Green City Wars

Philip Marlowe meets Redwall in this superior adult noir tale, where all the characters are animals, fighting for survival in the city underneath the humans.

"[A] charmingly bizarre SF noir....Interstitial fiction at its most engaging and mind-bending." -- Kirkus Reviews, starred review

In the solar cities of the future, the humans relax in the sun and the animals work in the shadows. Genetically engineered Little Helpers, serving humanity--unseen, unheard.

Meet Skotch. Raccoon, PI--yours for a few buttons as long as the job isn't too illegal, whatever that means.

A mouse has gone missing. Normally this wouldn't raise any hackles, nor any alarms, but this mouse has something that everyone seems to want, though nobody appears particularly eager to say what that something is.

The fee is good--perhaps too good . Certainly not something Skotch can easily turn down.

If only Skotch can work out where the mouse is hiding, what he's hiding, and why his secrets are upsetting a lot of animals caught up in the Green City wars.

 

Adrian Tchaikovsky is a British science-fiction and fantasy writer known for a wide-variety of work including the Children of Time, Final Architecture, Dogs of War, Tyrant Philosophers and Shadows of the Apt series, as well as standalone books such as Elder Race, Doors of Eden, Spiderlight and many others. Children of Time and its series has won the Arthur C. Clarke and BSFA awards, and his other works have won the British Fantasy, British Science Fiction and Sidewise Awards. In 2024, he was inducted into the European Science Fiction Society Hall of Fame, and he has been nominated for the Hugo Award six times between 2023 and 2025.