Tag: writing

John C. Wright answers a question concerning whether books can contain messages concerning politics, religion, or philosophy without being propaganda:

I am a Christian, hence I regard God as the ultimate floor of reality, the one necessary being from which all contingent beings flow. If I am a faithful Christian, this one ultimate reality influences all lesser realities, and there is no neutral ground. Even something as lighthearted as a fight scene, I must decide if the characters act like pagan warriors or chivalrous knights, that is, with the romance of Christendom. Even a love scene must show love to be romantic, as a Christian sees love, or as situation of shameful weakness, erotic madness, or mutual exploitation, as various pagan and secular worldviews see love.

The Leftist for whom politics is the ultimate floor of being is an idolater, and makes power arrangements his personal little crappy god. It influences everything in his thought and life, and if left unchecked will eventually ruin his writing.

The Leftist who is a faithful Leftist only on their sabbath days, and otherwise ignores the business (and that would be the majority of Leftists) can write a perfectly passable story about space pirates kidnapping space princesses without any hint of politics, to the satisfaction of all involved. He will write his love scenes with romance and his fight scenes with chivalry without noticing or caring about the origin of these Christian cultural artifacts. He will not think of them as particularly Christian, merely as part of the moral atmosphere and cultural background of his society. He will not notice the incongruity between his art and his philosophy.

The distinction Wright is making can be seen very clearly in the difference between Larry Correia’s MONSTER HUNTER NEMESIS and Greg Bear’s DARWIN’S RADIO, both of which I recently finished reading. Now, Bear is much more highly regarded in the science fiction community. DARWIN’S RADIO won the Nebula Award for best novel and was nominated for the Hugo, Locus SF, and John W. Campbell awards. Bear is a multiple award-winner who is described as a hard SF writer “who often addresses major questions in contemporary science and culture with fictional solutions.”

Larry, on the other hand, can’t get nominated for the Hugo without being accused of rape, child abuse, and sexual deviancy… no, wait, that was Marion Zimmer Bradley. Or was it Samuel Delany? Anyhow, the point is that his books are generally considered little more than pulp urban fantasy that is popular among right-wing mouth breathers due to its heavy gun-porn content. And that’s not an entirely unfair characterization, if one looks solely at the early Monster Hunter books.

But here is the interesting thing. I will come right out and say that NEMESIS will hold up much better over time than DARWIN’S RADIO, and eventually will be seen to be a deeper, more serious novel, because, under the skin of its hellacious action-fury, the former contains the significant examination of some long-contemplated philosophical questions, whereas despite its erudite flights of scientific fancy, the latter contains nothing deeper than cheap atheist propaganda.

I’ll explain the philosophical questions of NEMESIS on Monday, when I review the book that is easily the best of the Monster Hunter series to date. And as for the propagandistic elements running so strong within DARWIN’S RADIO, the book is almost startling for its contempt for the unwashed, easily frightened masses, with a lack of faith in humanity surpassed only by Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall”.

The core idea is a response to the fossil and DNA dichotomies that falsify the models supporting the theory of evolution by natural selection: evolution doesn’t merely punctuate its equilibrium, but occurs instantaneously across a broad spectrum of a species under stress because [long complicated theory concerning viruses I couldn’t possibly explain on the basis of a single reading.] Informed? Highly. Ingenious? Absolutely. But then recall that the “major question” he’s nominally addressing (despite never expressing any serious doubts about the consensus dogma), is “why doesn’t the evidence support the conventional neo-Darwinian synthesis?”

And his answer is absurd. Magic Science Elves or Alien Uplifters or even a bored, sadistic Creator God would have been considerably more plausible than the Magic Ancient Virus-Program, which raises far more questions than it purports to answer. The real question underlying the nominal one is: “just how terribly would those awful little people who are too ignorant to place blind faith in scientistry react if they found themselves in a situation where living as a traditional married couple would cause them to a) believe that the wife was unfaithful, and, b) humanity was on the verge of becoming extinct through miscarriages.

As you can probably imagine, it isn’t long before we are treated to riots, televangelists, thousands of women being murdered by their husbands, the president and several governors being assassinated by a bomb, and even a ritual lampooning of Pat Robertson.

“They’re calling it ‘original sin,’ you know that?”

“I hadn’t heard that,” Augustine said.

“Tune in the Christian Broadcasting Network. They’re splitting constituencies all across America. Pat Robertson is telling his audience these monsters are God’s final test before the arrival of the new Kingdom of Heaven. He says our DNA is trying to purge itself of all our accumulated sins, to…what was his phrase, Ted?”

The aide said, “Clean up our records before God calls Judgment Day.”

“That was it.”

“We still don’t control the airwaves, Frank,” Augustine said. “I can’t be held responsible…”

“Half a dozen other televangelists say these unborn children are the devil’s spawn,” Shawbeck continued, building up steam. “Born with the mark of Satan, one-eyed and hare-lipped. Some are even saying they have cloven hooves.”

Augustine shook his head sadly.

“They’re your support group now,” Shawbeck said, and waved his arm for the aide to step forward. He struggled to his feet, shoved the crutches into his armpits. “I’m tendering my resignation tomorrow morning. From the Taskforce and from the NIH. I’m burned out. I can’t take any more of this ignorance—my own or anybody else’s. Just thought you should be the first to know. Maybe you can consolidate all the power.”

Oh, that dreadful ignorance! Oh, those awful violence-prone Christians! Only turning to science and giving unlimited power to politicians wise enough to unhesitatingly accept the untested and unproven assertions of scientists can save Man! With only superficial changes, this could have just as easily been a book about global warming, or nuclear disarmament, or an unexpected attack by rapidly evolving salamanders.

That’s what Wright means when he talks about the leftist ruining his own writing. I found myself putting down DARWIN’S RADIO twice, and had to force myself to finish it once it became clear that the philosophical message was not merely an integral part of the story, the message WAS the story. The characters, the plot, even the “major questions addressed” were only there to serve the all-important Message: Evolution by natural selection is real despite the appearance of the evidence and only Scientists can save you from the blind fury of the ignorant masses.

So, it’s not terribly surprising to discover that despite its scientific erudition and its panoply of literary awards, DARWIN’S RADIO is presently ranked #731,269 on Amazon and Greg Bear is now reduced to writing game tie-in novels for an Xbox game. This leads me to conclude it might be interesting, and more than a little informative in this regard, to compare Bear’s CITY AT THE END OF TIME to John C. Wright’s CITY BEYOND TIME.

John C. Wright has the EXCLUSIVE details:

Before I left SWFA, the last sight I saw of the SWFA Mansion in New Jersey was the sight of Mr Martin diligently at work, his eyes red with lack of sleep, his typewriter smoking, steaming, and emitting sparks, nine ashtrays filled with cigarette and cigar butts and broken hoohaks heaped about it, bags of Frito chips not only empty but ripped open and the chip-dust licked dry, drained bottles of cheap claret smashed in the hearth in a glittering pile, dead elfs on the doorstep, wounded muses with threadbare wings struggling to escape the chimney, and meanwhile a horde of medical technicians from the ninth planet of Etamin inserting a needle into the major veins of his arm so that much needed nutriment and saline could reach his brain, since in his fury he had forgotten all mortal food or perhaps foresworn it.

I saw a lonely and hooded traveler on the road walking away from the SFWA Mansion (at first I took this to be someone disgusted by news that the writers guild now protected with their silence the filth and perversions of pederasts, but who, unlike me, could make no public denunciation), and, running after the silent, looming shape, asked in wonder if George RR Martin was hard at work writing the next book in his much-loved series.

Let the fans rejoice! At last!

A former gatekeeper laments the publishing revolution:

The idea of writers being able to bring their creations directly to readers is widely touted as a radical advance in authorial control and a revolution in the creative process. Its popularity has soared and its champions, such as the writer and founder of the Alliance of Independent Authors, Orna Ross, proclaim it as something “radical, really revolutionary within my world”.. Self-publishing is the revolution du jour, the change that will liberate writers and democratise publishing.

Unfortunately, self-publishing is neither radical nor liberating. And, as revolutions go, it is rather short on revolutionaries. It is actually reactionary, a contracted version of the traditional publishing model in which companies, who produce for a wide range of tastes and preferences, are replaced by individual producers each catering to very narrow range.

Self-publishing is supposed to democratise publishing. For Nicholas Lovell, writing in the Bookseller, “publishers no longer have an ability to determine which books get published and which books don’t.” In other words, democratisation is nothing more than the expansion of the publishing process from the few to the many. But this both overestimates the barriers to traditional publication – the vetting and selection process may be deeply flawed, but every writer can submit a manuscript – and underestimates the constraints of the marketplace. It also fails to consider whether the democratisation of publishing produces a similar democratisation for the reader by making literary culture more open.

By definition, self-publishing is an individualistic pursuit in which each writer is both publisher and market adventurer, with every other writer a potential competitor and the reader reduced to the status of consumer. Publishing then becomes timid, fearing to be adventurous and revolutionary lest it betray the expectations of its market. This is a natural tendency in traditional publishing but it is one restrained by the voices of its authors who are free to put their work first and entrepreneurship a distant second. With authorship and entrepreneurship now equal partners, the new authorpreneurs have thrown off the dictatorship of the editor to replace it with the tyranny of the market.

Gatekeepers are liberators! The freedom of the market is tyranny! War is peace! Black is white! Evil is good!

These people lie as automatically as they breathe. How absurd is it to say that traditional publishing is not as restricted as it appears because “every writer can submit a manuscript”? This article didn’t convince me that self-publishing is a bad thing, it convinced me that in addition to being outdated, the traditional publishers are outright evil.

The ironic icing on the cake is the fact that the author, a former publisher, “has self-published his last three novels”. His best-selling book ranks #700,264 on Amazon. Little wonder he despises “the tyranny of the market”.

Since some people, most of them of the binary-thinking variety, appear to be somewhat confused by what is meant by Pink SF/F, it may be be helpful to provide a concise definition of it. Let’s begin by listing its attributes:

1. It is written in conscious reaction to, and rejection of, the classic genre canon.
2. It is politically correct.
3. It consciously elevates current progressive ideology above story, plot, and characterization. The personal is the political and the propaganda is the plot.
4. It rejects Christianity and traditional Western morality.
5. It subscribes to the anti-scientific myth of human equality.
6. It exhibits a superficial multiculturalism.
7. It utilizes racial and sexual checkboxes.
8. It inclines heavily to the political Left.
9. It celebrates and normalizes sexual deviancy.
10. It is structured in the conventional form of a romance novel rather than a science fiction or fantasy novel.

From these observable characteristics, we can derive a useful definition: Pink SF/F is a Left-wing literary subgenre written as racial, sexual, and ideological propaganda in order to subvert traditional literature, religion, and society.

This should make it easier to see why David Weber and Jim Butcher, for all their risible gamma male socio-sexuality, are not writing Pink SF/F, whereas Arthur C. Clarke and Marion Zimmer Bradley observably were. Any work of fiction that checks five or more of the ten attributes listed above can be safely designated and dismissed as Pink SF/F.

I appreciate the HBO version of A GAME OF THRONES. Unlike most screen adaptations, it has actually improved upon the books in many ways, and it is likely to continue doing so now that it has reached the second-rate material of the later books. But in this recap of the recent episode in which the Red Viper and the Mountain fight their duel, Andy Greenwald pinpoints the fundamental flaw in the SF/F genre’s nihilism.

It was all quite thrilling, for a time, with the Red Viper leaping balletically through the summery air and Alex Graves’s camera swooping vertiginously to catch him. Game of Thrones has often punched me in the heart, but it’s rarely had it fluttering so mightily in my throat. But then, just as Tyrion was getting his hopes up and Cersei was reaching for her Big Gulp of merlot, Oberyn spiked the ball at the 1-yard line. Rather than finish off the Mountain, Oberyn was just getting warmed up, demanding much more than an improbable victory. Instead, like Tyrion in the garden all those years ago, Oberyn demanded logic and an answer. And we all know what happened next. Kung. Kung. Kung.

Actually, the sound of Oberyn’s head exploding was much more terrible than that. The defanging — and defacing — of the Red Viper was among the worst things I’ve ever seen on a screen, but it was definitely the worst thing I’ve ever heard: It somehow managed to remind me both of my own mortality and of Gallagher. (Trust me when I say I’m not sure which was more unbearable.) And in that gruesome, hideous moment I realized that the real takeaway from Tyrion’s story isn’t that he’s a fool for wanting order when there is only chaos. It’s that we just might be for greedily tuning in to the Orson Hour every week and expecting the same thing.

Look, contra Ramsay Snow, I have been paying attention. I harbor no illusions of a happy ending. But even in the midst of an epic, excellent season that has provided more wit, resonance, and emotion than I had previously thought possible, I am growing slightly weary of being taught the same merciless lesson again and again. I’d like to think that Charlie Brown had some grudging respect for Lucy the first time she pulled away the football. But the fifth? What happened to dashing Prince Oberyn was gripping, horrifying television. But, unlike his skull, it was also rather hollow. Few authors could introduce such a fantastic character with such economy and skill (and fewer showrunners could do the same on television, with even more of both). But only George R.R. Martin would so sadistically run that character into the buzz saw of disappointment and plot that is Game of Thrones just to prove a point — and, I suppose, to tighten the noose a bit more around Tyrion’s neck. Like a beetle, Oberyn was born to die, and in the most gruesome, splattery way possible. And to what end? Shocking us isn’t the same thing as challenging us. A simpleton with a rock might not need to explain himself, but a writer usually does. At this point, the most radical thing Game of Thrones could do is to make the audience exhale in relief.

But it isn’t only George R.R. Martin who is obsessed with making the same point over and over and over. In his excellent collection of essays on science fiction, TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN, John C. Wright makes the vital distinction between a good story and a well-written one:

An artist can draw a picture of the rotting skull of a dead dog on a dungheap with maggots and blind worms crawling on its exposed brains with perfect perspective, shading, composition, and balance of light and dark, and yet it is still a picture of a dead dog.

Lest you think Wright exaggerates the depths to which the nihilistic authors of SF/F habitually descend, consider this, which is the conclusion of the highly regarded, and recently deceased, literary SF author Iain M. Banks’s novel WALKING ON GLASS.

In the grass he saw a magazine lying, torn. He looked more closely at it, saw a woman’s buttocks, over a pair of hairy knees. The woman’s bottom was reddened slightly; there was a hand poised, too obviously posed, not in motion, over her. A small breeze ruffled the pages of the magazine for him as he looked, as obligingly as any Hollywood wind-machine stripping a calendar between scenes. The pictures in the rest of the magazine were almost all identical.

He turned away, disgusted with something other than the pathetic but relatively harmless fetish of the magazine, and saw a flurry of flies swirl into the air from something dark in the grass; it looked like an animal’s leg.

He closed his eyes, willing tears to come, some final part of him giving in only now, wanting the surrender to animal emotion which until now he had fought against, but as he stood there he could feel no tears coming, only a son of resigned, ugly bitterness, a comprehensive revulsion for everything around him, for all the people and their artefacts and thoughts, all their stupid ways and pointless aims. He opened his smarting eyes, blinking angrily.

Here it was; this was what it all really meant; here was your civilisation, your billion years of evolution, right here; a soiled and tattered wanking-mag and chopped domestic animal.

Sex and violence, writ small like all our standard fantasies.

The pain in his belly which had afflicted him earlier returned, sharp and fierce as a rusty blade.

It swelled in him then, like some wildfire cancer; a rapid disgust, a total allergy syndrome directed at everything around him; at the filthy, eviscerated mundanity of it all, the sheer crawling awful-ness of existence; all the lies and the pain, the legalized murder, the privileged theft, the genocides and the hatreds and the stupefying human cruelties, all the starveling beauty of the burgeoning poor and the crippled in body and brain, all the life-defying squalor of the cities and the camps, all the sweltering frenetics of the creeds and the faiths, all the torturingly ingenious, carefully civilised savagery of the technology of pain and the economies of greed; all the hollow, ringing, bullshitting words used to justify and explain the utter howling grief of our own cruelty and stupidity; it piled on him, in him, like a weight of atmosphere, that awful mass of air above for those moments no longer balanced by a pressure within, so that he felt at once crushed, smashed inside, but swollen too; bursting with the sickening burden of a cheap and tumid revelation.

The writing is excellent from a technical perspective. But to the extent that it is more than the picture of a dead dog, the message is poisonous, and, as Greenwald correctly observes, tedious. It is ironic that Banks died as he wrote, of a wildfire cancer that brought a meaningless end to his meaningless life of writing repetitively about the meaninglessness of Man.

But that is the fruit of nihilism: insignificance, boredom, and sooner or later, death.

I’ve been finding the reading of Scott Lynch’s first two “Gentlemen Bastard” books to be more than a little educational because they are such a strange combination of competent writing with flawed and shallow story-telling. As such, they provide a useful perspective on precisely where and how Pink SF/F goes awry as literature.

Take the following quote from Red Seas Under Red Skies, which shows how a desired concept could have been handled well while simultaneously fumbling the execution:

“When you go to sea, there’s two necessities, for luck. First, you’re courting an awful fate if you take a ship to sea without at least one woman officer. It’s the law of the Lord of the Grasping Waters. His mandate. He’s got a fixation for the daughters of the land; he’ll smash any ship that puts to sea without at least one aboard. Plus, it’s plain common sense. They’re good officers. Decent plain sailors, but finer officers than you or I. Just the way the gods made ’em.

“Second, it’s powerful bad luck to put out without cats on board. Not only as they kill the rats, but as they’re the proudest creatures anywhere, wet or dry. Iono admires the little fuckers. Got a ship with women and cats aboard, you’ll have the finest luck you can hope for. Now, our little boat’s so small I reckon we’re fine without no woman. Fishers and harbor boats go out all the time, no worries. But with the pair of you aboard, I’ll be damned if I’m not bringing a cat. A little one suits a little vessel.”

Now, this is a subversion of the urban legend that women were historically considered bad luck on sailing ships. Fair enough, although it doesn’t address the real reason women were not permitted to serve on ships in the past, the fact that they tend to destroy ship morale and provide a major distraction for the male crew in addition to getting pregnant and rendering themselves unfit for service.

Changing the superstition works. But simply declaring, contra literally everything shown in both books before or after the statement, that women are intrinsically better military officers than men, is absurd and indicates either PC preaching or catering to a specific market that enjoys that particular fantasy. The book would have been much more coherent had Lynch simply ended the first necessity before adding the four sentences about “plain common sense”. Instead of getting on with the story, we find ourselves wondering about the mystery of the general absence of these superior female officers. Indeed, how did it come to pass that the Stragos, the naval commander who is a central character in the plot of the second book, is a man?

The ease with which a single throwaway dog-whistle can render the plot nonsensical points to an inevitable problem with SF/F that is both a) derivative of traditional genre works and b) politically correct. It is fractured by the intrinsic conflict of two contradictory logics, and thus forces the resolution of those contradictions by predictable and usually unsatisfactory means. For example, the preponderance of rape and child murder in modern SF/F is not the result of modern SF/F writers being particularly prone to either sexual assault or violence, indeed, the male writers are probably among the least likely men on the planet to have either had sex with a woman or raised a hand in violence to anyone.

But the ubiquity of rape and attempted rape is the result of the forced marriage of the traditional “rescue the woman’s virtue” trope with the PC “a woman has a right to rut like a mink in heat without being criticized for it” concept. When there is no virtue to be lost or saved, there is no shame or drama in it. All that is left is the lesser shame and drama of the potential violation of a woman’s consent.

In the same way, the relentless Herodianism of Pink SF/F is the result of the forced marriage of the traditional “protect the helpless” trope with the PC “women are equal to men” belief. This means that children now make up the entirety of the classes to be protected in Pink SF/F, thereby requiring them to become the only victims who are capable of generating any sympathy in the reader. Unless, of course, a character is victimized solely due to his race or sexual preference.

And those are the restrictions imposed upon the competent Pink SF/F writers, who attempt to intelligently resolve the logical contradictions. The incompetent ones, (and I note that the failed resolution above stuck out precisely because Lynch is an otherwise competent writer), simply lurch from one leap of illogic to the next, never realizing that they are contradicting themselves and presenting the reader with an incoherent imaginary world.

On a tangential note, it’s not hard at all to understand why Lynch’s books are popular among the Pink SF/F-reading crowd, and at least in the case of the first book, beyond. Despite the fact that the books are repetitively circular from a plot perspective, are subject to the aforementioned logical constraints, contain no drama or pathos, and go absolutely nowhere in any deeper sense, they do provide very well indeed for the wish fulfillment of a certain psychology that bastes itself in its belief in its own cleverness.

If I could only give a single piece of advice to a SF/F writer it would be this: excise the verbs “to smirk” and “to quirk” from your literary arsenal. At some point in the last 10-15 years, they mutually invaded the genre and have become all but ubiquitous.

First, note that quirk is not even a verb! It is a bloody NOUN. Seriously. It even says so in the dictionary and everything!

QUIRK noun
1. a peculiarity of action, behavior, or personality; mannerism: He is full of strange quirks.
2. a shift, subterfuge, or evasion; quibble.
3. a sudden twist or turn: He lost his money by a quirk of fate.
4.a flourish or showy stroke, as in writing.
5.Architecture.
a.an acute angle or channel, as one dividing two parts of a molding or one dividing a flush bead from the adjoining surfaces.
b.an area taken from a larger area, as a room or a plot of ground.
c.an enclosure for this area.

How, pray tell, does one “quirk a smile”. How is a sentence “quirked” rather than “said”? I’m not sure who is responsible, but I have the vague sense that David Weber may be the chiefly culpable party. In any event, quirking is the twerking of science fiction and fantasy genre; it is annoying, vulgar, and fundamentally stupid.

Weber’s On Basilisk Station contains 4 quirks.

1. Honor stood motionless, watching through the armorplast, feeling Nimitz rise straight and tall on her shoulder to join her perusal, and an eyebrow quirked.
2.  The numeral on her maneuvering display changed to “1,” and she turned to Webster and quirked an eyebrow, waiting out the seconds until he nodded.
3. Her lips quirked at the thought, and she worked her way more briskly through the traffic.
4. She paused, eyebrow quirked as if to ask if Honor was with her, and Honor nodded.

Now, at least the smirk addicts use an actual verb as a verb. But they still, for the most part, use it ineptly, even when it isn’t being used improperly. Let’s go to the definition again:

SMIRK verb
1. to smile in an affected, smug, or offensively familiar way.
2. to smile in a manner expressing expressing scorn, smugness, etc, rather than pleasure

Like “quirked”, “smirked” is frequently used as a said-bookism, and an improper said-bookism at that. It is a manner of smiling, not a manner of speaking.

Scott Lynch serves as a good example. He’s considered one of the better “new” writers, and as a pure wordsmith, he’s quite competent. In his first book, The Lies of Locke Lamora, while there are no quirks, there are no less than 11 smirks.

1. Calo had dark liquor-colored skin and hair like an inky slice of night; the tautness of the flesh around his dark eyes was broken only by a fine network of laugh-lines (though anyone who knew the Sanza twins would more readily describe them as smirk-lines)
2. “Incomparable.” He coughed, and then, with quick jerky motions, he loosened his black neck-cloths just the slightest bit; the Salvaras smirked charmingly together. “I’m reminded again why I have such success selling gentler liquors to you people.”
3. Capa Barsavi reached out with his right hand and turned Locke’s head slightly upward by the chin, staring down into Locke’s eyes as he spoke. “How old are you, Locke Lamora? Six? Seven? Already responsible for a breach of the Peace, a burnt-down tavern, and six or seven deaths.” The Capa smirked. “I have assassins five times your age who should be so bold. Has Chains told you the way it is, with my city and my laws?”
4.  “Consider it my challenge to you, to go hand in hand with my blessing.” Barsavi smirked.
5.  “The threat of an empty stomach soon rekindles wisdom.” Chains smirked.
6.  “I shall return very shortly,” said Locke, and he spun on his heel and made for the door. As he left the receiving room, he allowed himself a brief smirk of pleasure; the guards pinning Benjavier now looked almost as frightened of him as the waiter did.
7.  The sun was pouring down light and heat with its usual intensity, and Locke was sweating hard inside his fine new clothes, but for a few moments he let a satisfied smirk creep onto his face.
8.  “She is knitting, my lady,” said Reynart, with a smirk that told of some private joke.
9.  “Now,” said Doña Sofia with a smirk, “it will either be Doña Vorchenza, or it will be a pair of young people doing something they should not….”
10.  The Falconer stood in the center of the little room, smirking at Locke, his hand folded before him.
11. “Oh no, Master Lamora.” Now the sorcerer positively smirked.

The disease apparently progresses with time. Red Seas Under Red Skies contains 14 smirks, while The Republic of Thieves features 19 for the reader’s edification and enjoyment.

I have a theory about why pinkshirts are so prone to having their characters not only smirking often, but smirking improperly. The former because it serves as a signpost to the reader that a cleverness has been committed, and the latter because it is the writer speaking through the character, communicating his sense of self-satisfaction with the character’s behavior in the scene.

It should surprise no one to discover there are no smirkings and quirkings to be found in Tolkien.