If I could state the novel’s central premise in one sentence, here it is: Intellectual freedom begins where interrogation is permitted. If I could add another distillation, it would be: Imagination, for me, is a moral practice—a way of seeing beyond self-preservation toward empathy.

In these early days of the AI reordering of all things human, this battle within the larger culture wars has been made to seem insignificant. Whether realist or anti-realist, we are up against the same problem: the end of reading, the end of the book, and certainly the end of anything as quaint as “aesthetics.” AI gives not a fuck about beauty.

Curse Him, by Sophia Terazawa, has been selected by Kazim Ali as winner of the 2026 Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize! FC2 will publish Curse Him in the Fall of 2027.