“Green City Wars” by Adrian Tchaikovsky

I’m generally quite happy to pick up an Adrian Tchaikovsky book based on his name alone, but I’ll admit that “raccoon PI” was an extra selling point for this one.

This is set in the not-too-distant future in the city of Neuwien (that’s “new Vienna” for those who don’t speak German) (it’s me, I don’t speak German). Neuwien, and many other cities like it, were built to replace the old urban areas, with an overriding focus on sustainability. Part of any city, of course, is the unglamorous infrastructure. The sewers need to be kept flowing, the trash needs to be picked up, the electrical grid needs to be maintained. What could be a greener solution than training up the smaller creatures that always go along with dense human settlements? A little genetic engineering to make them smart enough to do the tasks and to listen to instructions from humans on the rare occasions they’re necessary, and presto! You’ve got a self-sustaining system, no need for humans to even think about those difficult, dangerous, dirty jobs.

Except for a few emergent quirks that humans, for the most part, are unaware of. Give a creature the intelligence to manage sustainable wastewater treatment and understand language, and they’ll use that intelligence in other ways as well. An entire complex society emerged, kept largely hidden from humans: Rule One is “don’t do anything the humans will notice.” Most of the uplifted animals are part of corporations or guilds, taking care of their own and doing the tasks needed to keep Neuwien functioning. But others have formed criminal gangs running protection rackets, or radical anarchist communes who want to bring the system down, or freelancers like our protagonist the raccoon Skotch, who scrapes a living as an investigator.

Tchaikovsky has clearly read a bunch of noir novels; Skotch is a classic gumshoe of the Sam Spade tradition. He’s “invited” to come to talk to his ex-corporate boss by a few thugs, and given a job: there’s a mouse that is somewhere in Neuwien, recently arrived from the countryside, and Skotch is supposed to bring him in alive. With little choice in the matter, and he needs to get paid anyway, so Skotch sets out. Soon a bunch of different factions have approached Skotch to talk to him about the mouse, with varying degrees of politeness, including the requisite femme fatale (a stoat/weasel hybrid in this case: a very deadly predator, but a very enticingly slinky one). There’s much more going on than Skotch knows, and everyone assumes that Skotch knows more than he does. And above all they all want to make sure if and when Skotch finds the mouse, he brings the mouse to them and not anyone else. All very familiar to anyone who’s read noir novels.

And here’s where Tchaikovsky’s skill as a sci-fi author comes into play. Usually in “animals as people stories” (Redwall, Wind in the Willows, etc) the intelligent animals are, quite simply, people with animal shapes. Tchaikovsky put a lot of thought into keeping them as animals. Part of the reason Skotch went freelance is that raccoons are inherently ornery, and don’t do well as corporate drones. The bottom-of-the-food-chain creatures like mice and rats are quick to flee anytime they are startled; predators like cats or stoat/weasel hybrids tend to attack; the engineered parakeets are completely mad and happy like that.

And not all lives are valued equally. A mouse might live for a year or so, and units of “mausgelt” is how animal lives are measured. A mouse is worth one mausgelt; a rat is worth two; a relatively big creature like Skotch might be worth 15 or 20.  There’s a lot of implications in uplifting animals to sentience, and Tchaikovsky thought them through thoroughly.