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Semiosis
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Caitlin Davies, Daniel Thomas May
- Length: 14 hrs and 46 mins
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Publisher's summary
"Narrators Daniel Thomas May and Caitlin Davies breathe life into the large cast of Burke's debut science fiction...both excel at utilizing accents, inflections, and personality traits to quickly build characterizations. The unusual cadence and inflections used for the aliens work to captivating effect." — AudioFile Magazine
In Semiosis, debut author Sue Burke's character driven audiobook of first contact, human survival hinges on an bizarre alliance.
Only mutual communication can forge an alliance with the planet's sentient species and prove that mammals are more than tools.
Forced to land on a planet they aren't prepared for, human colonists rely on their limited resources to survive. The planet provides a lush but inexplicable landscape—trees offer edible, addictive fruit one day and poison the next, while the ruins of an alien race are found entwined in the roots of a strange plant. Conflicts between generations arise as they struggle to understand one another and grapple with an unknowable alien intellect.
Critic reviews
"Narrators Daniel Thomas May and Caitlin Davies breathe life into the large cast of Burke's debut science fiction. ...May and Davies both excel at utilizing accents, inflections, and personality traits to quickly build characterizations. The unusual cadence and inflections used for the aliens work to captivating effect." -AudioFile
"Daniel Thomas May and Caitlyn Davies...did very well, utilizing varied accents and inflections to portray the different characters of each generation so that each person felt like they had a distinct and unique voice." -TheBiblioSanctum
“In Semiosis, Sue Burke blends science with adventure and fascinating characters, as a human colony desperately seeks to join the ecosystem of an alien world.” —David Brin, author of Earth and Existence.
Featured Article: The best audiobooks about aliens for curious humans
Throughout the history of storytelling, we humans have been curious about the possibility of worlds beyond Earth and its inhabitants. Thanks to our endless fascination with extraterrestrial life, there is a mountain of literature, from novels to memoirs, exploring the potential outcomes of interacting with creatures from other planets. Without further ado, here are 20 of our favorite listens about alien life.
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Lovely concept, No pay off story wise
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The Unreal and the Real is a major event not to be missed. In this two-volume selection of Ursula K. Le Guin's best short stories--as selected by the National Book Award winning author herself--the reader will be delighted, provoked, amused, and faced with the sharp, satirical voice of one of the best short story writers of the present day. Where on Earth explores Le Guin's earthbound stories which range around the world, from small town Oregon to middle Europe in the middle of revolution to summer camp.
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Shame on you, Audible
- By Audrey McCombs on 07-03-20
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Grass
- By: Sheri S. Tepper
- Narrated by: Dina Pearlman
- Length: 18 hrs and 44 mins
- Unabridged
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What could be more commonplace than grass or a world covered over all its surface with a wind-whipped ocean of grass? But the planet Grass conceals horrifying secrets within its endless pastures. And as an incurable plague attacks all inhabited planets but this one, the prairie-like Grass begins to reveal these secrets - and nothing will ever be the same again.
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Speculative & Creative, Yet well Paced and Unique
- By Zach Wilson on 04-17-17
By: Sheri S. Tepper
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Dragon's Blood
- The Pit Dragon Chronicles, Volume 1
- By: Jane Yolen
- Narrated by: Marc Thompson
- Length: 5 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Dragons are trained to fight to the death, and two determined teens help free them in this spellbinding saga. Training a dragon to be a fighting champion is the only way to freedom for 15-year-old Jakkin.
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can't even listen to it
- By Ingvor V. Franklin on 11-12-17
By: Jane Yolen
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The Sea of Trolls
- By: Nancy Farmer
- Narrated by: Gerard Doyle
- Length: 13 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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In the year 793, siblings Jack and Lucy are captured by fearsome Vikings with a thirst for battle and pillaging. Taken to the court of Ivar the Boneless, Jack and Lucy are sent on a perilous journey - full of dragons and giant spiders - deep into the magical kingdom of the trolls!
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NO KINDNESS IS EVER WASTED
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 11-03-17
By: Nancy Farmer
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The Hills Have Spies
- Valdemar: Family Spies, Book 1
- By: Mercedes Lackey
- Narrated by: Nick Podehl
- Length: 10 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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In this new series, set in the bestselling world of Valdemar, Heralds Mags and Amily must continue to protect the realm of Valdemar while raising their children and preparing them to follow in their footsteps.
Mags, Herald Spy of Valdemar, and his wife, Amily, the King’s Own Herald, are happily married with three kids. The oldest, Peregrine, has the Gift of Animal Mindspeech—he can talk to animals and persuade them to act as he wishes. Perry's dream is to follow in his father's footsteps as a Herald Spy, but he has yet to be Chosen by a Companion.
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Great continuation of the series!
- By Peter on 06-28-18
By: Mercedes Lackey
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Far North
- A Novel
- By: Marcel Theroux
- Narrated by: Yelena Schmulenson
- Length: 8 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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My father had an expression for a thing that turned out bad. He'd say it had gone west. But going west always sounded pretty good to me. After all, westwards is the path of the sun. And through as much history as I know of, people have moved west to settle and find freedom. But our world had gone north, truly gone north, and just how far north I was beginning to learn.
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Spellbinding!
- By Joan on 01-14-10
By: Marcel Theroux
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Building Harlequin's Moon
- By: Larry Niven, Brenda Cooper
- Narrated by: Tom Weiner
- Length: 15 hrs and 27 mins
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The first interstellar ship, John Glenn, fled a solar system populated by rogue AIs and machine/human hybrids, threatened by too much nanotechnology, and rife with political dangers. The John Glenn’s crew intended to terraform the nearly pristine planet Ymir in hopes of creating a utopian society that will limit intelligent technology, but by some miscalculation they have landed in the wrong system.
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Excellent - but needed to be twice as long
- By DAVID on 10-11-12
By: Larry Niven, and others
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Thieving Forest
- By: Martha Conway
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 13 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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On a humid day in June 1806, on the edge of Ohio's Great Black Swamp, 17-year-old Susanna Quiner watches from behind a maple tree as a band of Potawatomi Indians kidnaps her four older sisters from their cabin. With both her parents dead and all the other settlers out in their fields, Susanna makes the rash decision to pursue them herself. What follows is a young woman's quest to find her sisters and the parallel story of her sisters' new lives.
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Skip the audiobook, read the real thing.
- By Kelly on 11-26-15
By: Martha Conway
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What Elephants Know
- By: Eric Dinerstein
- Narrated by: Kirby Heyborne
- Length: 6 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Abandoned in the jungle of the Nepalese Borderlands, two-year-old Nandu is found living under the protective watch of a pack of wild dogs. From his mysterious beginnings, fate delivers him to the king's elephant stable, where he is raised by unlikely parents - the wise head of the stable, Subba-sahib, and Devi Kali, a fierce and affectionate female elephant. When the king's government threatens to close the stable, Nandu, now 12, searches for a way to save his family and community. A risky plan could be the answer.
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loved it
- By Christina McGrath on 12-30-21
By: Eric Dinerstein
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The Trees
- By: Ali Shaw
- Narrated by: Ben Onwukwe
- Length: 18 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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There came an elastic aftershock of creaks and groans and then, softly softly, a chinking shower of rubbled cement. Leaves calmed and trunks stood serene. Where, not a minute before, there had been a suburb, there was now only woodland standing amid ruins. There is no warning. No chance to prepare. They arrive in the night: thundering up through the ground, transforming streets and towns into shadowy forest. Buildings are destroyed.
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Post apocalypse with a little bit of magic
- By Tam on 09-20-16
By: Ali Shaw
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Book of a Thousand Days
- By: Shannon Hale
- Narrated by: Chelsea Mixon
- Length: 7 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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When Lady Saren defies her father’s command to marry the vicious Lord Khasar, she is sealed in a tower with only her serving maid, Dashti, for company. In their cramped, dark space Dashti pours her thoughts into a daily journal while pitiless solitude engulfs them. At first the girl is optimistic: they have food aplenty, candles for light, and even a visit from Lady Saren’s true love, Khan Tegus - though he can only call to them from outside their walls. But their circumstances soon grow desperate.
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I charming little book.
- By Steve on 07-20-15
By: Shannon Hale
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How Long 'Til Black Future Month?
- Stories
- By: N. K. Jemisin
- Narrated by: Shayna Small, Gail Nelson-Holgate, Robin Ray Eller, and others
- Length: 14 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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N. K. Jemisin is one of the most powerful and acclaimed speculative fiction authors of our time. In the first collection of her evocative short fiction, Jemisin equally challenges and delights listeners with thought-provoking narratives of destruction, rebirth, and redemption.
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Great! One quibble with the audiobook editing
- By L on 03-05-19
By: N. K. Jemisin
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What listeners say about Semiosis
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
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Performance
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- Lilyn G.
- 03-20-18
Weird. But good. But weird.
Semiosis was an odd book that evoked many different emotions. I started out loving the book because of the sheer imagination displayed, but was pretty sure at some points that I was going to end up hating it. However, my affection for the book would gain ground again just a few chapters later. I can’t say I outright loved the book, but I actively wanted to finish it – and that’s been difficult for me to do lately.
There are aspects of Semiosis that don’t make a lot of sense, but you can put them aside for the sake of the story. For example, at one point there’s a super small amount people on Pax. Assuming an equal distribution of males to females, and fertility for all, that’s still not really a firm ground for genetic diversity to avoid inbreeding and stuff. There were some balances put in place initially, but they’re done away with fairly early on. And then additional complications are brought into play. So, yeah, the fact that several generations down the road there’s no visible signs of issues there gives me a little bit of pause.
The time skips were a little bit weird because there was no real order to do them. It was like the author used them to move past the parts of the story that she didn’t know how to handle. A way of just writing the good parts, you know? It ended up working out in the end, but it was one of my least favorite aspects of Semiosis.
Sue Burke did do an amazing job crafting the main character of most of the book. They were completely unexpected, creepy at first, and we (my buddy reader and I) were positive that there was something fishy going on. (And not in the Shape of Water way.) Neither of us liked them for a good potion of the book. However, somewhere in the last 80 pages, having watched the character evolve, a certain fondness took hold.
In some ways, Semiosis felt like it was a bit of a riff on the Harry Harrison’s Deathworld novel. In fact, when I read some of the first praise for it, I thought “Haven’t these people read Deathworld? It’s not that original.” But though there are some basic similarities, Burke definitely developed Semiosis into her own story, and it really was completely unpredictable.
One of the things that I think will stay with me for a long time is something that the characters talk about early on. Human beings realizing that they couldn’t bring their environment with them. That they needed to find a place to fit in with the local environment, not force the local environment to adapt to them.
In a time where science fiction seems obsessed with interstellar wars and focuses on the knowns such as the asteroid belt and the rocky planets, to read a book like this is a sheer pleasure. It shows that there are still science fiction writers out there that are capable of cultivating nearly neglected ideas and growing them into a book you haven’t read a variation on five hundred times before. Yes, there’s been plenty of first contact novels, but there’s only been a few like this.
Overall, Semiosis is a strong showing from Sue Burke. The plot is solid, the pacing wobbles a bit but stays interesting, the world is captivating, and it ends absolutely perfectly. I hope that any forthcoming novels from her are just as creative and interesting. It’s worth checking this one out, y’all, if for no other reason than it’s a great change of pace.
As for the narration: I thought they did a solid job. It was an easy book to sink into at night.
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67 people found this helpful
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- kimberly stewart
- 03-08-18
Blew my socks off
Any additional comments?
Old, jaded science fiction/speculative fiction/first contact consumer, here. It's hard to get me excited, but Semiosis was shockingly . . . excellent. The writing, the character development, the pace, the narration -- I'm serious, as big a snob as I am about most stuff coming out in the self-publishing age, this book is the best new sci-fi I've read in years. Like, ten years, maybe more.
The 'gift' this writer has is making the outrageously alien seem like a friend. The consistency in the science might not fool a botanist but I will never look at plants the same. You know that smell tomato bushes make when you prune them? It's their "Help!! Danger!" signal. That's all you need to know to find yourself ready to believe this book tells truth.
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26 people found this helpful
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- Matrin Zachs
- 02-09-18
Great tale of human survival.
Truly you are reading a great book when the end sucker punches you in the face and cause you wanted more. That's how I felt with this novel.
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20 people found this helpful
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- Jennifer
- 02-12-18
Great story, but jumps a lot and without warning
As a biologist, I really enjoyed this book. The story was well thought out and written. It was also very well performed.
I only gave 4 stars for story because I do wish the book had told more about many of the characters. You are introduced to several people from the different generations in order. After being introduced and telling a piece of the character's story, the story skips to the next (sometimes with large gaps in time). The earlier stories were just enough to captivate me and make me irritated when they jumped to the next generation and character without warning.
The ending was both interesting and satisfying, which I find to be quite rare.
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17 people found this helpful
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- Maria Stahl
- 02-16-18
Skip the audio, just read the book yourself
Would you listen to Semiosis again? Why?
No. Please, no.
What did you like best about this story?
The story is great. Interesting concepts - it is a real grabber! I like the multigenerational storytelling, as many things are not accomplished in full in one human lifetime.
What didn’t you like about Daniel Thomas May and Caitlin Davies ’s performance?
May is okay. Davies is painful. She sounds like a broken robot. And she uses glottal stops on words like "button" - it becomes "bu'on". Ugh. I also think I heard her say "eckcetera" at least once.
Any additional comments?
I would return the audio book if I could and just read the ebook. But it's too late.
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12 people found this helpful
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- Amazon Customer
- 06-24-18
Trigger Warning
For those who need it. Sexual assault described in graphic detail in 2nd chapter, about an hour and 25 minutes in. I don't know about after that.
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8 people found this helpful
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- Michael G Kurilla
- 05-27-18
Alien intelligence can be a bit inscrutable
Sue Burke's Semosis is a tale of alien contact where the gulf between intelligent species is so great as to almost preclude frames of reference that allow the differences to be bridged. At the same time, the story unfolds as inter-generational conflicts arise due to successive cohorts differing substantially in their perspectives of the alien world. What began as a quest to establish a more harmonious, pacifist society takes a wrong turn when they end up on the wrong planet and must struggle for survival as they encounter semi-intelligent animal species as well as intelligent plants. In addition, they discover the planet had been previously colonized by another alien civilization that died away, while their descendants have now gone feral.
The major sci-fi themes are around alien contact and alien intelligence with planetary colonization under harsh conditions. The animals have mostly earth counterpart-like features, while the plants appear largely earth-like, but with unexplained consciousness and intelligence. There's a tendency to mimic human qualities such as greed and double-crossing, but overall, the fascination is with the gradual recognition of botanical intellect and the creative means of communication and interaction. The evolution across human generations is also a prominent feature that not only displays the changes over time, but also the inter-generational conflict created by distinct attitudes and perceptions.
The choice of two narrators was wise in order to highlight the passing of the torch from cohort to cohort. Both narrators exhibited a good range of character distinction as well pacing and tone. The portions from the plant's perspectives were a bit stilted, but passable, although the main botanical intelligence came off with a bit too "arm-chair philosopher" style.
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- Aerindel
- 03-02-18
Great book...no ending.
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
Sure, its an interesting book and well read.
What did you like best about this story?
I enjoyed the ecosystem and its components, very imaginative.
What about Caitlin Davies and Daniel Thomas May ’s performance did you like?
Nothing memorable, which is generally a good thing.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
Many, but I won't spoil them.
Any additional comments?
This book had no real ending.....it just went on with more and more interesting things happening and then just came to an end with no real feeling of ending or resolution.
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6 people found this helpful
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- CCCii
- 03-18-18
Yes!
I thought I'd made a mistake at first, but it got good. So good. I've noticed a lot of my favorite books confuse me or annoy me at first, but then I fall in to them. This is like that. It's brilliantly creative, a great story, and different than the usual.
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- CallmeJace
- 03-08-18
Incredible
This was one of the most refreshing takes on sci-fi I have ever heard. I usually favor robots and lasers over organics and self reflection, but this book defied expectations and gave me a truly amazing listen. Told from the perspective of generations of humans and one massive plant, Semiosis is a brilliant and thought provoking look at humanity and it’s coexistence with alien life, both animal and plant. I was gripped by all the conflicts and dangers our poor settlers encountered and always satisfied with the resolutions. I highly recommend this book for people looking for something new to discover, to find a fresh take on what life would be like on an alien world.
Not to mention the excellent voice acting that kept me engaged till the very end! 10/10 for me.
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