(courtesy Pan macmillan Australia)
The books of Adrian Tchaikovsky are a supreme delight in a thousand different, incalculably satisfying ways.
He excels at next level characterisation, immersively clever storylines and dialogue that sings and crackles as needed; what knits all of these vibrantly readable elements together is a feat of imagination, the likes of which I have seen in few other writers.
As you dive into any of his novels, and in this case it’s Green City Wars, the first thing that strikes you is now fantastically imaginative the premises are; they don’t just hint at a clever idea, they embrace it, enlarge it and make it unmissably great and impactful, all the while filling it with a thoughtfulness and humanity that never feels overstuffed but always just what is needed to make the story really hit home.
In Green City Wars, that premise is dizzyingly smart.
In a future where humanity has thrown out the industrially wasteful and planet despoiling ways of old and embraced clean, green cities and farming where sustainability is the name of the game, humanity exists in clean, green luxury, their lives held aloft by unseen Little Helpers aka Gehirner, serum-enhanced animals who live beneath the surface of homes, restaurants and public spaces and make sure that civilisation keeps humming smoothly and faultlessly along.
Rule number one makes it clear that they are never to interact with people; while the inhabitants of the cities know the animals are there, it’s case of out of sight, out of mind, and it seems to work for animals and people alike.
What this translates to, behind the scenes, is that areas that are the absolute shiniest and well-heeled in all of Neuwien are, to a Gehirner, the most brutal, the harshest to live in, the most viciously fought over. Because they fight, the service animals. It wasn’t in the design specs, but there’s some healthy Darwinian competition going on up there.
While it might seem idyllic and future perfect, and it is for the people at least, within the seamless machinery of society animals are dealing with unintended consequences of their uplifting to useful sentience.
Along with the ability to think, reason and do, animals have also inherited the distinctly lesser animals of our nature.
Criminal enterprises rule the roost, enacting tithes and payments and engaging in furious wars over turf and control of a thousand small enterprises; animals too now wrestle with death and purpose and reasons why, their once unassailable instinctual way of living now encroached upon by the kind of reasoning which causes all manner of existential and real world crises.
But Green City Wars also one other thing troubling its animal population at play.
The animals only stay elevated in thought and deed if they get ampules of Plangent, a compound with an augmentative ability that needs to be constantly administered or the recipient goes “dumb”, unable to think, speak or perform the tasks they have been mercilessly bred for.
It’s an endless Sword of Damicles hanging over every animal resident Neuwien, a re-imagined Vienna, and one that Skotch, the protagonist of Green City Wars, a private eye raccoon who’s freelancing these days away from the cartel for which he once worked (or was enslaved to, in his view), feels most acutely now he’s not employed on a regular basis and must scrabble to make sure he gets the next vital ampule of sentience delivered through his eye in time.
Things are looking up, and yes, down too, when his old employer contracts him for one job which on the surface seems simple enough.
Find a fugitive mouse of some intellectual scientific nous known as Doctor Meece (there’s a lovely meta joke about his name casually but cleverly throw in at one point) and deliver him back quite alive for god knows what purpose.
But as always happens with these things, everyone seems to want Doctor Meece, many dead rather than alive, for themselves, and soon Skotch is racing to outsmart and outmanoeuvre what amounts to a rat mafia who are cahoots with rat scientists and warring red and grey squirrel armies, a mercenary stoat femme fatale assassin and any number of other big and small players, all of whom see some benefit for having the rogue mouse scientist in their grip.
It’s a clever thriller story, where the stakes get ever higher, the threats ever more violent and pronounced and the great sins of humanity are visited on haplessly augmented animals whom it is suggested more than once would have benefited from never being elevated in the first place.
Green City Wars is a brilliant tale of what happens when the world constructed by humans and corrupted by animals who have taken on more than human genetic extras finds itself at a massive crossroads and the big question is asked – is all of the pain, suffering and mercy worth the output of an untroubled human idyll?
And Skotch probably could have done, once, but he’s falling down the well of Plangent deprivation and right then he feels he could barely get out his own name.
No prizes for guessing what the humans would say, were they to feature in any deeply meaningful way in Green City Wars.
There are a couple of good people who do feature in the novel but mostly Green City Wars is about the animals, their trials and tribulations, and how they are victims of their uplift, essentially enslaved to a system which keeps them in line with the threat of Plangent being taken away and “dumb” coming in to take its place.
It’s a cruel and nasty system that has far more negatives than positives for the animals caught in its human-serving machinations, and while the race to find Doctor Meece delivers up a thrilling story that could result in a wholesale seismic change to this verdant, glossy new future for the planet’s ecology, if not the augmented fauna at its core, Green City Wars is also concerned with some questions about whether the ends justify the means and whether in augmenting animals for our benefit we have further damaged the very ecology the new green system is designed to save.
Clever and thoughtful, heartfelt and meaningful as well pedal-to-the-metal action full of film noir twists and turns, Green City Wars is an imaginative tour de force that marries substance and style, narrative momentum and thrilling incisive ideas together in a story that thrills the mind, engages the heart and makes you marvel at how truly gifted a storyteller Tchaikovsky is, no matter what kind of story he tackles.