Oblivion's connection to Discworld is a legacy worth celebrating

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^Stay tuned for the video version of this article.

I’ve been thinking recently, apropos of absolutely nothing, about the word “Legacy”. How it’s a particularly loaded word when it comes to authors, artists, filmmakers… any kind of creative, really. A prolific author, unlike the vast majority of us, leaves behind a body of work full of clues as to their real character: Terry Pratchett, for example, who is Britain’s best and most beloved author after Tolkien, published a bewildering 41 Discworld novels over a period of 32 years, almost exactly the latter half of his life.

If you’re currently doing some quick maths and thinking, that’s preposterous, that means he must have written more than one book a year at one point, then yeah, at the time it was a bit of a running joke. At his most prolific he was writing over 400 words per day, minimum, with an almost religious determination. Sometimes he would write significantly more. At that rate, you can knock out a novel’s worth of words in around six months. The trick is sustaining it: it’s astonishing to me, someone who writes a 1200 word script and then has to go and have a lie down for about a week, that he just wrote, and wrote, and wrote, and never stopped.

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