Adrian Tchaikovsky has written uplifted spiders, war dogs, and sentient robots. His latest protagonist is a raccoon named Skotch who works as a private investigator in a Germanic solar-punk city, and the author says he couldn’t explain exactly how he got there even if he tried.
Green City Wars, released from Tor Books on June 23, is already turning heads as one of the more singular genre mash-ups of the year. A noir mystery set in a future city powered partly by carbon-neutral urban animal labour, it takes the trappings of classic detective fiction and drops them into a world where raccoons, stoats, and squirrels have been uplifted into intelligence by a drug called plangent and then almost immediately exploited. It is, somehow, also very funny.
Adrian Tchaikovsky Explains Where the Raccoon PI Idea Came From
In a new exclusive interview with Winter is Coming, Tchaikovsky traced the book’s origins back to his broader thinking about climate futures and the animals that already share human spaces. “I tend to wander around the animal kingdom in my writing and I hadn’t really done urban animals yet,” he said. “I feel a lot of animals that share human spaces have a very bad rep — people resent them despite the fact that it’s usually us who’ve moved into their habitat.”
From there, his mind moved toward solar futures and sustainability, and he landed on the idea of urban animals serving as a carbon-neutral form of infrastructure. How that concept evolved into a noir detective story is something he admits he can’t fully account for. “How I got from there to a noir detective story with Skotch the raccoon I couldn’t rightly say.”
The interview covers a lot of ground, including the raccoon biology research that went into Skotch (including the apparently surprising fact that raccoons hold their own in fights with cats), the real-world UK red-versus-grey squirrel conflict that forms the core of the plot, and why a central European city felt like the right home for the story. Tchaikovsky also addresses the book’s tonal balancing act. It wears its jokes proudly, including a raft of pop culture references he says he included largely for his own amusement, but underneath is a sharp critique of pharmaceutical dependency and labour exploitation. Much like his previous Tor standalone Service Model, the laughs are load-bearing.
For now, the book is a standalone, though Tchaikovsky left the door open in the interview in the way he usually does: most of his books are standalone until an idea arrives and an audience shows up.
Green City Wars is available now from Tor Books wherever books are sold.
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