briefly clear. Margot may be stuck on Venus but at least she and her classmates will be able to see blue sky and direct sunlight, if only for a moment. At least, Margot could, if her classmates were not beastly little brutes who pick exactly the worst moment to lock Margot in a closet.

Zorachus by Mark E. Rogers (1986)

From the author who brought us the light-hearted Samurai Cat parodies comes a tale in which pious, kind-hearted wizard Zorachus is dispatched to Khymir, the world’s wickedest city. Zorachus is very nearly a living saint. Victory is assured! Although not for Zorachus.

The people of Khymir embrace and embody every possible variation of depravity, debauchery, and cruelty. They might seem ideal candidates for conversion to virtue. However, they prove far more adept at convincing naïve Zorachus to embrace temptation than the saint is at resisting temptation.

Divided by Infinity by Robert Charles Wilson (1998)

Life’s many calamities failed to kill Bill Keller…or did they? His reward for surviving sixty years is bereavement: Bill Keller lives in a Toronto now sad and barren after the recent death of his wife, Lorraine. Grief brings leads him to contemplate suicide, which Keller resists…or does he?

Lorraine’s former employer, Zeigler, takes pleasure in the fact that simple survival delivers one to an increasingly science fictional universe. Zeigler does not appreciate just how true that is. Bill Keller will receive a very personal education in the implications of the Many Worlds model, which delivers survival whether or not one wants it…but also death in uncountable variations, as well as endless, inescapable isolation.

Cascade by Rachel A. Rosen (2022)

Political divisions, climate change and the sudden return of magic delivered the death blow to the United States of America, now collapsed into warring dystopian states. Calamity for Americans is a godsend for smug Canadians. Unlike poor America, Canada’s democratic institutions proved sufficiently robust to weather the 21^st century’s crises.

Dispassionate observers might point out to self-congratulatory Canadians that the Titanic kept afloat for more than two hours after hitting the iceberg. The Party might believe it is Canada’s natural ruling party, the embodiment of “peace, order and good government,” but it is mistaken. Prime Minister Patrice Abel has never seen an embarrassing scandal into which his uncontrolled libido could not propel him. The Party’s success is thanks to political wizard Ian Mallory and his prophetic gifts.

Mallory can see all futures. What he does not share with his allies is that all of those futures are terrible. He cannot guide the Party to victory. He cannot protect Canada from its own native-born fascists. Indeed, he cannot even save himself. All he can hope for is the least-bad choice from a wealth of terrible options.

***

No doubt those of you who enjoy this sort of reveling in doom have your own favourites, works not mentioned here. Feel free to point out the publications I overlooked. Comments are, as ever, below.

In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021 and 2022 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.

The post Five Stone-Cold SFF Bummers That Might Make You Feel Better About Your Own Life appeared first on Reactor.

A little over a month ago, I started playing a game called Cozy Grove. Cozy Grove is like Animal Crossing without the capitalism. (Mostly.) You still buy things and craft things and get flowers and trees and a lot of stuff. (There are cats, and they really like stuff.) But helping the ghost bears who live on the island of Cozy Grove is the heart of the game, and it makes a huge difference in how it feels. You run their errands, find their stuff, listen to their stories (or conspiracy theories), help them figure out who they were and what they need. It’s a game of small kindnesses and big feelings, a place where figuring yourself out, mistakes and all, is key.

In that way, it’s kind of like a Becky Chambers book. It’s a world where flawed people deserve love and connection, where kindness and hope spring eternal, where you can make interspecies friendships and find adventures through small gestures. These are the kind of worlds I want to live in, right now—worlds that give us permission to be human, in the sense that to be human is to be flawed and imperfect and full of messy feelings that don’t always have anywhere to go. To want and need and love and struggle and hope on a human scale, one that rarely concerns the fate of worlds or the actions of a chosen one. To walk through a world—ours or another—more gently. 

This feeling always existed in Chambers’ work, but has reached new heights in her Monk and Robot books. The premise is simple: in a thriving, harmonious world, Sibling Dex has a bit of a crisis. “Sometimes,” A Psalm for the Wild-Built begins, “a person reaches a point in their life when it becomes absolutely essential to get the fuck out of the city.”

It’s a beautiful, wonderful city—the only City—but Dex needs something new. They decide to become a tea monk, traveling around listening to people’s problems and serving them tea. Out in the wild world, Dex encounters something truly unexpected: a robot named Mosscap. Robots, in this world, gained sentience centuries ago and took off into the wilderness. They haven’t spoken to humankind since. But Mosscap has returned to ask one simple and difficult question for humanity: What do people need?

What do people need? Dex doesn’t know. Dex doesn’t even know what they themself want, exactly. (Dex is extremely relatable.) In Psalm, Dex and Mosscap have a lot of conversations about people and the world we live in. Things that we take for granted, things that humanity has, generally speaking, really fucked up—these things are fascinating to the robot, who is “wild-built,” made out of the parts of previous generations of robots. Mosscap has never experienced people. Mosscap has never experienced a lot of things. Everything is fascinating. Everything is wonderful. This could, if you were Sibling Dex, get a little exhausting. But Chambers knows how to pace a story, knows how to give just enough of Mosscap’s endless curiosity so that we’re reminded just how many things there are to be curious about—how many things we walk past, in any ordinary day, and yet don’t understand.

Buy the Book

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

Buy Book

A Prayer for the Crown-Shy

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

In the second Monk and Robot book, A Prayer for the Crown-Shy, Dex and Robot make their way back to the towns of Panga so that Mosscap can pose his question to other people. What do they need? People need help with chores and tasks. They need small things, mostly. Practical things. This society trades for necessities and people look out for each other in ways big and small. The harder question is one Mosscap doesn’t really know how to frame: What else do you need when your basic needs are met? Do you really need more? What kind of more? 

And what does a robot need?

Little things happen in these books, and they feel momentous. Mosscaps learns about the world’s trading system. It marvels at trees, reads everything, stops for every flower. On a very good day, I can feel a little like Mosscap, walking around my neighborhood with an eye out for every hummingbird, every new bloom of lilac, every creaking crow and stranger’s garden; the way one house has a plastic pony tied up out front and another offers a “creature swap,” a shelf full of small toys for the local kids to trade. On a bad day I just see the weeds and the gloom, dripping gutters and mossy roofs, potholes and low-hanging clouds. 

This specificity, this understanding of the small, often intangible things that make a day good or bad, hopeful or bleak, has run through Chambers’ work since The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet. I picked up The Long Way up for a quick brush-up and before I knew it, I was 150 pages in and entire re-engrossed in the lives of Rosemary Harper and the rest of the crew of the Wayfarer, a ship full of people (of several species) with a job to do and a lot to talk about. The galaxy, in this series, is not a place colonized and dominated by humans. We’re just kind of … there, among all the other, more powerful species. We are small and argumentative and unimportant. We are not saving the universe.

It’s really very refreshing. Haven’t we ordinary folks got enough problems of our own? And aren’t those problems—the personal ones, as well as the big ones—valid and meaningful? Do we not deserve adventures and found families and new kinds of freedom even if we aren’t “heroes” and superstars? Every one of Chambers’ books says yes, both for her characters and for people, in general. Every story is an epic; every person is a galaxy.

And then there’s To Be Taught, If Fortunate, a book that will very gently tug at your every heartstring until they’re all singing and you feel like you’re vibrating at a whole new frequency. It follows the journey of a quartet of astronauts who blasted off from Earth in a future wracked by climate change, but also shaped by collaboration. Their company is funded by everyone who believes in space travel, from the very wealthy down to the people who just donated their beer money to the cause. Ariadne, Jack, Elena, and Chikondi are on a mission to visit planets, study their native species while leaving no footprint, then travel to the next planet to do it all again.

It’s simple. It’s endlessly complicated. The book is narrated by Ariadne, an engineer, who’s speaking to us—an “us” she can’t really define or know—from an uncertain future. It’s a story, but it’s also a report on their mission, and it becomes more or less personal at different times, more or less intimate, more or less focused on the science or the people. But throughout, it’s a story about connection, grief, isolation, and how feeling trapped and lost in your own life can feel like being stuck inside a spaceship that’s being gnawed on by screaming alien rats. 

Where The Long Way was very focused on its crew, To Be Taught is as much about everyone who isn’t aboard the Merian. It’s about those left behind, those whose fates are unknown. Us, basically: the people of the past, whose future is still a big looming question mark. What will we choose for this world, which is still the only world we have, no matter how many other amazing planets are out there? How do we hold onto hope in the face of the unknown?

Chambers is a genius at recontextualizing what matters, what’s hard, what affects us, what we have to endure and who we are when we come through it. A spaceship is a home; a ship’s crew is a family; a robot is the only being capable of asking us a question we might have forgotten to ask ourselves. And part of the reason she can explore all these things so deftly is that she creates worlds in which just being ourselves is a given. Everyone is different—species, sexual desires, cultures, habits, quirks, appearances—but none of these things are issues. Often, they aren’t even defined. People just are who they are. In these worlds, we don’t have to explain ourselves. But we still need to understand ourselves. Her work asks its own question: What would a better world look like? How can we work toward it?

“I write the stories that I need to hear,” Chambers said in an interview last year. “The harder things in my own life are, the more likely I am to lean into writing about people who grow and heal.” 

And they’re not just stories about people who grow and heal, but stories that center that growth and healing. The Long Way is about growing up and growing into yourself (among other things); To Be Taught is about facing loss and grief and finding ways to heal and hope and keep growing despite everything. The Monk and Robot books feel like fables about a kind of growing and healing that goes beyond ourselves and into our worlds and communities—making Chambers’ work all one process, a growing up and out, a way of becoming more ourselves, but still human, and still with all our flaws. 

These stories make me feel like it’s okay: okay to be human, okay to be confused, okay to make mistakes and missteps on the endless journey of figuring shit out. It’s okay to be human, with all that entails: ignorance and selfishness and secrets and shame right alongside love and empathy and curiosity and the promise that there is always something new, something more out there. There’s always a new way to understand who and what we are. 

If there is one thing I feel slightly weird about in saying that Chambers’ books give us permission to be human, it’s that word: human. It’s a key part of her storytelling that we aren’t the center of things—not the planet, not the universe, not the story of this world. But there’s humanity, and then there’s the idea of “being human,” which to me means a lot of complicated and messy things: being fallible, self-aware, imperfect, hopeful, and full of potential. Part of what makes Chambers’ work so expansive, so open and loving and welcoming and big, is that none of these traits are specific to humanity itself. Robots, AIs, alien species, even plants and weird screaming alien rats are all treated with the same respect—and awe. Every new life form is a source of wonder to the scientists of To Be Taught. Every tree is a source of wonder to Mosscap. It’s amazing that any of these things exist. 

It’s amazing every single one of us exists. To say that might sound impossibly hokey, like a sci-fi greeting card. But viewed through Chambers’ sharp eye and rigorous mind, it becomes something else—something that encompasses the role of science, the need for clarity and kindness and inquisitiveness, and the simple fact of human smallness, the fact that we’re just clinging to this rock for a brief time. It becomes wise and reassuring, a reminder as big as the galaxy and as small and comforting as a hot cup of tea.

It’s amazing that we exist, no matter how flawed, no matter how imperfect, no matter how many times we stumble. It’s amazing what we, as a species, still might do—and still might mess up. Hopefully we’ll learn to be wrong. We’ll learn to step back and sit down. We’ll learn, eventually—along with Mosscap, along with Dex, along with all the troubled bears of Cozy Grove—what we actually need.

Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.

The post Becky Chambers’ Books Give Us Permission to Be Human appeared first on Reactor.

Of course, what exactly constitutes a comfort read will vary from person to person but here are five that reliably make me smile. Perhaps you will smile as well.

Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons (1932)

Orphaned at nineteen, Flora Post embodies “every art and grace save that of earning her own living.” Without any other means at hand, she goes to live with distant relatives: the Starkadders, whose homestead, Cold Comfort Farm, is in the depths of rustic Sussex.

Flora intends to earn her living. The rural melodramas of such luminaries as Mary Webb (Gone to Earth) assure Flora that her unfortunate rural relatives must languish under a myriad of troubles that their simple rustic minds are incapable of solving. Indeed, each Starkadder struggles with issues so profound as to seem parodic. Flora, on the other hand, is a very modern, very organized girl. What seem like insurmountable challenges for her kinfolk are to her simple challenges easily solved.

Readers who know Cold Comfort Farm only from the otherwise exemplary 1995 film adaptation—”There’ll be no butter in hell!”—may be surprised to learn that Cold Comfort Farm was a science fiction novel of sorts. The 1932 text references the Anglo-Nicaraguan wars of ’46, establishing that the book takes place in what is now an alternate history.

The Butterfly Kid by Chester Anderson (1967)

In a 1970s where the Summer of Love never ended, Greenwich Village is home to a diverse and colourful counterculture. Artists, authors, pornographers, and retired spies call the Village home; the squares are pleased to let them have it. It is very nearly an American utopia, save for Sean’s butterflies.

What protagonist Chester Anderson takes for a skillful magic trick is closer to true magic: naïve Sean can create butterflies through sheer act of will. Sean is no super-powered Child of the Atom but rather a beneficiary of Laszlo Scott’s reality pills. This would be a marvelous development except for the fact Scott is a scoundrel. He is not doling out reality pills out of charity. Rather, Scott is doling out reality pills because he is working for malevolent aliens.

It’s only a matter of time before reality pills end up in the digestive tract of some paranoid whose hallucinations will depopulate Earth. All that stands between humanity and certain doom is an assortment of hippies, whose courage may not be backed up by any sort of competence.

Mirabile by Janet Kagan (1991)

The human colonists who settled Mirabile came armed with cutting-edge biotechnology. Hidden within the genes of their animals was the engineered potential for each creature to spawn other species. It was a marvel of compactness and efficiency that provided the colonists with a far greater number of species than could have otherwise fit into their generation ships.

The problem with this ingenious arrangement was two-fold. Firstly, a mishap erased the records of which animals had what potentials. Secondly, the conditions on Mirabel provoked unforeseen emergent properties in the technology. Rather than enjoying a bounty of lifeforms, the colonists often found themselves surprised, inconvenienced, and endangered by the so-called Dragon’s Teeth.

Annie Jason “Mama Jason” Masmajean is a roving trouble-shooter, investigating each Dragon’s Teeth outbreak and determining how best to deal with them. Each scientific mystery is more delightful than the last!

Aria by Kozue Amano (2001–2008)

Human efforts to terraform Mars have been what might be described as excessively successful. Not only has Mars been transformed into a verdant life-bearing world, the once Red Planet, now named Aqua, has been transmuted from world desert to a global ocean.

Akari Mizunashi arrives on Aqua, determined to become a gondolier (or “undine,” as they are known in her adopted city of Neo-Venezia). One does not become an undine simply by wishing it so; long, arduous training waits for Akari. However, this is a case where not only is the prize worth the effort, so are the experiences Akari and her fellow Undines in training will have along the way.

Natsume’s Book of Friends by Yuki Midorikawa (2005–present)

Friendless Reiko Natsume could have mastered social skills. However, being possessed of prodigious spiritual skills, she chose a different path. She stalks supernatural beings, steals their names, and binds them to her. Each being whose name is inscribed in Reiko’s Book of Names is compelled to do her bidding. Close enough to friendship for Reiko.

This would be a grim tale if the protagonist were Reiko. The protagonist is in fact her orphaned grandson Takashi. As friendless as Reiko, Takashi’s reaction on discovering the nature of the Book of Names is not to embrace slavery as a substitute for friends. Instead, the kind-hearted young man sets out to free his grandmother’s victims, regardless of the personal danger that the angry, newly freed supernatural beings might pose to their victimizer’s grandson.

***

There are of course many works I could have mentioned (Legends & Lattes, for example, and A Psalm for the Wild-Built as well, were only passed over because Cole Rush beat me to them in Five Fantasy Cafes I’d Love To Visit.). As I said, which works are feel-good depends very much on the reader’s tastes and no doubt many of you have favourites you feel I should have mentioned. Comments are, as ever, below.

In the words of fanfiction author Musty181, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll “looks like a default mii with glasses.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis) and the 2021 and 2022 Aurora Award finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, and is surprisingly flammable.

The post Five Feel-Good Comfort Reads appeared first on Reactor.

People have used the term sad banger before, but no one has put it better. It’s the contradiction, the nuance, the two-to-five minutes of holding grief and fury, sadness and delight, loss and hope together in your head, the feelings stitched together with song lyrics that, more often than not, beg to be sung. It is, as Abdurraqib notes, Robyn’s “Dancing on My Own.” For me, it’s an obscure B-side by a Scottish band that I put on when I just need a straight shot of feelings: an anthem that feels like a ballad, a song that’s somehow a door opening and closing at once. And thanks to Abdurraqib’s piece, it’s also now Pronoun’s perfect five-track shot of pandemic anxiety, OMG I MADE IT.

But: Can you sustain a sad banger? Can a whole album be a sad banger? And—you knew this was coming—can a book?

It is a truth of sad bangers that I can’t write while listening to them. I tried to start this column listening to my own personal favorite sad banger subgenre of anthemic songs with heartbreaking lyrics: to that Idlewild B-side, to the Mountain Goats’ “This Year” or Sleater-Kinney’s “Get Up” or the entirety of Frightened Rabbit’s The Midnight Organ Fight and Worriers’ Survival Pop. To Metric’s perfectly bittersweet “The Shade” and Bloc Party’s “Hunting for Witches.” (Whether you think these are sad bangers or not is beside the point. Sad bangers are the ultimate “your mileage may vary.”)

But what makes a sad banger a sad banger is, maybe, that you have to give yourself up to it. You can’t do something else while a sad banger is on. You have to let its feelings become your own.

Or, as Abdurraqib put it:

…it gets beyond binary emotions and unlocks a multilayered fullness that might, depending on the song, involve dancing, and crying, and longing, and stumbling out of some dive bar midtune to text or call the person you probably shouldn’t.

Unless you are reading in bars while drinking so much that reading gets challenging, you’re probably not doing that last one mid-book. You might be, though. I have more than once found a moment in a book that so echoed across time that I wanted to text people I hadn’t spoken to in years. But trying to explain it would be too much work, especially in a text. Turning the page is much easier.

It doesn’t often work to use the language of music for books, or vice versa. A few things cross the road from one to another, some phrases about language and rhythm and shape. A sad banger of a book does something different than a sad banger of a song. The nuance, the complication, the sense of heartbreak and joy, the coexisting emotions: those are all there. But how to translate the way that lyrics and music work together into a world that’s just prose?

Plot and character arc, maybe. Story and feelings. Prose and emotion. Somewhere, somehow, there has to be a contrast (not necessarily a conflict) between what happens—in the story or on the page—and the way it feels. An epic fantasy where you’re crying at the end and you can’t put your finger on why. A blistering revenge story where the protagonist has to face the fact that everything she’s done has failed to make her feel any better. A devastating story written with uncommon grace.

(You can definitely find sad bangers in movies. The Empire Strikes Back is a classic sad banger. Rogue One wanted to be a sad banger but it didn’t quite get it right, and the close-but-yet-so-farness of it all was more frustrating than plain failure might have been. The Fall remains my favorite movie, and it is absolutely a sad banger. Everything Bryan Fuller makes has sad banger moments. Battlestar Galactica? Sad banger. The Magicians adaptation? Nothing but.)

I’ve been reading other people’s thoughts on sad bangers, and they are as varied as the songs we’d each list within the category. Some people think they have to be well-known, but to me that contradicts another key point of sad bangers: Only the rarest among them are universal. (See again: Robyn.) I like to think that we can all agree that The Stone Sky is royalty among sad banger books. Code Name Verity, which destroys readers with just six words. The Last Unicorn. The fact that the elves, in The Lord of the Rings, are going to diminish and go into the West. As a kid I was outraged: Let the elves stay! Elves are cool as shit and I want them around! As an adult, the fading says something different, something more complicated and difficult.

Buy the Book

Face

Buy Book

Face

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

But most sad book bangers are sad, and bang, for you alone in some way that no other reader will ever feel. They’ll come close; another reader’s sad banger path will intersect yours sometimes, but not at every point. I’ve tried to explain why Catherynne Valente’s The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two is high on my list of personal sad banger stories. It’s a book for kids, and yet its lesson (It’s a terrible magic that everyone can do—so do it. Call yourself what you wish to become) is one I have to keep trying and failing and trying to learn. And it’s a book that says you don’t have to go “home” to some mundane adulthood. You can, as September does, cry and blush and change. But not everyone will get that from Valente’s story about a girl and a pregnant moon. (I would like for them to! But who can say what else people bring to that book when they sit down to read it?)

And sometimes, a sad banger is undefinable, unexplainable: you know it when you read it. When I finished Jordy Rosenberg’s Confessions of the Fox, I was sobbing. I didn’t really understand why. The end wasn’t sad. It was exultant and glorious and free, and I wanted that story for everyone, wanted everyone to see all of the things Rosenberg had done with characters and ideas and footnotes! beautiful, plentiful footnotes! and storytelling and reclaiming and sex and joy. But there are layers and depths and darknesses and rich contrasts in story and telling, and a framing story with a sense of threat and control that feels familiar and close. Confessions is an escape, and when it was over I wanted to go back in. Maybe I was simply crushed because it was over and I didn’t know what to do with myself. It’s a banger. I was sad.

Sad bangers are a color and a shape and a feeling and an itch, all those things that aren’t songs or stories or books, but that we nevertheless wind up associating with them. They’re that feeling like you can’t possibly contain what you’re reading, like it’s going to burst out of you in some kind of opposite-chestbuster situation, rainbows and sparklers and perfectly shaped teardrops instead of murdery little aliens. A feeling like you need to dance, in your chair or out of it. It’s so hard to put that into words. But I bet you know a song or a story that feels like it.

Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.

The post Crying in the Book Club: Can a Book Be a Sad Banger? appeared first on Reactor.

Some readers may be thinking “post-apocalyptic” does not sound fun, living as we do in a world where each day is a race between new Covid variants, economic derailments, climate changes, and the possibility that the last thirty years were merely a misleading detour that left us back on the path to thermonuclear exchange.

BUT… don’t be deceived by “post-apocalyptic”! Ashinano’s YKK (as the manga is sometimes nicknamed) is tremendously life-affirming fun. There is a reason YKK’s era is called the Age of the Calm Evening.

Though there is, of course, the small matter of the end of the world as we know it.

Exactly what went wrong decades earlier is unclear, but the consequences are obvious. Ocean levels rose dramatically, with the effects on coastal infrastructure one would expect. The human total fertility rate appears to have dipped well below replacement levels. YKK’s Earth is a quieter, damper world than ours. This is not a crisis to which characters react. It is the background they accept as normal.

However, while humanity appears to uninterested in doing anything to forestall extinction, our legacy will be more than dramatic climate change, enigmatic ruins, and genetically engineered plants. Before their fall, humans engineered androids.  Those androids are more than able to carry the torch of human civilization long after humans have vanished.

Alpha is one such android. Having inherited a tea house from her long-vanished master, she is content to provide a tranquil tea-drinking experience to the community around her. Alpha is effectively immortal, but the humans around her are not. Thus, Alpha is a fixture in an ever-changing community. Children become adults and move away. Adults unwilling to move will age and eventually die.

Buy the Book

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou: Omnibus Collection 1

Buy Book

Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou: Omnibus Collection 1

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• IndieBound
• Target

This might sound like a downer, but it’s not. Whatever went wrong went wrong decades ago. The period in which YKK is set may be an era of decline but it is a very gentle decline, one without the usual tension, fear, or violence one expects from post-apocalypse societies. Life’s necessities can still be obtained and if the process is more onerous than it was before the oceans rose, very few people remember that era. They’re no more alarmed at Amazon’s absence than we are by the curious lack of decent matter replicators in our homes.

Also calming: the author has a fine eye for landscapes. Few humans means fewer impediments to scenery porn, such as lavishly depicted rustic vistas and the drowned ruins of today’s cities. Humans might just get in the way.

Finally, the characters are an endearing lot, even if some of them will remain on stage long after others have retired to their graves. Ashinano doesn’t need to resort to violence-driven drama because the daily interactions between the characters are more than enough to hold the reader’s interest.

YKK is a welcome alternative to the usual post-apocalyptic stories and once August rolls around—if August rolls around—you will be able to verify this for yourself.

In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and the Aurora finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award, is eligible to be nominated again this year, and is surprisingly flammable.

The post Yokohama Kaidashi Kikō: Your New Favorite Comfort Read About the Post-Apocalypse appeared first on Reactor.

Since it’s always been a food that I make alone, ramen doesn’t trigger pangs of loneliness and isolation—and that means I can read and slurp and enjoy the pandemic away.

So today, I’d thought I’d discuss some brands and flavors of instant noodle, then pair them with classic and contemporary SF/F works. In this way, I hope to share some love for these books and this magical food.

“Why are there so many
Folks who love ramen?
I know that lots of you do.
Ramen is filling
And perfect for chilling
And ramen is really cheap, too.

Some like the spicy, and some like the chicken
And some like to read when they eat–
I know we share it
The Ramen Connection
Our tasty, high-sodium treat!”

***

Maruchan Soy Sauce Flavor & Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon

I buy Maruchan for one of two reasons: either it’s cheap, or I am tired of Top Ramen, but don’t want to think too hard.

Maruchan Soy Sauce Flavor is perfect for those times in the pandemic when you’ve not only lost track of which COVID variant we’re on—you don’t even know what month we’re on.

On nights like this, pair Maruchan Soy Sauce Flavor with Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men. Forget variants of COVID—here are eighteen variants of humans: rising, falling, killing each other, losing their minds, finding them, to be once again crushed by despair.

Maruchan Soy Sauce flavor. Simple and clean. Every meal, individually packed. The noodles are sterile, the flavor packet is sealed, and everything goes into boiling water. When it’s done, you breathe in, think yes, you can smell.

You read about the next human species. They rise. They fall. As does the next.

How long has it been? You could be on a spaceship. You could be the last of your kind.

Will anyone remember you?

You take your first bite. You still have taste. You still have time.

Top Ramen Chicken Flavor & Your Favorite SF/F Paperbacks

I’ve eaten this all my life and will continue to do so. Sometimes, I don’t even notice when I’m making them. I can go years without Top Ramen Chicken Flavor, but one day, there they are.

I know what they taste like. I have a favorite style of bowl. I’ll add some green onion. An egg.

Why am I eating Top Ramen? Maybe I lost a teaching gig. Maybe I had a breakup. And now, in these COVID times, Top Ramen Chicken Flavor is as affordable and familiar as it’s always been.

Now, what to read? I suggest your favorite SF/F paperbacks. Mine are the Star Trek books. What are yours? Anyway, you know where they are—they’ve been with you since elementary school, dragged from one closet to another, maybe in the basement, or a small place on your bookshelf.

They’d probably be collectors’ items if they weren’t dog-eared and torn. My Star Trek #7 has water damage from when I got the bright idea that Captain Kirk taking on a freaking Greek god would make the perfect bathtub reading.

How long has it been since you’ve read them?

It seems like only yesterday, doesn’t it?

Cup (O’) Noodles Shrimp Flavor & George Lucas’ Stars Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (Director’s recut. Remastered. New scenes added. Han shoots second.)

Cup O’ Noodles was a special treat because the noodles came in their own cup (they were also more expensive than Top Ramen).

Cup O’ Noodles Shrimp Flavor was even more special because there were a couple or so freeze-dried shrimp that looked a little like broken Lucky Charms. And there were some dehydrated peas, carrots—and egg, I think.

But a few years ago, I noticed something terrible. Cup O’ Noodles was no more. Somewhere along the way, Nissin Foods decided to drop the “O’” and just call them “Cup Noodles”

WTF, Nissin? That’s like calling Flannery O’Connor “Flannery Connor.” Or The Story of O just “The Story of.”

Why don’t you just rename Top Ramen “TP Ramen” and sell it by the roll?

It’s like what George Lucas did to Star Wars (yes it was just “Star Wars”). Suddenly the barren landscape is full of squooshy aliens, the Death Star explodes more elegantly, and what is up with Greedo?

I know it’s not a book, but “Star Wars Episode IV: ‘Whatever the Newest Hope Is’” perfectly complements “Cup Noodles” for an evening spent railing at creators who can’t stop messing with our most cherished memories.

It was Han! Han shot first! And Cup O’ Noodles! Cup O’ Noodles!

Shrimp Flavor, please. And they still did Porkins wrong.

Nongshim Shin Ramyun & Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu

Yes, I have my usual noodles, and they are fine… usually.

But is it wrong to wonder how my fish cake and soft-boiled egg might taste in another bowl?

Nongshim Shin Ramyun is different from my usual noodle—packaged in rich and stylish red, and emblazoned with a bold 辛. Spicy, picante, hot—however one understands it, this noodle promises more than a nice lunch.

Nongshim Shin Ramyun is for those stretches of pandemic when I want temptation, obsession, and more than a hint of danger. Inside are two flavor packets. One holds a mélange of dried vegetables…

And the other? How much spice can I take? How much am I willing to endure?

Oh, but the satisfaction.

My pair for this is Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation, by Mo Xiang Tong Xiu. Those of you who follow BL (Boys’ Love) probably know this manhua (or web novel, or anime, or live action drama). But to those unfamiliar with the story, Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation is a tale of lust, misunderstanding, seduction, redemption, and oh so much 辛.

Beautiful warrior musicians falling in love. Delicate doomed siblings. Exquisite spirits and demonic corpses. Badass mothers with purple snake whips. Incredible magic and action sequences and all the flowing hair and silk you can imagine.

Nongshim Shin Ramyun and Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation may challenge what you thought you preferred. They will enthrall you, enchant you—and may even lead you to a few temptations of your own.

Nissin UFO Yakisoba & Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! by Sumito Owara

A UFO? It’s a UFO! OMG! But why so quiet? Let’s pry open the hatch. Hmmm…the crew seems to be in some sort of suspended animation.

How to revive them? Ah—they have re-animation instructions on the side! Adjust for temperature, re-hydrate, leave them for 2 minutes and—OH NO! Tentacles!!!

No, wait—they’re noodles? Alien noodles! Flying Spaghetti Monster! We have to defend ourselves—it’s eat or be eaten! We have to—wait!

Why are these noodles so yummy? Why is the sauce so delicious? Why aren’t they fighting back?

Could this be a misunderstanding? Perhaps these aliens knew we weren’t ready to trust them, so they offered their lives as a sign of goodwill…

Nissin UFO Yakisoba seems designed for people like me who make up stories about their food. And so does Sumito Owara’s Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!

Three girls live in a postapocalyptic future, and all they want to do is make anime full of hope, new understanding, and dreams.

They draw pictures. They visit old buildings. They get laughed at. But they work—and work and work and work.

And they create robots, aliens, forgotten races under the sea.

Nissin UFO Yakisoba and Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! are for those nights when you are questioning the path you chose—a reminder that becoming you was never a choice to begin with.

Maruchan Gold & She Who Became the Sun by Shelley Parker-Chan

Sure, it’s in GOLD packaging. Sure, it costs ten times more than regular Maruchan. Sure, some people will question your judgment, even call you ostentatious for purchasing “craft ramen noodles.”

And sure, people will whisper, play upon your insecurities.

But you know what? Screw them. You deserve the best. You are the best. And let no one stop you from attaining your radiance.

Maruchan Gold. Pair this with Shelley Parker-Chan’s incredible She Who Became the Sun. Blow upon the succulent noodles, so supple and delicate. Pull them tight, then dip them into the waiting, fragrant broth. Swirl them slowly before taking them, welcoming them completely into your mouth.

Yes. Yes.

A queer re-imagining of the birth of China’s Ming Dynasty, She Who Became the Sun is sensual, beguiling, yet stormy and sometimes cruel. But more than anything, this is a tale of determination, of the drive to overcome anything that stands between where one is and a future one knows they deserve.

Zhu Chongba and General Ouyang revel in their destinies and desires.

And so should you, my radiant Emperor. So should you.

Sapporo Ichiban Original Flavor & The Chronicles of Amber by Roger Zelazny

Effortless, delicious, sooo easy to finish. Sapporo Ichiban Original Flavor is not as popular as some of the everyday brands, and it costs a little more–but this ramen is why I fell in love with instant ramen in the first place.

Sapporo Ichiban Original Flavor is the good stuff. The noodles are a little chewier. The broth is a little more flavorful.

No other ramen connects with the better parts of my childhood in quite the same way.

As a companion, I recommend the first five books of Roger Zelazny’s The Chronicles of Amber (yes, I know that’s five books, but you can get a Sapporo Ichiban family pack). The first book, Nine Princes in Amber, introduces Prince Corwin, from a family of what are essentially royal demigods. Corwin struggles with his brothers to control Amber, the one true reality in an ocean of alternate Shadows.

The Chronicles of Amber were a revelation. For all their wacky, alternate-universe expanse (in one reality Corwin and his brother eat “Kentucki Fried Lizzard Partes”), each of Corwin’s adventures is rendered clearly, deeply, with insight and even love.

In the second book, The Guns of Avalon, there is a passage about a woman called Lorraine, in a land called Lorraine, and as Corwin loves and loses her, I can see the words and smell the pages without even needing to take the book from my shelf—because Zelazny so beautifully portrayed the weariness of trust and betrayal.

And even though I was much younger, I knew that I was very tired, as well.

And all I will ever be as a writer is one who tries to craft words that can give my readers the music and wonder that Zelazny’s words gave to me, right there.

Sapporo Ichiban Original Flavor. The Chronicles of Amber.

Yes. The good stuff.

Samyang Spicy Hot Chicken Flavor & The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien

Warning: Samyang Spicy Hot is epic. This is not a ramen to eat lightly. The journey will not be without pain—sometimes agonizing beyond compare. However, it will also be satisfying and delicious—and don’t forget the lovely endorphin high.

What separates Samyang Spicy Hot from so many super spicy ramens is that its payoff—its amazing taste—is worth the agony.

And so, its companion can only be something as equally agonizing, epic, and rewarding: J.R.R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings.

With the first whiff of danger, this trilogy will match your ramen experience stride-for-stride—from the Gandalf’s smoke rings, to Moria and Durin’s Bane, to riding like Rohan, to the fiery final confrontation, as your precious ring is precariously perched over the molten crevices of Mt. Doom.

Yes, you’ll be covered in sweat like Gandalf. Yes, you’ll be screaming “You shall not pass!” But inside, you know that you will have to bear this burden this to the end.

Just watch your fingers, and don’t forget to scour the Shire, afterward.

Culley’s World’s Hottest Ramen & Marvel’s Iron Fist

Finally, looking at the packaging and marketing, I can just imagine the thinking that came up with Culley’s World’s Hottest Ramen.

Dude, those Chinese noodles are all right, but what if we take ours to the next level?

Yeah! Let’s kick it up a notch by making ours more extreme—Carolina Reapers, dude! The world’s hottest!

Then we slap a ninja on these bad boys—because fuck yeah ninjas!

Bro! Cash money! Fist bump! Fuck yeah!

This vaguely Asian-inspired instant noodle was recently discontinued. Judging from the reviews, I suspect this was a case of the makers not comprehending that most of us eat instant ramen because it’s cheap and pleasant—not because it lacks taste, character, or any conceivable purpose, other than to test our endurance and tolerance for pain.

If you can find it, serve this with Marvel’s vaguely Asian-inspired and recently discontinued Iron Fist. This is not a book, but a TV series about a billionaire trust fund kid who is also a Buddhist monk and Kung Fu expert—except the creators ditched the Buddhism and Kung Fu and added racism and sexism because why the hell not?

Spend the night with these before you send someone an unsolicited dick pic. The pandemic has spawned a lot of questionable decisions, and this a good pairing for those times when you need reminding that even the dumbest ideas can seem pretty reasonable when it’s late and your baseball cap is on too tight.

Buy the Book

Light From Uncommon Stars

Buy Book

Light From Uncommon Stars

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

Ryka Aoki (she/her) is a poet, composer, teacher, and novelist whose books include He Mele a Hilo and two Lambda Award finalists, Seasonal Velocities and Why Dust Shall Never Settle Upon This Soul. Ryka’s work has appeared or been recognized in publications including Vogue, Elle, Bustle, Autostraddle, PopSugar, and Buzzfeed. Her poetry was featured at the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center, and she was honored by the California State Senate for “extraordinary commitment to the visibility and well-being of Transgender people.”

The post The Ramen Connection: Books, Noodles, and Living the Pandemic Life appeared first on Reactor.

First of all, a quick etymology note, for the nerdiest among us, to help clarify the kinds of stories I’m thinking about: the word “apocalypse” comes from a Greek term which means to uncover or to reveal something hidden. To some extent, it’s more about the ways in which things change than the way they end, necessarily (but don’t those often feel the same when you’re going through them?). I’m drawn to end-of-the-world stories that aren’t just about big budget special effects wreaking havoc and grimdark cinematic escapades of inescapable doom—stories about how we face apocalyptic changes, and what comes after.

I do have friends who are binging horror movies and stories right now—the grimmer and darker the better—and have been for the past year, in a kind of cathartic masochism I can barely wrap my head around. Then again, I have other friends who want nothing to do with anything dark or frightening, who seek comfort and the gentlest of escapism, who are avoiding scary stories like the… well, you know. Both are equally valid reactions: it’s been a strange time—probably the strangest year in most of our memories! But personally, I find that there’s a kind of catharsis that comes with these types of survival-in-dark-times stories that you can’t quite get anywhere else.

I admit that I love The Day After Tomorrow mainly because one group of protagonists takes shelter in a library (and then proceed to ponder the inflammatory properties of different philosophers)—as a librarian, I enjoy those scenes more than I necessarily care for the movie’s plot or believability. But there is something interesting about watching various characters grappling with the weather and its impact, as superstorms wreak havoc like never before. They (just like those of us watching at home) can’t help trying desperately to stay ahead of the next twist—the human brain is always scrambling to figure out what’s next, based on patterns and situations that we’ve seen before, or imagined we’ve seen. It’s a good mechanism for survival when it works: that’s why we do it.

And that right there gets at the heart of the appeal of these stories: they give our brains practice runs. They let us mentally and emotionally prepare for the worst in a relatively low-stakes way. (Literally? Rule #1: Cardio.) Hands up, everyone that has at least joked with their friends about their zombie apocalypse survival plan. (Go up the stairs—and then destroy the stairs!) And while there are certainly works in which no one survives, that kind of nihilistic horror is relatively rare and generally seems to sink out of the pop culture psyche fairly quickly; as a general rule those types of stories are emotionally impactful, but they ultimately don’t give our minds anything to work with. We need the stories that show us that there’s a light, however small, at the end of the ordeal. We need the sense that there might be some solution to the overwhelming problem or crisis facing the protagonists. Fiction gives us practice dealing with huge paradigm shifts, which, notably, are much more fun to grapple with when they’re fictional…

Let’s take a look at a less conventional apocalypse story—one which nevertheless shines a light on some of the same ideas. Jojo Rabbit, if you haven’t seen it, is a story of a young German boy who, in the midst of World War II, wants to be a Nazi for reasons he himself is not entirely clear on. The framing of most WWII stories allows us to address them from a historical perspective, but Jojo Rabbit gives us Elsa, a Jewish teenager hiding in the walls of Jojo’s family home—a character who is clearly facing the end of her world, struggling to understand why she is still here and what to do with herself if she survives. Rosie (Jojo’s mother and Elsa’s rescuer) stands defiant in the face of overwhelming odds, and she teaches the two young people in her care how, even when you think you can’t survive, you can and must still plan for survival. She teaches them to focus on what lies beyond this dark and fearful moment, to live for the time when the skies finally clear and you see a new day.

Buy the Book

A Half-Built Garden

Buy Book

A Half-Built Garden

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

And we need that. Whether facing something like an overwhelming global crisis or a more intimate, personal disaster, our minds have to be able to reach into a version of the future when we survive. That kind of thinking is a muscle, and it takes practice, especially when you’re afraid… but it’s something that you can, again, practice safely within the bounds of fictional stories.

Cory Doctorow’s novel Walkaway, again, isn’t a standard apocalypse narrative. In the book, the ultra-rich enjoy lives of extravagant luxury, and in response, more and more people have embraced the “walkaway” lifestyle, turning their back on “normal” behavior and refusing to participate in the economy, capitalism, or any part of the social structure that’s become so grossly oppressive. The rich are threatened with their own extinction, flipping the script and giving us a chance to see the changes from the other side, or underside (where I think, after all, most of us reside). If these people can turn their backs on the system and live happily with no one at the top of the food chain, then how can the ultra-rich prove that they deserve to be where they are? The status quo is irreparably broken, and the paradigm shifts are coming for “default reality.”

Doctorow’s writing leans heavily into thought experiment, which seems to drive the story more than plot at times, but that’s useful for our purposes because the characters’ philosophies are upended time and again, through massive shifts in technology as well as shifts in the cultural mindset. Doctorow also chooses to move away from conventional, pessimistic apocalyptic storytelling tropes and instead borrows from sociological studies that show that people generally *don’t* turn on each other during disasters. In fact, disasters tend to bring out some of our best behavior, a phenomenon that has surprised people again and again. That’s the best and brightest part of Walkaway: it’s a vision of the world in which, over and over, no matter what changes, people have each other’s backs, people rebuild communities, people choose forgiveness and altruism over greed. Most of the time, people help each other.

Even so, sometimes terrible things happen. Uncontrollable, huge events occur and leave us reeling in their aftermaths. Naomi Kritzer’s story “So Much Cooking!” is the coziest, scariest story I’ve read recently. (I discovered it after her post about it early last year and have compulsively reread it several times. It might be the perfect case for comfort-reading disaster stories!) Lots of apocalypse stories are about flash and bang, filled with events hurtling forward at insane speeds. “So Much Cooking!” gives us something else: a focus on the mundane, the endless waiting, the preposterous (okay, not so much anymore) notion that a lot of survival is…boring. It’s a continuous slog of day-to-day, monotonous endurance when you find yourself sometimes coping, and sometimes sinking into despair, and mostly just coasting and dazed. That should be a relief compared to facing flood or fire…but that daily grind is damn hard, too! Kritzer’s story acknowledges that even the “easy” parts of getting by can be difficult.

The found family that protagonist Natalie creates in “So Much Cooking!”, though, provides a solution to that difficulty. By keeping the kids fed and entertained, she finds a way to get herself through her own boredom and fear.

The thing that connects all of these works—and, in my opinion, ties all the best apocalypse-focused stories together—is the importance of the bonds that we have, or make, with each other. We can’t predict the future (or even the weather, some days, no matter how advanced the technology gets). But we can make plans for survival—not with the goal of being the last man standing, but with the hope of building a community with each other. Hard times are inevitable, but the one thing that remains consistent are the sparks of hope we get from each other, and the family we find or make.

Perhaps at this point you can already see the light coming back; from my far northern latitude here in Alaska, it’s more than a metaphor as the days slowly lengthen. What will you uncover? Perhaps with some luck and a little wisdom, we’ll learn and grow more than we imagined we could at the start of this long year. Keep thinking your way through, keep planning for survival, and hold tight (even if the hugs are virtual for now) to the people who spark your hope. And of course, please share any stories that bring you comfort along the way…

Originally published in March 2021.

Rachel Ayers lives in Alaska, where she writes cabaret shows, daydreams, and looks at mountains a lot. She has a degree in Library and Information Science which comes in handy at odd hours, and she shares speculative poetry and flash fiction (and cat pictures) at patreon.com/richlayers.

The post Finding Comfort in the (Fictional) Apocalypse appeared first on Reactor.

Pandemic okay is a very specific kind of okay. It means, “Technically things are Fine yet nothing is fine.” Pandemic okay means something different for everyone, especially for people who were in precarious positions before this all happened.

In the face of “pandemic okay,” it’s easy to make some guesses about why I want a certain kind of read right now. How everyone exists within this kind of “okay”—or outside of it—is deeply individual. For me, on a reading level, it’s been a narrative about-face, a shift from the space-stress stories I wanted last year to a desire for stories about interiority, about people being okay with themselves. And these books feel hard to come by. 

Here is a short and absolutely incomplete list of things the protagonists of my favorite fantasy books have done:

• Saved the world from the lord of death.
• Saved the world from monsters from beyond.
• Saved the land from a wicked king. (Many wicked kings in many books.)
• Saved the world from an invading host of monsters.
• Saved the world from an invading host from another world.
• Saved as much of the world as possible from total disaster.
• Fulfilled a prophecy and saved the world. 
• Defeated a deadly spirit and saved the world.

You get the picture. The world-saving isn’t always specified as the whole world, but existence as the characters know it is threatened in some way, and they either have to or are the only ones who can save it. I love a good save. I love drama and high stakes and the impossible tasks that only a few people could possibly pull off. But right now, I want so little of that.

I have a Helen Oyeyemi quote written on a post-it on the wall by my desk: “I like the entire drama of whether the protagonist is going to be OK inside herself.” This, I thought when I read it. This is what I want to read. 

You can have this drama of the self inside a story about saving the world; the books that can manage both are excellent. But lately I want things ticked down a notch, or several notches. Sometimes the world-saving is still there, but it hovers on the periphery, but almost incidental. Sometimes there’s a big mystery but it’s not as big as Oyeyemi’s question: Will the protagonist be okay inside herself? 

Buy the Book

A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Buy Book

A Psalm for the Wild-Built

Buy this book from:

• Amazon
• Barnes and Noble
• iBooks
• IndieBound
• Target

Where I run into trouble is when I want this question asked and answered in a fantasy setting. I want it in a world with magic and maybe dragons, with all the intense worldbuilding of epic fantasy; I want it taken fantasy-seriously. There are a lot of this kind of story to be found in the magical borderlands between fantasy and litfic, and I adore these books—the Oyeyemis, the Kelly Links, the Aimee Benders and Ruth Ozekis and Karen Russells; Quan Barry’s We Ride Upon Sticks and Madeline Miller’s Circe. I’ve found some in SF, too: Sarah Pinsker’s novels, Becky Chambers’ work, and Marissa Levien’s claustrophobic and terrifying The World Gives Way, among others. In SF, technology can provide the scale; the human crises can still be personal.

Does magic inherently raise the stakes? If we have magic, do we have to have conflict and power-based crises on a major scale? I know, technically, the answer is no. There is a whole small library’s worth of Patricia A. McKillip books that demonstrate that magic can exist and a book’s focus can still be low-key. Even Wicked, famous as it is, is about rewriting the Wicked Witch into her own story—not a figure out of nightmares but just a girl (albeit a green one) seen through the lens of a mythos she wants no part of. 

But I want more.

I don’t like to call these small-stakes or low-stakes books, because the stakes of our own lives can feel anything but small or low. Maybe just personal-stakes books. Maybe they’re simply character-driven, though that can apply to so much. A friend recommended the thoroughly enjoyable The Ten Thousand Doors of January, which I liked a lot but felt had just slightly larger stakes than I wanted. A Twitter question on the topic offered up a lot of suggestions, many of which went onto a list of things to read soon. Others helped me narrow down some of my own personal criteria for books of this sort:

• No royalty or rulers of any kind as major characters;
• No chosen ones;
• No saving the world/kingdom/land/city.

What I want isn’t urban fantasy, though technically it often fits the bill, and isn’t light or comedic books, all of which are great in their ways but not what I mean by this specific kind of bookish desire. What I mean is a Kelly Link story grown to novel length. (Someday!) What I mean is Piranesi, in which the world is massive but it is home to only one lost man. What I mean is Karin Tidbeck’s The Memory Theater, which feels like the world and like one person’s dream at the same time.

I can think of these stories more in middle grade and YA spaces, perhaps because there’s an assumed coming-of-age aspect to many of those, and coming-of-age is about figuring out who you are and how you’ll be okay inside yourself. The first part of Lirael’s story, in Garth Nix’s novel, is entirely this: a girl trying to understand her place in a world that she doesn’t seem to fit into, adapting and growing and changing. Eventually she saves the world—twice! But that comes later. Destiny Soria’s Iron Cast and Michelle Ruiz Keil’s novels have this magical and intimate vibe, but take place in this world. But they inch closer to what I want.

Sometimes, well-known authors write these books and they get a little overlooked. Palimpsest is rarely the first Catherynne M. Valente book people mention, but it’s an absolute dream of intimacy, a magical sense of place, and bittersweet possibility. Robin Hobb is hardly unknown in fantasy circles, but her Liveship Traders series—books very concerned with the practicalities of life, with making a living and finding a place and surviving a difficult world—usually play second fiddle to the more epic-in-scope Fitz and Fool stories. (Though those novels, too, are grounded in the reality of her fantasy world, in the practical way Hobb uses work and status and power.)

But that’s what I want: fantasy books about people building their ordinary lives. Books about bookbinders and tavern-keepers, the people who raise horses and make boots, the troubled daughters setting out to find their own places in the world. (It often, for me, comes back to Tess of the Road.) You could maybe call it working-class fantasy, but that feels tied to capitalism in a way I don’t love. I want fantasy that breaks the rules of fantasy and lets the unheroic have their own life-sized adventures. 

I try not to talk about Ursula K. Le Guin here too much, as I work part-time for her estate, and it can feel like tricky territory. But I have that job partly because I’m a lifelong Le Guin fan: A Wizard of Earthsea was the first fantasy novel I encountered, and that story looms large in how I read, and what I want from and look for in books. And it’s hard to think or write about reading and SFF without being influenced by Le Guin, who often asked still-relevant questions about science fiction, stories, and people, as she did in her 1976 essay “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown.” 

Le Guin starts with Virginia Woolf, who wrote about Mrs. Brown, a woman Woolf observed in a train carriage, a “clean, threadbare” old lady, with “something pinched about her.” Woolf watched the woman, eavesdropped on her, and noted how she looked “very frail and very heroic” when she disappeared into the station. “I believe that all novels begin with an old lady in the corner opposite,” Woolf wrote. “I believe that all novels, that is to say, deal with character.”

Le Guin takes this premise, accepts it, and then asks a question that still resonates, almost 40 years later: “Can the writer of science fiction sit down across from her?” Her question is, “Can a science fiction writer write a novel?” by Woolf’s definition, and also, “Is it advisable, is it desirable, that this should come to pass?” She answers both in the affirmative, and says a lot of very interesting things along the way about gender, and about We and Islandia and Frodo Baggins and some of her own work; she argues against her own position for a bit.

It’s a brilliant piece, and what I take from it—what I still look for in books—is encapsulated by the image of Mrs. Brown in a spaceship. In which books is there room for her, or her magical equivalent? Is this all I’m asking for: a book that sees the value, the heroism, in a threadbare woman on a train?

I will keep looking for Mrs. Brown. I’d love to know where you’ve found her.

Molly Templeton lives and writes in Oregon, and spends as much time as possible in the woods. Sometimes she talks about books on Twitter.

The post What to Read When You Are Worn Out on World-Saving appeared first on Reactor.