Mindless Ones

(continued)
like reading a newspaper, and it feels like getting reports from a real other world, one which has its own history, politics, and theology.

In later storylines, this distinction between Estarcion and the real world is broken down, to the point that one book is almost entirely given over to a discussion of the Bible, and Sim seems to believe, at least somewhat, that he was writing the prehistory of our own world — but so did Tolkien, and while Sim’s fictional world is nowhere near as fully thought-out as Tolkien’s, it was, for a while, possible to believe that it was, if only in Sim’s mind.
Trigger warning: this piece discusses rape.