ADRIAN TCHAIKOVSKY Green City Wars. Reviewed by Robert Goodman

The new novel from the award-winning author of Shroud brings together sentient animals and a noir detective story.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, who in the last few years has delivered top-flight fantasy (The Tyrant Philosophers series) and science fiction (Service Model and the Children of Time series) and received a number of major awards, swerves into a completely new genre-mash in Green City Wars – a noir-detective meets utopian-human-society meets sentient-animal meets bioengineering combination that no one saw coming. And, being Tchaikovsky, it not only nails the brief but has some deeper things to say about politics, society and humanity.

The setting for Green City Wars is a new type of eco-friendly modern city that, through bioengineering, combines technology and nature. The engine that drives this city, though, is its workforce – bioengineered animals that live in the subfloors and hidden byways and do everything from cleaning up in restaurants to maintaining the water purification and transport systems to taking out the garbage.

The utopian cities that live off the sun had the carbon footprint of an ant wearing tight shoes. And for all that to work, for the green city residents to get the full futurist experience, nobody wanted to go unclog the sewers or go up a pole to fix the telecoms transmission box. It all had to go on seamlessly, unseen, like magic. And, like magic, the solution was having a dove up your sleeve and a rabbit in your hat. Or a pigeon and a rat respectively.

One of these animals is Skotch, a racoon and former employee of Uzco, one of the main companies that run the city. Skotch has gone freelance and works as a private detective, but this leaves him always on the edge of poverty and, more importantly, in constant fear of running out of Plangent, the drug that maintains his sentience. Without a constant supply of Plangent, the animals revert to their original state.

Skotch is brought in by Uzco, and tempted by a huge retainer, to do a job. That job: find a mouse called Doctor Meece, who has come to the city from the farms. They need Skotch to do this as Meece is hiding in the middle of a war zone where company employees would not be welcome. Skotch soon finds that there are a range of interests looking to secure this one mouse, including a hired killer, and not all of them want the mouse alive. But despite being the one in the middle of it all, Skotch has no idea why Meece is so valuable.

Green City Wars is a classic noir detective tale.

Down these mean streets a beast must walk … Or at least beneath them.

But Tchaikovsky nods to other influences, too, from Blade Runner (‘Mice are cheap in the big city because they don’t last. But then again who does?’) to Animal Farm (‘And then Wizzo shuts them all down because although they’re all egalitarian siblings of the revolution, he’s still in charge’). By using animals as the main characters, he also draws on classics like The Wind in the Willows, the Redwall and Duncton Wood series, and Watership Down.

Skotch is the gumshoe hired to find a MacGuffin and in doing so traverses every level of the city and encounters all of its various animal political factions. He also gets beaten up, a lot, which is par for the course in this type of narrative. For the majority of the book Skotch knows less about his mission than most of the forces that are trying to co-opt, manipulate or kill him. But despite his world-weariness, Skotch has a heart of gold, brings together a group of allies, and when he does finally have the full picture, contrives to chart his own course.

While Skotch is the main character, Tchaikovsky has a lot of fun with all of the different animals in his world. This includes Benson the ageing turtle, who gives Skotch his original job; Lulu the extremely chatty but surprisingly useful and loyal pigeon; Sly the connected fox; Tybelle the cat, who is followed around by a group of rat acolytes; and Szerky the killer stoatweasel:

She gives him a look like butter wouldn’t melt. Which is to say she’s the sort of cold-blooded killer who’d give Tekki the ratsnake frostbite.

There’s also a large cast of ragtag revolutionaries, crime bosses, crazy parrots, warring squirrels and scientist rats.

Like much of the noir that it is based on, Green City Wars is an inherently political tale. The human world is blind to its workforce, which is enslaved and programmed to behave against their natures. But what humans do not understand is that raising animals to sentience has created a complex, self-aware society.

… from the point of view of even the earliest first-generation animals … the environment they found themselves in had a resource economy which could be manipulated, controlled and gamed …

The human people who built these animal people – who made these animals just human enough – did not ever plan for them to become little shadows of their creators’ vices, but that’s how it’s turned out …

Another thing humans probably didn’t plan was hierarchies, but they didn’t have to. Humans think in hierarchies. They exist like ghosts within the systems humans make.

So the animal world of Green City Wars has become a reflection of the human world but below its notice: there are the wealthy animal corporations that want to keep control, the anarchists who want to bring everything down, two warring armies (grey squirrels versus red squirrels) whose members seem to be for hire, and plenty of organised crime. Animals are considered in accordance with their value – the basic unit of this system is the value of a mouse, called ‘mousgelt’ – and they fight over access to the limited supply of Plangent.

Green City Wars is another winner from Tchaikovsky. It is science fiction drawing on the noir tradition that uses its animal characters to shine a light on humanity. Skotch, the gumshoe racoon, is a winning protagonist and is ably supported by a large range of idiosyncratic allies and enemies (and enemies who become allies). And while the underlying mystery possibly takes a little too long to get to (and with a delayed reveal that is very much foreshadowed), readers will have a lot of fun getting there and leave with something to think about.

Adrian Tchaikovsky Green City Wars Tor 2026 PB 368pp $34.99

Robert Goodman is an institutionalised public servant and obsessive reader, who won a science fiction short-story competition very early in his career but has found reviewing a better outlet for his skills. He is a judge of the Ned Kelly Awards and reviews for a number of other publications – see his website: www.pilebythebed.com

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Tags: Adrian | Tchaikovsky, crime fiction, detective stories, green cities, noir, sentient animals, speculative fiction