Green City Wars

In the acknowledgements for this book, Adrian Tchaikovsky thanks his editor, Lee Harris, “for actually allowing me to get away with any of this incredible nonsense”. He does so because, unlike most of his novels (that I have read), Green City Wars is mostly played for laughs.

We are in near-future Europe. Mankind has finally cracked the sustainability thing, and us humans now live in beautiful garden cities that are totally recyclable and have zero impact on the environment. Of course it has taken a lot of biotechnology to get to this point, but us humans are good at the sciency stuff. We have learned to make houses that are grown rather than built. We have learned to be part of an ecosystem rather than ruining it. And most importantly we have learned how to make other species do all of the work that we don’t want to.

Wait, what???

You heard me. In ancient times we have slaves to do our dirty work for us. These days we have the working class. Science fiction writers speculate that one day all of that work will be done by robots. But Tchaikovsky suggests that it will be better done by uplifted animals.

Mostly these are small creatures: rats, mice, squirrels and so on. After all, the whole point is that they should scurry around getting things done and not being noticed. We wouldn’t want people getting all sentimental about this arrangement, after all. And so, mostly, they are not noticed. Which is how most humans are entirely unaware that these newly intelligent creatures have developed a whole bunch of human social habits such as politics, war, and organised crime.

Green City Wars is (mostly) not about war. It is a hard boiled detective novel. Our hero is Skotch, an American raccoon who used to work for a multi-national company here in New Vienna, but who has since gone freelance. His old bosses want to hire him to track down a missing mouse and, like any gumshoe in any novel, Skotch has to take the job because he is down on his luck.

He’s also down on his brains. To stay intelligent, the animals must take regular doses of a drug called Plangent. If they don’t get it, they start to revert to dumbness. Regular supplies of Plangent are a standard part of a salaried job, but for freelancers life is not so easy.

Skotch soon finds out that Herr Doktor Meece is a very popular rodent, and a genius chemist. Everyone wants a piece of him. Some organisations, like Skotch’s old bosses, want his research notes. Other people just want him dead so that no one can ever replicate his work. Skotch has a sinking feeling that the fate of the city is at stake, especially when the local anarchist commune gets involved. They’d think nothing of killing all the humans.

But wait, where is the dame? There has to be a dame, right? And so there is. Her name is Lulu and she’s a pigeon, and a journalist of sorts. She works for a human called Herr Schreiber who writes children’s stories about the lives of the cute animals who keep the city running. But, like all good journalists, Lulu has a nose (or a beak) for a story, and the missing meesus is the biggest story in the city in years.

There are also a couple of femme fatals. There’s Szerky the stoat, a corporate security operative who has been chasing Meece since he fled the countryside agribusiness for whom they worked. And there is Tybelle the cat, a killer for hire who has been employed by some of the city’s less scrupulous animal inhabitants. (Yes, organised crime is run by the rats. Why did you have to ask?)

Also, all of this takes place against a background of an actual war for control of the city. Two armies are fighting it out: the red squirrels, and the grays.

Yes, Tchaikovsky has had a ridiculous amount of fun writing this book. He even introduced a human nun who has taken it upon herself to bring the Word of God to the animal masses. Inevitably her name is Saint Frances.

Of course there is a plot in amongst all of this silliness. Skotch and Lulu have to find Doktor Meece before the various competing factions do, and before they get killed by Szerky, Tybelle or one of the squirrel armies. Then they have to decide whether to protect him, or kill him before he can destroy the city.

This being Tchaikovsky, there is also a serious point to the book. The way in which humans treat their uplifted animal servants is very much how we have treated slaves, and would treat robots, when we can get away with it. Capitalism has not gone away in the world of the book, it has just found new things to exploit.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is great fun, very clever, and making a serious point all at the same time. At Finncon I asked Tchaikovsky if he was riffing off China Mièville’s King Rat, but having finished the book I have realised that it also has a lot in common with The City and The City, because the animals have their own world that runs in parallel to, but entirely hidden from, the human world.

There is one thing about the book that I didn’t understand. The animals have a religion known as Jeffism, worshipping a human called Jeff. This is never explained in the book. I assumed that the story was probably set in the same world as Tchaikovsky’s Dogs of War and its sequels, which I have not read. But I bought an ebook of Dogs of War and I can’t see any mention of Jeff in it. Google, of course, is utterly useless these days. So, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary I am going to assume that the animals are actually worshipping Jeff VanderMeer. It makes as much sense as anything else.

Title: Green City Wars
By: Adrian Tchaikovsky
Publisher: Tor
Purchase links:
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Amazon US
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