Review of “Counting Cats in Zanzibar” (1996)
Gene Wolfe (writer).
Read in 2026.
There’s a woman on a boat.
It’s as if Wolfe had taken every one of Isaac Asimov’s android stories, especially The Robots of Dawn (1983), rotated the structure of the whodunit 61° on the z axis so that the whole story is a mystery for the reader to figure out instead of a page-turner, and then added numerous literary allusions in place of naturalistic dialogue. The plot eventually clears up, but is poorly constructed.