There should have been a warning....
The tales of awful cruise vacations are varied these days. I took a cruise once, in 2003 or 2004 on a Carnival Cruise ship called the Ecstasy. While there was no explosive intestinal plague or drunk captains diverting us into a rocky coast on my trip, the amenities were the most contrived, dated, tacky, and bizarre pretense of a luxury experience in the history of rip-off excursions…. hell, I couldn't make this shit up.
In fact, it made such an impression on me, I put it in my book. In Participants of the Project, I have my five core characters take the same cruise. Granted, when I took the cruise, no one got murdered, but there was a cheesy dance contest, goofy "entertainment" provided by the crew, cigar and cigarette smoke recirculating through every indoor space, and extremely inflated prices for extras, like crappy "spa" treatments and watered down cocktails. The interior was worn and faded, with broken fixtures, empty spaces where the library and game room were supposed to be, and chained-off attractions like an arcade and casino that were out of use. It was like being trapped in a condemned amusement park for three days, only out on the open seas in February when it's actually pretty damned cold off the coast of Southern California. I don't know... I could easily imagine mayhem and peril lurking beyond the bizarre of such a scenario!
I had a lot of fun writing that part of Book One of The INCE Trilogy. In POTP, Dakota, Halp, Skipper, Alfonz and Rafe take the cruise together and encounter odd people and weird vibes, just like I did, including a pair of sisters-in-law based on real people that I met on my cruise. The impressions my characters have of their accommodations and of the demographic of the guests is reflective on my own conclusions: utterly lacking. But the rest is pure fiction... science fiction with a dystopian slant that frankly doesn't feel too far out of reach with today's big money running government. In this case, it's big bio tech money and a billionaire politician playing with power, a.k.a political terrorism.
My characters are in a bubble they created to insulate themselves from exactly the kind of human betrayal they are doomed to confront, face, and probably not survive.
Of course, little do they know at that point in the story that the cruise was actually one of the last normal experiences they would ever have again. But you'll have to read the book to that find out for yourself.
~ cre8tvdeb
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