
The Mountain in the Sea
A Novel
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Narrated by:
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Eunice Wong
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By:
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Ray Nayler
About this listen
2022 Slate Book Review Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
2023 Locus Awards - Winner
2023 Nebula Awards - Nominee, Short-listed
2022 Slate Best Books of the Year, Long-listed
“Eunice Wong’s measured pacing and mellow tones perfectly complement Nayler’s provocative exploration of memory, minds, and consciousness.” - Booklist
"The theme of the nature of consciousness is equal parts intriguing, thrilling, and eerie. Best of all, it's always compellingly narrated, making for a performance that's difficult to pause."- AudioFile Magazine
Humankind discovers intelligent life in an octopus species with its own language and culture, and sets off a high-stakes global competition to dominate the future.
Rumors begin to spread of a species of hyperintelligent, dangerous octopus that may have developed its own language and culture. Marine biologist Dr. Ha Nguyen, who has spent her life researching cephalopod intelligence, will do anything for the chance to study them.
The transnational tech corporation DIANIMA has sealed the remote Con Dao Archipelago, where the octopuses were discovered, off from the world. Dr. Nguyen joins DIANIMA’s team on the islands: a battle-scarred security agent and the world’s first android.
The octopuses hold the key to unprecedented breakthroughs in extrahuman intelligence. The stakes are high: there are vast fortunes to be made by whoever can take advantage of the octopuses’ advancements, and as Dr. Nguyen struggles to communicate with the newly discovered species, forces larger than DIANIMA close in to seize the octopuses for themselves.
But no one has yet asked the octopuses what they think. And what they might do about it.
A near-future thriller about the nature of consciousness, Ray Nayler’s The Mountain in the Sea is a dazzling literary debut and a mind-blowing dive into the treasure and wreckage of humankind’s legacy.
A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
©2022 Ray Nayler (P)2022 Macmillan AudioListeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"With a thriller heart and a sci-fi head, The Mountain in the Sea delivers a spooky smart read. Artificial intelligence, nascent animal sentience, murderous flying drones: like the best of Gibson or Atwood, it brings all of the plot without forgetting the bigger questions of consciousness, ecocide, and scientific progress. Truly a one-of-a-kind story"—Kawai Strong Washburn, author of Sharks in the Time of Saviors
"Nayler’s masterful debut combines fascinating science and well-wrought characters to deliver a deep dive into the nature of intelligent life. . . As entertaining as it is intellectually rigorous, this taut exploration of human—and inhuman—consciousness is a knockout." —Publishers Weekly, starred review
"Less a science-fiction adventure than a meditation on consciousness and self-awareness, the limitations of human language, and the reasons for those limitations, the novel teaches as it engages." —Kirkus Reviews
"With a thriller heart and a sci-fi head, The Mountain in the Sea delivers a spooky smart read. Artificial intelligence, nascent animal sentience, murderous flying drones: like the best of Gibson or Atwood, it brings all of the plot without forgetting the bigger questions of consciousness, ecocide, and scientific progress. Truly a one-of-a-kind story" —Kawai Strong Washburn, author of Sharks in the Time of Saviors
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Good book, but not for Audio
- By Paul on 05-16-25
By: Joe Mungo Reed
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Ninefox Gambit
- By: Yoon Ha Lee
- Narrated by: Emily Woo Zeller
- Length: 10 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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To win an impossible war, Captain Kel Cheris must awaken an ancient weapon and a despised traitor general.
Captain Kel Cheris of the Hexarchate is disgraced for using unconventional methods in a battle against heretics. Kel Command gives her the opportunity to redeem herself by retaking the Fortress of Scattered Needles, a star fortress that has recently been captured by heretics. Cheris' career isn't the only thing at stake. If the fortress falls, the Hexarchate itself might be next.
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Just too confusing with enough context
- By Jose Alvarez on 04-02-17
By: Yoon Ha Lee
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Embassytown
- By: China Mieville
- Narrated by: Susan Duerden
- Length: 12 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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China Miéville doesn’t follow trends, he sets them. Relentlessly pushing his own boundaries as a writer - and in the process expanding the boundaries of the entire field - with Embassytown, Miéville has crafted an extraordinary novel that is not only a moving personal drama but a gripping adventure of alien contact and war. In the far future, humans have colonized a distant planet, home to sentient beings famed for a language unique in the universe, one that only a few altered human ambassadors can speak....
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must hear to fully appreciate.
- By Don Gilbert on 01-05-12
By: China Mieville
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Retrograde
- By: Peter Cawdron
- Narrated by: Sarah Mollo-Christensen
- Length: 9 hrs
- Unabridged
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Mankind has long dreamed of reaching out to live on other planets, and with the establishment of the Mars Endeavour colony, that dream has become reality. The fledgling colony consists of 120 scientists, astronauts, medical staff, and engineers. Buried deep underground, they're protected from the harsh radiation that sterilizes the surface of the planet. The colony is prepared for every eventuality except one - what happens when disaster strikes Earth?
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Who rescues the Martians when Earth is gone?
- By Jason on 09-20-17
By: Peter Cawdron
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Radiance
- By: Catherynne M. Valente
- Narrated by: Heath Miller
- Length: 13 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
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Severin Unck's father is a famous director of Gothic romances in an alternate 1986 in which talking movies are still a daring innovation due to the patent-hoarding Edison family. Rebelling against her father's films of passion, intrigue, and spirits from beyond, Severin starts making documentaries, traveling through space and investigating the levitator cults of Neptune and the lawless saloons of Mars.
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Unexpected and tons of fun
- By Kate on 11-17-15
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The Mountain and the Sea
- By: Kwame Dawes
- Narrated by: Paula-Anne Jones
- Length: 3 hrs and 17 mins
- Original Recording
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Esther, a painter living in Jamaica and recovering from the death of her husband, comes across a man on a mountain road with no memory of his past. As a hurricane rushes towards the island, she shelters the handsome stranger, names him “Monty”, and tries to uncover the mystery of his missing memory. She soon finds herself falling in love with a man she barely knows, and who doesn’t even know himself. The Mountain and the Sea is a romantic tale about letting go of the past and embracing the present.
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Pornography
- By Randall on 04-04-20
By: Kwame Dawes
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The Sparrow
- By: Mary Doria Russell
- Narrated by: David Colacci
- Length: 15 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
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A visionary work that combines speculative fiction with deep philosophical inquiry, The Sparrow tells the story of a charismatic Jesuit priest and linguist, Emilio Sandoz, who leads a scientific mission entrusted with a profound task: To make first contact with intelligent extraterrestrial life. The mission begins in faith, hope, and beauty, but a series of small misunderstandings brings it to a catastrophic end.
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Superbly Written and Thought-provoking
- By Jim N on 08-15-12
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Dhalgren
- By: Samuel R. Delany
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 34 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there...the population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. And into this disaster zone comes a young man - a poet, a lover, and an adventurer - known only as the Kid.
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A classic I return to every few years
- By kwdayboise (Kim Day) on 04-08-17
By: Samuel R. Delany
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Version Control
- A Novel
- By: Dexter Palmer
- Narrated by: January LaVoy
- Length: 18 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Rebecca Wright has reclaimed her life, finding her way out of her grief and depression following a personal tragedy years ago. She spends her days working in customer support for the Internet dating site where she first met her husband. But she has a strange, persistent sense that everything around her is somewhat off-kilter: She constantly feels as if she has walked into a room and forgotten what she intended to do there; on TV, the president seems to be the wrong person in the wrong place; her dreams are full of disquiet.
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This one is a keeper
- By Charles Elmore on 03-28-16
By: Dexter Palmer
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Sea of Rust
- A Novel
- By: C. Robert Cargill
- Narrated by: Eva Kaminsky
- Length: 10 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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It's been 30 years since the apocalypse and 15 years since the murder of the last human being at the hands of robots. Humankind is extinct. Every man, woman, and child has been liquidated by a global uprising devised by the very machines humans designed and built to serve them. Most of the world is controlled by an OWI - One World Intelligence, the shared consciousness of millions of robots uploaded into one huge mainframe brain.
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This Book has Magic
- By Kurt Schwoppe on 06-15-18
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Kraken
- By: China Mieville
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 16 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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With this outrageous new novel, China Miéville has written one of the strangest, funniest, and flat-out scariest books you will read this—or any other—year. The London that comes to life in Kraken is a weird metropolis awash in secret currents of myth and magic, where criminals, police, cultists, and wizards are locked in a war to bring about—or prevent—the End of All Things.
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A New Favorite Author
- By Caveat Emptor on 10-23-10
By: China Mieville
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Exit Zero
- Stories
- By: Marie-Helene Bertino
- Narrated by: Adenrele Ojo
- Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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Death-shaped entities—with all of their humor and strangeness—haunt the twelve stories in Exit Zero. Vampires, ghost girls, fathers, blank spaces, day-old peaches, and famous paintings all pierce through their world into ours, reminding us to pay attention! and look alive! and offering many other flashes of wisdom from the oracle and author of Beautyland, Marie-Helene Bertino.
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Metallic Realms
- A Novel
- By: Lincoln Michel
- Narrated by: Shaun Taylor-Corbett
- Length: 10 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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Perennially single, socially awkward, and drowning in debt, Michael Lincoln finds his life has turned out nothing like the intergalactic lives of the pulp heroes of his youth. But these are pedestrian concerns—he has a higher calling, and that is to preserve for all posterity the greatest series in the history of the written word: The Star Rot Chronicles.
By: Lincoln Michel
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The Terraformers
- By: Annalee Newitz
- Narrated by: Emily Lawrence
- Length: 13 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Destry's life is dedicated to terraforming Sask-E. As part of the Environmental Rescue Team, she cares for the planet and its burgeoning eco-systems as her parents and their parents did before her. But the bright, clean future they're building comes under threat when Destry discovers a city full of people that shouldn’t exist, hidden inside a massive volcano. As she uncovers more about their past, Destry begins to question the mission she's devoted her life to, and must make a choice that will reverberate through Sask-E's future for generations to come.
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No no no no no
- By Jeff Reynolds on 03-12-23
By: Annalee Newitz
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A Hymn Before Battle
- Legacy of the Aldenata
- By: John Ringo
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor
- Length: 14 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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With Earth in the path of the rapacious Posleen, the Galactic Federation offers help to the backward humans - for a price. You can protect yourself from your enemies, but God save you from your allies!
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Another heads up!
- By Dr. Daniel Chapman on 06-12-14
By: John Ringo
Good near term sci-fi book on AI
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One of my favorite books ever
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Unexpected great read
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The performance is amazing. It takes place all around the world and characters have names from different languages and the narrator just nailed it all. As I said, extraordinary by any measure.
Extraordinary by all measures
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The story takes place in our future when there have been massive upheavals in the geopolitical sphere, and wars that caused environmental catastrophes in addition to killing large portions of the population. The main part of the book is about Dr. Ha and the two who are on the island with her. One is a woman who has been enhanced so she is as much a machine as a human. The other is an android whose perfection scared the population to the point where there were riots and social unrest. Now they are hidden on this island to help Dr. Ha with her research.
There are several other strands that weave through the story and eventually meet in Dr. Ha’s story. Eunice Wong does an incredible job narrating. Each main character has a distinct voice. The narration is always clear even when describing actions like battles. I do not possess the words to describe how incredible and wonderful this book is. I have listened to it three times already. I am discovering new gems each time I listen.
I have truly enjoyed this book. It took my imagination to new places and definitely new situations. It also made me think about what being human really means.
@raynayler @Netgalley @EuniceWongActor
what being human really means
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The idea of an animal evolving while humanity takes over the planet was intriguing.
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Narrator was well above average
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Smooth and in-depth storytelling
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Incredible book
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Fantastic slightly cyberpunk story of great depth
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