I spent the last three days (Friday to Sunday) in Budapest, at our company’s annual conference/off-site. (Last year’s trip went to Berlin.) We spent most of our time in various social activities, including a lot of eating, so I didn’t have time to see as much of the city as I had hoped, but here are some brief notes:

• Warm. The temperature was around 15 to 20°C during daytime. After the +5°C we had in Stockholm, it was a bit of a shock. I’d forgotten what 20°C feels like, and wished I had brought sandals.
• “Continental,” with lots of outdoor cafes and restaurants, shops spreading their wares into the streets, street performers etc, and a lot of people out and about in the evening. Of course it’s easy to get people to hang around in sidewalk cafes when the weather outside is so balmy.
• Grey and beige, since almost all houses were clad in local sandstone. Made me think of central Paris, which was similarly grey.
• The Donau (Danube) is nowhere near blue.
• Buda and Pest are strikingly different. Buda is hilly, green, residential. Pest is flat, gray, commercial.

The most interesting sight I saw was the thermal baths of Szécsény. It’s a complex of indoor and outdoor pools, heated by natural hot springs. It was interesting to see bathing as a social activity: the crowd was mostly adults hanging around, conversing, and floating. There were hardly any children around, and I imagine they would have found the baths quite boring (although there were some fountains and a jet stream.) The coolest pool had a water temperature of 18°C and the hottest was 38°C – too warm for comfort, in my opinion. But the 34°C pools were quite pleasant, and the relaxing atmosphere was quite contagious, although I have to admit to getting slightly bored and impatient after an hour or so (at which point I fetched my camera and did some wandering).

Photos coming up soon, hopefully.

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com:

• How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn Easily
• NY Times: 21st Century Babies: The Gift of Life, and Its Price – An increasing number of babies born using fertility treatments are twins, and they carry special risks often overlooked in the desire to produce new families.
• NY Times: The Calorie-Restriction Experiment – Comprehensive Assessment of Long-Term Effects of Reducing Intake of Energy

The Steel Remains is the (fantasy) story of three war heroes, well after the war (against a race of lizard people wanting to take over all human lands) has ended. Ringil, the main guy, is asked to help track down a distant relative who’s been sold into slavery. The second one, Egar, is a nomad chief who’s no longer respected by his tribe. Archeth, advisor to an emperor, is tasked with investigating a mysterious and powerful attack on a harbour city. Most of the book circles around Ringil’s voyage but the three plot threads turn out to be connected, via a powerful alien race who has evil plans against humans.

That’s the plot. But the theme of the book is that of war: the cost of war, and how little time it takes for the gains to be frittered away, and how quickly the people forget what their warriors did for them and what they sacrificed.

While some of the events described (the war, for example) are huge, the viewpoint is always close up and personal. There is no grand battle between good and evil – there are just angry men fighting for or against something.

This is fantasy noir at its bleakest. It’s a corrupt, bigoted, ignorant, violent world, where criminals get rich and honest people suffer. There is no hope, no aspiration towards a brighter tomorrow. In all the 400 pages not a single happy relationship is mentioned, nor a happy memory, not to mention actual happy feelings in the present.

Perhaps this is why one of the back cover blurbs says that The Steel Remains “doesn’t so much twist the cliches of fantasy as take an axe to them. Then set them on fire.”

But I suspect that comment was referring more to the style and tone of the book, which is pretty brutal: all full of action and violence, drugs and sex and swearing.

Unfortunately this axing of cliches becomes too much of a focus for Morgan, and turns into provocation for provocation’s sake. Yes, making your protagonists flawed is a trendy thing for fantasy books, but when they’re all more or less despicable, you’ve gone too far. (Not as bad as Abercrombie’s The Blade Itself but definitely competing in the same league.) Yes, having a homosexual protagonist is a modern touch, but describing each of their sex acts in great detail is just juvenile. And yes, using contemporary language is a break with the usual high-flowing semi-archaic language, but when every other word is fuck, it starts to grate.

I guess this brutalist approach suits the theme. But it also seems like a prop that Morgan uses because it’s an easy way to stand out. Strip away the dark ambience from this book and what remains is not so special.

(Oh, and I cannot resist mentioning the absurd love affair between Ringil and one of the vampire-like all-powerful evil elves. Yeah, right, aliens find humans irresistibly sexy, happen to be homosexual, and their anatomy just happens to fit, too. Gaah!)

Still, despite this grumbling, I enjoyed the book. It did stand out from the masses of fantasy: it was intelligent, coherent, thrilling, realistic and intense.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

• Readability – An Arc90 Lab Experiment – A tool (javascript bookmarklet) that makes any web page readable by removing all the clutter.
• Color Scheme Designer – Create a colour scheme from a single colour
• kuler – Create a colour scheme from a single colour.
• Scott Bellware: Lean Reading List – Scott's list of books about Lean Software Development and related topics (lean production, Toyota etc).

A thought that keeps occurring to me, again and again:

I hope that I live long enough to see and hear what the coming generations will say about this time in human history, say from 1950 onwards. The time when mankind had actually become aware of how it affects the world, but kept on going anyway, wilfully destroying most things around them. Us. Spreading noxious gases and hormone-disrupting chemicals and plastic junk, burning and chopping down rainforests, fishing out the seas, and so on and on.

I hope this doesn’t sound like whinging. I really am curious to see when the insight will hit us, and how that will feel.

You know you are an Estonian when (in addition to the 148 other things that mark an Estonian) your breakfast consists of rye bread and freshly pickled cucumbers.

(I found an English-language version of the “slow pickle” recipe, but nothing for the “quick pickle” that is ready after a day or two, which is what Eric and my mum made.)