Green City Wars is sort of like the untold, urban underworld story of Uplifted animals. It’s set in a future where humans (after an unexplained decimation of their population) have at last figured out how to live sustainably in beautiful green solarpunkesque cities, thanks to the genetically enhanced animals, Gehirner, who do all the behind-the-scenes clean-up and maintenance for them.
Skotch is a freelance PI, a former Uzco corporation employee in charge of removing human trash who hung up his collar and now works as an unaffiliated raccoon in the nooks and crannies of the green city of Neuwien. It’s a tough life, though, because Gehirner who don’t get a steady dose of Plangent gradually lose their cognitive capacities in a Flowers for Algernon-like slow devolution. Skotch no longer gets corporate-provided Plangent or geneware upgrades, so he’s reluctantly talked into taking a job for his former employer, finding a mouse who’s fled the agricultural farms of the country and is hiding somewhere in Neuwien.
Green City Wars grafts hardboiled fiction tropes to animal fables and seasons them with a dash of cyberpunk. Everything the Gehirner do — on the job or on their own time — must be kept hidden from human view. That’s Rule One, and all the Gehirner reluctantly accept its necessity. Nobody wants humans realizing how far their convenient little utility animals have strayed from their original programming, or the extent to which Gehirner society has opportunistically adapted itself to and around human existence. The street finds its own uses for things, indeed.
In his search for Dr. Meece, the renegade mouse, Skotch negotiates with an information-brokering ex-military fox, a group of the criminal Rattenkönige, religiously minded crows, anarchistic Maulers, the warring Red (squirrel) and Gray (squirrel) armies, and a gossip-gathering pigeon, and finds himself competing with a series of bloodthirsty rivals intend on finding the mouse for their own employers.
Although the concept of beautiful, environmentally sustainable green cities nods to solarpunk’s optimism, the title and content of Green City Wars query that utopian promise, touching on issues such as structural inequality, neocolonialism, speciesism, universal basic income and crimes of survival. Regardless, I’d say that whether you choose to approach the novel as a purely escapist, talking-animal thriller or speculative social critique, Green City Wars is well worth your time.