The Convent of the Future: Coziness and Monasticism in Contemporary Science Fiction

This paper takes two recent sf novella duologies, Becky Chambers’ Monk and Robot books and Lina Rather’s Our Lady of Endless Worlds, as case studies in the recent trend in queer and politically-radical uptakes on the sf trope of “monks in space.” The deconstructed forms of monasticism in these works provide an entry point for sketching a key defining feature of the emerging “cozy” sub-genre of science fiction: its subversion of generic expectations of estrangement. The kind of utopian closure enabled by “cozy” sf ends up consisting in the ongoingness of everyday life, of people simply continuing to live anyway; and this dissolution of narrative tension is accomplished through the dissolution of the contained monastic space into the space of everyday life. The contradiction that the monastic foregrounds between utopian possibility and political entrenchment is key to understanding how currents in sf are grappling with the outer limits of the political imaginary.