Adrian Tchaikovsky is known for doing his homework, and his upcoming novel Green City Wars is no exception. The sci-fi author went deep into raccoon biology for the book, and what he found surprised even him.
Green City Wars centers on Skotch, a raccoon private investigator navigating a solarpunk future city. It is the kind of high-concept premise that demands world-building grounded in something real, and Tchaikovsky took that seriously enough to discover things about raccoons that completely reshaped how he wrote the book.
What Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Raccoon Research Revealed About Green City Wars
In an exclusive interview with Winter is Coming, Tchaikovsky opened up about just how strange the research rabbit hole got. “There’s a lot of fun stuff with raccoons,” he said. “They’re perfect uplift candidates, and also ideal little helpers if you’re looking for a servitor species.”
That part tracks for fans of his work. But then it got weirder. Tchaikovsky revealed he had to rethink his antagonist after learning raccoons regularly win fights against cats in the wild. “I was surprised that they win fights with cats in the wild,” he said. “I had to beef up the cat in the book to be a plausible threat to Skotch.”
The evolutionary angle caught him off guard too. “Raccoons really are bears,” he explained, “or at least evolutionarily they split off from bears relatively recently.” For a writer whose career is built on exploring what intelligence and biology mean across species, that kind of detail is not just trivia. It feeds directly into how he constructs Skotch as a character with real physical presence and cognitive depth, not just a cute genre gimmick.
Tchaikovsky has spent years writing non-human perspectives in series like Children of Time and Elder Race, but Green City Wars sounds like it pushes that fascination into new territory. A raccoon PI in a solarpunk city already sounds like essential reading. The fact that the author stress-tested the biology this carefully makes it even more intriguing.
GreenGreen City Wars is available now from Tor Books wherever books are sold.
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