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Alien: Sea of Sorrows

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Listening Length 5 hours and 7 minutes

The Alien film franchise has been embraced by sci-fi fans around the world. The series stars Lieutenant Ellen Ripley and her battles with the deadly Xenomorph commonly referred to as the Alien. Continuing the groundbreaking story from ALIEN: OUT OF THE SHADOWS by Tim Lebbon, this novel will reveal Ripley's legacy, as her descendants continue to be harried by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation in their unceasing effort to weaponize the aliens.

Produced by Twentieth Century Fox, the franchise launched with the release of the 1979 film, Alien. The film led to three very successful movie sequels, numerous books, comics and video game spinoffs. This second novel and its two tightly plotted tie-ins will directly relate to the first two films of the franchise, expanding the canon like never before. 

Alien TM & © 1979, 2013 Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

6 pages, Audible Audio

First published July 22, 2014

4 people are currently reading
67 people want to read

About the author

James A. Moore

231 books764 followers
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name.

James A. Moore was the award winning author of over forty novels, thrillers, dark fantasy and horror alike, including the critically acclaimed Fireworks, Under The Overtree, Blood Red, the Serenity Falls trilogy (featuring his recurring anti-hero, Jonathan Crowley) and his most recent novels, seven Forges, The Blasted Lands, City of Wonders , The Silent Army and the forthcoming The Gates of The Dead (Book Three in the Tides of War Series) and A Hell Within, co-authored with Charles R. Rutledge.

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5 stars
89 (19%)
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186 (40%)
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154 (33%)
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28 (6%)
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 74 reviews
Profile Image for Sinisa Mikasinovic.
136 reviews29 followers
June 2, 2018
I've been looking for this!

Ever since I started this series, though horribly out of order, I get goosebumps whenever someone mentions aliens. Of any kind :)



Not sure why Audible came up with such an unusual publishing plan, but I don't care much. Reading the series out of order just made those "A-ha!" moments that much better.

Weyland-Yutani Corporation is at it again. Sending people in blind, requesting they get the "specimen" back. Preferably alive. This time they even have a plan on how to do this, which surprised me greatly. Expendable as mercenaries are, they need their alien samples sooner, rather than later.



First and third books are full of action. But this one went all the way!

Five hours of sheer terror, panic, rage, and satisfaction. I don't think I can phrase it any better :) It has it all - colonists, infestation, queens, betrayal, fear. The only thing missing was a Predator ;)



If you are a fan of the Alien franchise you'll enjoy this book immensely. If you are not then I've got nothing for you. But you probably don't even exist either, so it's okay. Everyone needs a bit of terrifying killing machines lurking in the shadows in their lives. My heart beat so fast I lost weight.

Listening with the full cast was, once again, an awesome experience. I just love Audible and the things they pull off. Directory did a marvelous job and I'll keep splashing my cash for their books for as long as they'll keep making them.

Overall, 15* for 3 books. Impressive.

- So Decker, I think I can probably find you a little bit of armor... and maybe a weapon or two.
- Ahh... I'm not a weapons kind of guy...
- You wanna survive this?
- Um... yeah. Let's go find some weapons.


- Hey, this was a good landing! What did you do?
- He read a manual.


 

Alien: Sea of Sorrows (Canonical Alien Trilogy #2)
by James A. Moore (Goodreads Author), Dirk Maggs, John Chancer (Narrator), Stockard Channing (Narrator), Walles Hamonde (Narrator), Laurel Lefkow (Narrator)


Verdict     Blood, sweat and tears. Beautiful!
Runtime     05:07
Overall    
Performance
Story      
Profile Image for Emma.
1,009 reviews1,211 followers
September 5, 2018
Now as a book i'm not sure this would have worked for me, even though it had more plot than I was expecting and linked really well to other offerings in the universe. It's pretty basic and has some questionable dialogue. But as a dramatised audio, it was just right- any cheesy bits add rather than detract from the experience. From the motion sensors to hissing aliens and automatic gun fire, it dings all the audio bells so loved in the films and sets your mind's eye alight. Extra points for the sound used for the facehugger application process, which is enough to make you lose you lunch, and never failed to make me gag, shudder, and lean back in my seat to get away from what, for me thankfully, was a non-existent threat. The characters were shit out of luck though. To be fair, all i'm looking for in this type of listen is lots of people getting killed by lots of aliens so I was pleased it delivered this and a whole load more.

The absolute best part is always the anticipation, that feeling of knowing so much more than the people on the ground. So you get situations where a team investigating the old mines of LV-178 go quiet and their coms aren't working because of the Trimanite interference, but their heart rate monitors show a big spike 10 hours ago followed by what looks like them sleeping and everyone's totally fine about it.... because it doesn't seem like something's wrong.. and i'm like 'OH YOU THINK SO???' What I KNOW is that they were scared shitless by a bunch of aliens, then facehuggered, and are now glued to a wall with gross alien secretions until a baby alien rips its way out of their chests. AND THEN everyone's in even more trouble.

The two main characters are excellent too. Alan Decker, a descendent of Ripley who seems to have some kind of empathetic connection to both humans and aliens, sounds like Bryan Cranston so I pictured him as an early Walter White throughout. Wayland-Yutani Corp Acquisitions manager, Andrea Rollins, was a cast iron callous bitch, with an attitude like Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada and a serious disregard for human life, always pushing the requirement to capture a live specimen. While I flat out LOVED her, I haven't been so desperate for someone to run into a bunch of aliens since Burke. Even if she might not be as human as I hoped.

All in all, heaps of fun with blood and bodies everywhere, recommended.
Profile Image for Cathy .
1,929 reviews295 followers
October 26, 2022
Very confusing intro and prelude. Had to check that I had picked up the correct book, aka the sequel to Alien: Out of the Shadows. Anyway, once the story starts with chapter one, we are in a plot very similar to that of the second Alien movie. The main character (barely) Decker is a descendant of Ellen Ripley.
He is sent to a planet to recover a Xenomorph. Settlers have been lost. The ship is staffed with marines/mercenaries and he is a consultant. They go down into a mine, some of them get snatched, the others try to recover them, there is a malfunctioning escalator… it‘s a bit like painting by colours… it‘s all very predictable, down to figuring out who the „synthetic“ is this time around. No big surprises and it doesn’t add anything new to this universe. It was ok, but you don‘t miss anything if you skip this.

The full-cast audiobook dramatization was well done, although the action with all the background noises was often unintelligible, aka you needed a lot of imagination to figure out what was going on.
Profile Image for Michael Hicks.
Author 38 books506 followers
May 3, 2018
[Updated 5/3/2018]

Having now listened to the Audible Original Drama adaptation of James Moore's Sea of Sorrows, I've bumped up my rating to four-stars. The Dirk Maggs production was, in my opinion, a significant improvement over the prose novel. As with the prior two Alien Audible Originals, Sea of Sorrows is performed by a full cast of actors, including Stockard Channing, complemented by sound effects and musical score. And like the prior two entries, it sounds freaking incredible and makes for an intense listen that will make you feel like your surrounded by Xenomorphs, worried that a facehugger might try to leap out of your speakers.

Story-wise, I appreciated the changes and shift of focus that this audio drama brought to the table. Much of the original prose novel was centered around the empathic Decker, and it would surely be difficult to sustain an audio drama built around stuff that occurs so much inside one guy's head. Maggs has slightly shifted the focus a bit more toward the mercenaries that have abducted and pressed Decker into service on behalf of Weyland-Yutani. While I had complained a bit in my original review that Sea of Sorrows was rather derivative of the Aliens film, I found it easier to digest during this second go-round. I'll chalk that up being more familiar with the story beats and the movie-like (minus the visuals) presentation Audible has afforded it.

Although it's been a couple months since I read Moore's book, I feel like Maggs made some pretty big changes in the story itself, trimming a lot of fat, shifting scenes around slightly and giving us a stronger ending than what had been written originally, in addition to tying this story a bit more fully into the narrative begun in Alien: Out of the Shadows. Maggs also wastes no time getting us right into the action, starting immediately with Decker's abduction, which occurred in the prose work after an extended introduction to Decker, his abilities, and his history with Weyland-Yutani and LV-178.

Maggs and his cast put the pedal to the metal early and often, giving us another strong entry in Audible's adaptations of these Titan books. I'm hoping we get plenty more of these suckers in the years ahead, and if I may be so bold, I'd recommend Alex White's recent Alien: The Cold Forge for next year's Alien Day release.


[Original review follows]
[Begin transmission]

I don’t really have much to say about this one. It just kind of exists within the realm of ALIEN tie-in fiction. SEA OF SORROWS is certainly readable, but it doesn’t add much in the way of originality or freshness.

Set 400 years after the first ALIEN flick, Weyland-Yutani still wants an alien to call their own and set loose a score of mercenaries on a defunct mining colony we visited previously in Tim Lebbon’s book. Forced into the mission is Decker, a very distant relative to Ellen Ripley who the aliens can sense and hate and want to kill. He’s a low-level empath and can feel the aliens in return. Unfortunately this plot conceit feels a bit superfluous to the whole thing, with the book trying to retread the familiar action of movie-sequel ALIENS.

It’s moderately satisfying if all you’re looking for are alien kills, soldiers taking baths in acid, and occasional glimmers of evil corporate subterfuge, but it’s certainly not breaking any new ground on any of the franchise’s previously established conceits. It just is what it is and doesn’t aim any higher than that.

Profile Image for Octavi.
1,232 reviews
March 22, 2021
Una pena. Técnicamente el audiolibro es impecable, es brutal. Pero repiten la historia de siempre por tercera vez. Lo dicho, una pena y una oportunidad perdida.
Profile Image for Ashleigh (ash_and_books).
1,251 reviews66 followers
July 18, 2022
4h52m
TW: graphic descriptions of blood, corpse depictions, injuries, death, murder

Left on an odd ending and there arent anymore audible original Alien audiobooks
Profile Image for Susanne.
Author 13 books147 followers
April 15, 2020
I enjoyed this one! Set 300 years in the future, it’s not constrained by the canon we already know. (You don’t already know who dies.) The characters are engaging and you even get a little Xenomorph POV. If you like sci-fi horror, you would probably like this.
Profile Image for Sarah.
1,008 reviews262 followers
April 5, 2023
PopSugar strikes again.

I didn’t really want to read this, but I am now more determined than ever to complete, advanced prompts and all, the PopSugar challenge in 2023. I read this for “book based on a movie”. (32 of 50 done!)

I do not read novelizations. That is not to say there is anything wrong with them or to put down readers who enjoy them- I just don’t belong to any of the fandoms that are most often novelized. (The novelizations I might have read would have been based on video games and therefore not really in the true spirit of the prompt.)

So I ended up with this. Because it was short. And because I could listen for free on audible.

And whoa boy.

It’s like listening to an Alien movie for 5 hours. Complete with sound effects, cicada alien noises, alien roaring, flesh ripping, plasma gun blasts…

If I had any idea what was going on… it probably would have been pretty fun. It was full cast. Most of the voice actors did a great job. But with so many actors and so much screaming and roaring it felt impossible to follow the action. There’s no dialogue tags, so the book relies on the reader’s ability to distinguish the voices to get who is saying what. In a book with three or four characters/actors and no sound effects it probably would have been fine. Here it just doesn’t work.

That being said, if you’re just looking for an action packed good time, get out your popcorn, this is not a bad book to fill that need.

I could follow the general plot beats, can tell you how it started and ended, just what’s in the middle is a bit muddled.

On to the next!
Profile Image for Bikram.
379 reviews4 followers
August 22, 2018
I dunno why I keep buying books of this series. All 3 books (audible dramatizations) sound exactly same as the other. Just that the books reference events in the earlier book, only to repeat the same event. If you've read one book, you've read all of them.

And the gunfire sound in this series is the worst I've heard ever.
Profile Image for Randall.
21 reviews
January 5, 2020
Fun listen with great voice acting. Enjoyed it quite a bit, a lot of fun twists that played out well in audio version.
Profile Image for Ricardo García Sánchez.
284 reviews3 followers
February 21, 2025
leído como Audiolibro: Un espectáculo inmersivo que recomiendo a todos. Mi nota es un 7/10.
Alien: Mar de las Penas. Escrito por James A. Moore, este libro se sitúa siglos después de los eventos de Aliens y Alien 3, en un intento de la corporación Weyland-Yutani por recuperar y explotar los xenomorfos en LV-178, un planeta rico en minerales donde los alienígenas han permanecido en letargo.

El protagonista, Alan Decker, es un empleado de Weyland-Yutani que descubre que es descendiente directo de Ellen Ripley, lo que le otorga una conexión telepática con los xenomorfos. Cuando la corporación envía un equipo de seguridad para capturar a las criaturas, la situación se sale de control y el horror se desata de nuevo.

Estilo y estructura
Escrito por James A. Moore, apuesta por un enfoque de thriller de acción con elementos de terror. A diferencia de Desde las sombras, que tenía un tono más claustrofóbico, aquí hay más secuencias de combate y un despliegue tecnológico mayor, con soldados fuertemente armados enfrentándose a hordas de xenomorfos.

El punto más polémico es la introducción del vínculo psíquico entre Decker y los xenomorfos, algo que nunca se había explorado en la franquicia de Alien y que puede resultar extraño o forzado para algunos fanáticos de la franquicia.

Audiolibro: Un espectáculo inmersivo
Como los otros libros de la trilogía, el audiolibro de Audible es una ficción dramatizada, con sonidos de ambiente, efectos especiales y un elenco de voces.Es una película narrada

🔊 Puntos fuertes del audiolibro:
✅ Ambientación envolvente con sonidos de armas, explosiones y chillidos alienígenas.
✅ Buena actuación de los personajes, que aporta tensión y realismo.
✅ Narración ágil, que hace que la historia fluya con rapidez.

🚫 Puntos débiles:
❌ El vínculo telepático con los xenomorfos puede resultar chocante y menos aterrador.
❌ Menos terror y más acción, lo que puede decepcionar a quienes buscan la atmósfera de horror clásico.
Temas principales
Codicia corporativa y explotación: Weyland-Yutani sigue tratando de convertir a los xenomorfos en un arma, sin importar las vidas humanas sacrificadas.
El legado de Ellen Ripley: A través de Decker, el libro explora cómo la maldición de los xenomorfos persigue a su familia.
El horror de la guerra contra lo desconocido: Aunque los humanos cuentan con mejores armas, siguen estando en desventaja ante los xenomorfos.
Razones para leerlo o escucharlo
✔ Si te gustan las historias de Alien con más acción y enfrentamientos militares.
✔ Si te interesa una perspectiva distinta sobre la conexión entre humanos y xenomorfos.
✔ Si buscas un audiolibro que te haga sentir dentro de una película de Alien.

Razones por las que podría no gustarte
❌ Si prefieres el horror puro de Alien en lugar de la acción tipo Aliens.
❌ Si no te convence la idea de un protagonista con habilidades psíquicas ligadas a los xenomorfos.
❌ Si esperas que se profundice en la historia de Ripley o en eventos conocidos de las películas.

Este libro introduce un concepto nunca antes explorado en el universo de Alien: la conexión mental con los xenomorfos. Aunque esto recuerda a ciertas ideas de la Reina Alien en Aliens o los híbridos en Alien: Resurrection (1997), aquí se presenta como una habilidad humana hereditaria, algo que podría ser difícil de aceptar para los puristas de la saga.

En términos de continuidad, no afecta directamente a los eventos de las películas, pero expande el universo de Alien con una nueva perspectiva sobre la relación entre humanos y xenomorfos.
Profile Image for Rian Bolger.
55 reviews
May 1, 2025
You know that clip of that kid saying like, "Four seconds! It took you four fucking seconds to piss me off again!"? Yeah.

Alien should have been one movie. They never should have touched it again. I'd be willing to trade Prometheus and Covenant to axe everything else. Nobody except Ridley Scott has a fucking clue what to do with this world. No one can escape that first film. No one can just leave it behind. They've all deified Ripley into this mythological hero when really she's just, generally, the smartest person in the room. She's relatively unremarkable. That's what makes the first film so fantastic! They're teamsters! Glorified truckers! They are good at putting up with long drives and very little else. The last fucking thing I want to hear when a new project is rearing it's ugly, elongated head is "Nostromo."

Besides that, the script here sucked. The other two Maggs productions did a very good job of communicating what was going on via sound, and where appropriate, some relatively elegant exposititory dialogue. Here, people are insanely robotic. Instead of, "Shit. We're trapped!" you get, "We have been backed into this dead end that we can't escape!"

Also besides Decker and Manning I never knew who was talking or why I was supposed to know or care about them. There's a big soppy suicide at the end of this that I was supposed to get emotional for but unfortunately I didn't know who the girl was. I thought it was Adams until they mentioned she's facehugged on the ship that's leaving. They also take as long as humanly possible to explain the facehugger lifecycle to like three different groups observing it for the first time. At one point I thought I'd accidentally reversed.

Simply crap. #Sorry
Profile Image for Adrian.
1,439 reviews41 followers
March 27, 2024
I do like that once a year Amazon offer me an Audible free trial, one free credit, and a month of access to their Audible Plus Catalogue. For the next few weeks I'll be working through their 'Alien' offerings.

For some reason the first audio dramatisation isn't available in the UK, so I had to start with the second in the series and have now moved onto this, the third.

Unlike Alien: River of Pain, this story does feature a number of callbacks to the unavailable Alien: Out of the Shadows. This slightly detracted but wasn't the main issue I had with this.

The big issue was the story. Set 300 years after the events of the films, a descendent of Ellen Ripley finds themselves being press-ganged into returning to the infamous moon, by the Weyland Corporation. The twist is that he has a unique gift, he is a telepath/empath and can sense the xenomorph's thoughts. If this wasn't far-fetched enough, the alien's can sense that he is a descendant of Ellen Ripley, who they have labelled as 'The Destroyer'.

The plot follows the usual path of mercenaries being used to try and capture a live specimen, close calls, dark passages, face huggers, an Alien Queen or two, and the evil corporation with their relentless goal of weaponising the xenomorphs.

Although well produced, sadly this only gets 3 stars.
Profile Image for Joe Kucharski.
310 reviews22 followers
October 9, 2024
Totally entertaining story that hits all the proper Alien cliches: Weyland-Yutani is evil; the Marines/Mercs are stupid; yet a few redeemable souls make the story worth it. James A. Moore actually throws in an unexpected twist or two and even uses the facehuggers for offense, well before a similar use in Alien: Romulus that makes Sea of Sorrows satisfying enough for any Alien fan.

The only frustrating element of the story is its use (or non use, really) of technology. For a tale that is supposed to take place 300+ years after Ripley and the Nostromo events, tech sure hasn't changed much. Their comms are broadcast on radio waves (how 19th century!). The mercs use heavy-to-carry and easy-to-go-through projectile ammunition. Elevators! Cargo trucks! All so frustratingly 1986. And all to make it conveniently easy for the main characters to forcibly interact with the xenomorphs.

But hey... that's why we read Alien stories. And this one is pretty decent.
Profile Image for Abdul Alhazred.
663 reviews
October 28, 2025
No Ripley which seems like it should open more doors, but they still end up making it a descendant (and make reference to the Ripley's daughter storyline) which just ends up making the universe feel small. It's the Skywalker problem, a whole galaxy of trouble and you end up running into the same 5 people or their relatives.
The introduction of psi powers gives them a chance to tell more about what's going on in the xenomorph heads but to little effect since these are the Aliens-aliens, and have no deep thoughts aside from a... genetic hatred for the Ripley bloodline? What? That is the actual fulcrum of the story as well, providing motivation for the protagonist being recruited (by the world's most persistent megacorp) as well as some dubious later plot points.
The acting and production is fine enough, and the psi powers make the universe feel a bit Dredd-like which is fine, but the tortured plot was a bit too much.
Profile Image for Finlay O'Riordan.
329 reviews
June 26, 2025
I thought the last few chapters were pretty good, but for the most part, it basically just felt like a redo of "Out of the Shadows" except with different characters.

Speaking of the characters, there are just way too many of them. I lost track of who was who after a while, and it doesn't help that the focus seems to shift between all these random little groups of supporting characters while the actual protagonist, Alan Decker, is treated as more of a plot device.

Speaking of Decker, he is supposed to be Ripley's descendant, but since we're told Amanda didn't have any children, I don't see how that's possible, unless he's descended from Ripley 8 instead, but there's no attempt in this story to reconcile that plot point.
Profile Image for E.
201 reviews1 follower
April 5, 2024
1.5 stars. Listened to this audiobook on Audible.

Wow, this stunk. They way overdid all of the sound effects and the dialogue was cheesy with some pretty terrible voice actors. I had a really hard time getting through it. It felt like a really terrible episode of a space sci-fi tv show. And where was the story? It just seemed like a lot of shooting and lots of face eating/impregnating monsters coupled with a bunch of macho commando type guys who loved to make stupid jokes with horrible dialogue. I don’t recommend this audiobook.
Profile Image for Addam Dallman.
127 reviews1 follower
August 29, 2024
Alien Sea Of Sorrows is an excellent follow up and production from its predecessor Alien Out Of Shadows. The sound effects and music are still top notch. The voice actors for this did a great job. The story goes at a great pace as well as being very interesting and entertaining. I was not sure how I would feel about Decker being a descendant of Ripley but his character turned out to be really good and relatable to me. This one is def more action heavy than the first. It reminded me of the difference between the first and second films. I highly recommend checking out this production.
Profile Image for Devlin.
8 reviews
May 17, 2024
This was a great listen and I really enjoyed the character of Decker. Though I don't think the connection to Ripley was necessary for him to have a connection to the xenomorphs I liked the rest of the story a lot.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Profile Image for Joshua.
82 reviews
March 3, 2025
Meh. Probably not going to finish it. I only listened to this because I had audible premium. My Subscription is going to end before I finish it anyway.

Update: I was right. DNF. Didn't get past chapter 3. Sub ended before I could finish it.
Profile Image for Ione.
65 reviews
April 17, 2024
Quite enjoyable. Had some popcorn.
It was only part way through that I realized there's another one before this book. My next listening.
Profile Image for Namy.
128 reviews
January 14, 2025
4.5
This was so fun! And that type of ending I loved get hate cause it left me wanting more and I'm not sure if there is.
Profile Image for William.
395 reviews3 followers
March 18, 2025
More fluffy sci-fi. More fun. I gotta slow down w books this year oh my days.
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