[Teralogosnews] Digital Heirs Feud Over Author's Legacy

[teralogosnews@sjgames.com]

Digital Heirs Feud Over Author's Legacy

MEXICO CITY, Mexico/Teralogos	Nov 18, 2100  
  
Julita Reyes can hardly wait to read the latest installment in the epic
Millennium Saga by author Jonathan Sky. But her sister, Pilar, prefers the
rogue Millennium stories by his literary rival, J-X.  
  
Their mother, Rosario, thinks both her daughters are crazy: the real
Millennium Saga died with its original author, Jonathan Taylor Bradley. As far
as she's concerned, neither of his feuding digital literary heirs are
legitimate.  
  
The story behind the Millennium Saga has become at least as interesting as the
convoluted plots of the books themselves, which detail the lives and loves of
two powerful families whose fates converged in the year 2001.  
  
Over three decades, Bradley wrote eight installments in the wildly popular
epic, which since its first publication in 2060 has been enjoyed by over 12
billion readers. He passed away in 2096, shortly after completing the
blockbuster 4,424-page epic Salt of the Sun, which ended on a literary
cliffhanger.  
  
Fans were devastated, until the Bradley estate revealed that a mind emulation
had been taken shortly before the author's death. Calling itself Jonathan Sky
-- after an early pen name of the author -- the sapient shadow wrote a ninth
Millennium book, A Brighter Tomorrow, in 2098. Most reviewers called the book
a faithful, if uninspired, continuation of Bradley's work.  
  
But the release of a rogue Millennium story on the TSA web by another
emulation called J-X later in 2098 stirred excitement and controversy in the
literary world. Broken Skies, while unmistakably carrying the Bradley stamp,
took the story in a wild new direction that many critics said breathed new
life into the series.  
  
The origin, nature, and even ownership of J-X remains a mystery. While the
Bradley family refuses to concede that J-X has any connection to the author at
all, most literary experts disagree, believing it is another shadow of Bradley
that somehow escaped the family's control.  
  
"Creating a program to pastiche an author’s writing style only takes you so
far," said Fadil Mohammed of the University of Basra. "The ideas and
expression of ideas in J-X’s writing shows a clear link to Bradley on a deeper
and more fundamental level than any mere eidolon. It’s undeniably a sapient
emulation like Sky, although when and how it was created remains to be seen."
  
Other critics agree. Chance Mackintosh slogged that "the Bradley of Broken
Skies is clearly from an earlier epoch of his organic period, possibly the
mid-2070s. J-X's style has the fresh intensity of early Bradley, lacking the
baseline triumphalism, bordering on speciesism, that so diminished later
installments of the saga."  
  
And Jonathan Sky itself? For its part, the authorized shadow refuses to even
discuss its rival. Interviewers are warned not mention J-X at all, or the
interview will be ended.   
  
J-X and Jonathan Sky are both expected to release their respective versions of
the long-awaited tenth book in the now-bifurcated Millennium Saga in December
of 2100.  
  
-- filed by Patrick Sweeney