Uplifted raccoon investigator solves mysteries
When you begin Green City Wars, Adrian Tchaikovsky drops you into a world that looks a bit familiar but has enough that’s incomprehensible that you spend at least some time thinking, “Wait, what?” a lot in the first few chapters. You are wandering the very German-inflected European city of Neuwein-Grundstadt with Skotch, a raccoon who freelances as a finder of things and investigator of secrets.
Skotch is a Gehirner (which is the German word for “Brains”), one of many small animals who live in the city and have been genetically hacked and augmented to be able to do routine maintenance and labour. The people of the city all have some kind of Universal Basic Income and do what they want while these Gehirner unclog sewers, fix telecom transmission boxes, and clear plates at fancy restaurants. They are paid in Plangent, a drug that allows them to maintain their level of intelligence; if they cannot get it, they slowly feel themselves losing their ability to speak, reason, and solve problems. The Gehirner are an eco-friendly solution to the question of who will do the work of a city that no one else wants to do: hence, “Green City.”
In this noir-coded tale, the freelancer Skotch is pulled in for “one last job” to find a mouse that everyone wants to get their hands on. Usually no one would care about a single mouse, but this mouse is special. Skotch doesn't know why, but every Gehirner interest-group in the city wants this mouse, dead or alive. And, as Philip Marlowe might say, Skotch doesn't know if he's going to be able to get through this case with his own skin intact.
The world, while confined to one city, feels sprawling. There were times when I felt like I was being introduced to too many characters and gangs. There are literal squirrel armies fighting over turf. A gang of amphibians control the city's waste management, and corvids deal with the dead. There are cultists, anarchists, a sexy but villainous Stoatweasel, and a dangerous cat who might sometimes be an ally if it thinks it would be amusing. There are mystical parrots; a loud, nosy pigeon; and the rats have their own gang called the Rattenkönige (“rat kings”).
Humans are nearly completely absent from this story. In Green City, Rule One is “Don’t bother the humans.” The humans know about the Gehirner; they created them. But all Gehirner work must happen at night to avoid being seen by humans. Tchaikovsky doesn’t clearly explain why, but it’s a central tenet of how Green City works.
If you are already familiar with Tchaikovsky's work in series like Children of Time, Dogs of War, or Shadows of the Apt, you will not be surprised to hear that he does a fantastic job thinking through how a group of uplifted animals might deal with building a society. In this book in particular, he’s considering what traits humans might want to add to animals, and then how those choices might affect the animals in question.
For example, humans tried to modify dogs. But dogs actually evolved around humans, so dogs pretty much did all the things humans really wanted them to do. Trying to make them smarter made them extremely neurotic. And, quoting Tchaikovsky, “being just so smart and no smarter turned out to be the way humans like their dogs. Nobody wants a pooch that can beat them at chess, basically… Dogs were already too smart to be properly engineered any smarter.”
Tchaikovsky is also interested in exploring the question of how human gene-hacking would interface with an animal's natural instincts. How would it change them? I adored this paragraph where Skotch considers religion:
“Do raccoons have a sense of the numinous? That the world might contain more than can be grasped, smelled, bitten? Skotch, despite being one, can’t say. If a lion could speak, the old human saw goes, could we understand it? And yes, it turns out you can understand the lion. But the act of reworking the lion to allow it to talk removes enough of its lion-ness that, when you ask, What’s it like, being a lion, the thing can only shrug with the new shoulders you’ve given it. It’s probably something about the engineering process, though, that makes space in a Gehirner’s head to think about the other and the beyond. Not a huge amount of space, because they’re small heads and full of work stuff most of the time, but still. The big questions squeeze in there somehow.”
So these uplifted animals are still animals, but they have—of course—been changed by having their genes hacked. In addition to considering religious movements, these changes have also led to other very human social developments, like a cutthroat, competitive, under-the-table economy where squirrel armies fight over resources. Skotch frequently stops to consider how the humans do not understand all of the changes they have wrought with their gene modifications; he hopes the Gehirner might someday break out of these very human systems caused by the artificial scarcity of Plangent.
If you've come to Tchaikovsky through Children of Time, The Tyrant Philosophers, or The Final Architecture, this book is going to seem a bit light. Tchaikovsky clearly had a lot of fun writing it, but it's a fairly basic private detective story under the animal skins. However, it does contain hidden depths: much of Tchaikovsky's work centres on how animal intelligences and technologies might develop, and it is interesting to see him explore it in a new world.
In many ways, it felt like reading the first book in a series, although Tchaikovsky has no concrete plans for further books in this world. (When I asked him on Bluesky, he said, “Like a lot of my work it's a standalone until I get an idea for a followup, which would likely be self-contained but build on the first.”) I would definitely like to see more of this world and I would be curious to see where else he might go with the Gehirner society.
Highlights:
- Raccoon solving mysteries
- Squirrel armies
- Deeper questions about personhood and intelligence
Nerd Coefficient: 7.5/10. A mostly enjoyable experience that is worth your time and attention.
Reference: Tchaikovsky, Adrian. Green City Wars [Tor Books, 2026].
POSTED BY: Christine D. Baker, historian and lover of SFF and mysteries. You can find her also writing reviews and editing at Ancillary Review of Books or podcasting about classic scifi/fantasy at Hugo History. Come chat books with her on Bluesky @klaxoncomms.com.
