GREEN CITY WARS

If the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit were an even darker comedy, you might come close to this charmingly bizarre SF noir.

In Neuwien-Grunstadt, an ecologically sustainable reinvention of Vienna, infrastructure maintenance and service industry tasks are performed by Gehirner, genetically modified animals that are supposed to remain as unobtrusive as possible. Unbeknownst to humans, the Gehirner have built their own, often contentious, society. Skotch is a raccoon who’s left his official job as a trash collector at his manufacturer’s company, Uzco, to go freelance as a private investigator. Now, his former turtle boss at Uzco, Benson, has hired Skotch to find Doctor Meece, a country mouse—and a genius chemist—recently arrived in Neuwien. Unfortunately for Skotch, a lot of other parties—criminal rat gangs, battling squirrel armies, and an anarchist group including a toad, among others—are also interested in Meece’s whereabouts, and they all seem to think Skotch knows a lot more about the situation than he’s telling. Where is the mouse, and just what is he planning? A noir thriller with a raccoon private eye is an inherently silly concept. But this novel works because Tchaikovsky takes his world so seriously. These characters are real; the stakes are real. The story cleverly blends noir, the author’s ongoing interest in how nonhumans might think, and another theme beloved of British writers, the turbulent personal lives of the “invisible” servant class (it might seem like a stretch to connect this novel to Downton Abbey, but they definitely share DNA). If the story lacks anything, it’s that there’s no true representative of the most delightful noir trope, the femme fatale. A cat named Tybelle and a stoat called Szerky do pose considerable physical dangers to Skotch, but as they’re all different species, there’s no sexual tension involved. But that departure from the noir standard only underscores just how nonhuman this milieu is, which is at least part of Tchaikovsky’s point.

Interstitial fiction at its most engaging and mind-bending.