When you start reviewing the broader range of fictional catastrophes and world ending disorders, you will at some point run across an unusual phrase: cosy catastrophe. The first point to understand, if you use American English spelling is that “cosy = cozy.”
If you have read a lot of these tails, you can very quickly get a general sense of the term. A cosy catastrophe is a story that is supposed to be about an earth shattering event, where many or most people die, and yet the characters by the end of it are having a pretty good time, and from their own personal perspective may very well have come out ahead of the game.
The term, cosy catastrophe, was first coined by Brian Aldiss in The Billion Year Spree: a survey of Science Fiction up to that point (1973).
In a cosy catastrophe, you have a relatively non-violent ending, largely featuring middle class characters, finding ways to pull together for the team and survive. The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction describes it as:
Cosy catastrophe n. a disaster or post-apocalypse story which focuses on a character or characters who take advantage of the situation to pursue self-indulgent pleasures and attempt to rebuild society according to their (usually white and middle-class) values. [Giving examples:]
1973 B.W. Aldiss Billion Year Spree 293: It was then that he embarked on the course that was to make him master of the cosy catastrophe. The Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham, was serialized in Colliers [magazine] , and appeared in hardcover in England in 1951.
1995 D. Broderick Reading by Starlight 26: Our attention is directed to the soothing benefits of a reasserted background order.[….].
Aldiss in the novel comes off as the malcontent progressive of the era. So when he is knocking Wyndham
One description:
Cosy catastrophes are stories involving a sudden non-violent event wiping out most of civilization; the cosiness refers to the conceit of a band of survivors left to rebuild society in relative comfort. Aldiss originally used the phrase to describe (with a hint of criticism, perhaps) John’s Wyndham’s novels, particularly The Day of the Triffids. Cosy catastrophes, Tim Major, CoseyCatastrophes, 22 December 22, 2009
Aldiss himself perplexedly ponders the popularity of these stories as being
1. Collapse of the British Empire
2. A back to nature movement
3. Malaise over increased industrialization
A lot of people have jumped to the defense of Wyndham, and of John Christopher (who wrote No Blade of Grass which partially fits the stereotype, and The World in Winter (Early Ice Age), and A Wrinkle in the Skin (Earth Quakes), Empty World (YA Plague)), noting that their stories are not nearly as rosy as portrayed, and rather than being status-quo conscious, are often rather critical of the days current ruling structure.
Some of this confusion seems to come from the fact that Brian Aldiss appears to have been part of the radical-liberal movement of the 1960s. Wyndham and Christopher, to some degree are staking out, if not a libertarian, a new rustic version of the neo-conservative ethos. Both groups would have viewed the then dominant bureaucratic progressive liberal government in power with a lot of suspicion. As they are sitting on opposite sides of the dominant political force of their day, but on opposite sides, they both tended to associate the other’s positions as being part of the dominant coalition of power. It is rather similar to the way that both liberal and conservatives can both be really pissed at Obama, and yet both think he belongs to the other group [yes – many radical liberals think Obama is a status quo conservative little different than George W. Bush].
So some of Aldiss’ definition, is in my mind, a confusion of the politics of the day, and leads to the problem that a definition of cosy that only fits 1950-1975 British catastrophe fiction is not broad enough to be very helpful. It doesn’t tell us if Patriots is a cosy or not.
So I have come up with a broader definition of a cosy. Since I write in American English, I am going to spell it as “coz”y, to make it easier to distinguish from the earlier definition.
First point is that the Catastrophe should be of a global nature. The effects can be uneven in application, but the effect cannot be limited to a specific geographic area. A prescient person writing in 2004 about a huge hurricane that swamps New Orleans and the Gulf Coast is not writing a cozy. It would be a disaster/personal survival story with a (botched) rescue element.
Second, the setting and plot need to be recognizable and plausible as a “real-world” event to normal people, possibly as a plausible cautionary tale. Disasters that are implausible, but close stand-ins for more generic disasters are acceptable. The tale should generally involve, at least some point, the survival of a small group, or groups of people that are making decisions for themselves. Futuristic war stories won’t fit on that count. Because of length considerations, most of the disasters will be some version of a “quick-collapse” scenario, but this is not a requirement. Novels set in a distant future, with no coherent connection to our current reality fail the “real-world” test: sorry, no Planet of the Apes.
Third, is the world survivable with suitable effort? If everyone dies, it cannot really be a cozy, because that is not very comforting. Note that this does not mean that everyone who takes appropriate measures survives, but that the heroes do. For instance, many cozies have some sort of disease that wipes out everyone but the protagonists. What is important is that the heroes’ efforts are perceived as making a difference: in other words they are at least in some part rising to the occasion.
Fourth, “cozy” to some degree was a pejorative term, it was said that it was middle-class people wandering about doing middle class things, while the working-class where conveniently killed off. While that is too narrow, and too pejorative for my tastes, I think there is one fair distinction. If the people in the novel made advanced preparations for the disaster: no matter how unlikely the disaster, than you cannot say that they are surviving based on some racial or social bias of the author. Call them crazy (like Noah), but they are surviving because they prepared. A book that would otherwise be a cozy, but has the participants preparing for their troubles, is not a cozy, but a survivalist book.
Fifth and final (until more criteria are thought up), in the end society is reconstituted – preferably to a better more robust fashion. In the original cozy model, it was the actual group that reconstitutes society. Again, that is too restrictive. Provided that our little group of heroes can rejoin this new society and live happily within it, I would call it a cozy. The gray area here is that a lot of dystopian catastrophe novels with I would call a “radically-liberal” (being descriptive rather than pejorative here) world view, tend to not end on a happy note. If you want, you could say they are happy to see the evils of our current world go away, but don’t feel compelled to create an alternate survivor society. What does make the case gray is that they will often hint that the world will be better in the end. Brian Aldiss, who started this whole cosy thing, has a novel Greybeard (which I will review) that fits this category. You could call it a close cosy.
I have made a chart based on the above descriptions, to see where some of the upcoming reviewed novels fit. Note that the first two points of order would have to be answered yes, for them to be included. And thus a couple of them are not here. There are also a couple of other novels, that I did not review that I included because they were either famous, or they added some variety to the possible outcomes. I have only included novels that I have read.
Categories | ||||||||
SM: | Survival on merit | |||||||
PRP | Was there advance preparation | |||||||
V+ | Was there a return to values (recovery) | |||||||
Cosy/S | Cosy (C) = Y-N-Y pattern in previous three. | |||||||
Survival Fiction (S)= Y-Y-Y pattern | ||||||||
* | Ambiguity in rating | |||||||
SM | PRP | V+ | Cosy/S | |||||
· Post-Apocalypse Dead letter Office. | Y | N | Y | C | ||||
· Maleville | Y | N | Y | C | ||||
· No Blade of Grass | Y | Y* | Y | S* | ||||
· Day of the Triffids | Y | N | Y | C | ||||
· Last Light | Y | Y* | Y | S* | ||||
· The Unit | Y | N | Y | C | ||||
· Three Monks East | Y | N | Y | C | ||||
· This World We Live In | N | Y | N | N | ||||
· The Dead and Gone | Y | N | Y | C | ||||
· Life as We Knew It | Y | N | Y | C | ||||
· Patriots | Y | Y | Y | S | ||||
· The Long Voyage Back | Y | N | Y* | C* | ||||
· The Fall of Eden | Y | N* | Y | C* | ||||
· World Made by Hand | Y | N | Y | C | ||||
· Into the Forest | Y | Y* | N | N | ||||
· Operation Serf | Y | Y | Y | S | ||||
· Things We Did Not See Coming | Y | N | Y | C | ||||
· Crossing the Blue | Y* | N | N | N | ||||
· Random Acts of Senseless Violence | Y | N | N | N | ||||
· The Far North | Y | N* | N* | N* | ||||
· The World Ends in Hickory Hollow | Y | N* | Y | C* | ||||
· Super Sad Love Story (Dystopian Satire) | N | N | Y | N | ||||
· The Road | N | N | N | N | ||||
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