r/printSF

I interviewed Rebecca Thorne about her new book Moss'd in Space, and during the conversation, she said she wants cozy sci-fi to become a sub-genre like cozy fantasy is. I love the idea of more sci-fi books in general, but also especially with a cozy feel to them.

I have to assume that some are already published, and I either don't think of them as "cozy" (which is subjective) or I just don't know about them.

So I guess my question is, what are some "cozy sci-fi" books?

I've found a few self-published ones, but they can be pretty hit or miss for me.

Random seed, pattern recognition, using the library of human knowledge as its training data... I wonder if Greg Egan based it off neural networks.

The orphan is essentially Artificial Intelligence, not an uploaded human mind. Though in Greg Egan's stories, there's not much of a difference.

A lot of sci-fi stories end with humanity surviving, winning the war, escaping extinction, or at least finding a way forward.

But I'm curious about the opposite.

What's a sci-fi book where, if you look at the situation objectively, humanity basically lost... yet the ending didn't feel completely bleak?

Maybe Earth was abandoned. Maybe humans became something else entirely. Maybe another species inherited the future. Maybe civilization collapsed and never recovered. The important part is that the outcome wasn't really a "victory" in the traditional sense.

I'm not necessarily looking for happy endings. More the kind of ending where you close the book and think, "Well, that didn't go well for us... but maybe that's okay."

The best examples for me are the ones where the loss forces a change in perspective rather than just serving as a tragedy.

Any recommendations? Obviously spoilers are unavoidable, but please hide details when possible.