Exoplanet, by Benjamin Percy and Andy Weir | Free Audiobook
One ship, one planet, three timelines, and no way home that does not go through the others
An anomaly in deep space does not kill the crew of the Wild Blue Yonder, it scatters them. Jeff Shaw, the chief engineer, comes to on a world that wants him dead, with a voice in his ear and a daughter waiting somewhere he cannot reach. Becca Bang, the first officer, wakes in the same place in a different century. The others are out there too, each in their own version of the same hostile planet, unable to tell who is alive and who has been dead for a very long time.
There is no shared mission left to run. What the survivors have is one planet that keeps changing its rules and a way home that depends on understanding what the anomaly did to time. Every era has its own dangers, its own version of the local wildlife and its own reasons to stop breathing, and helping each other would mean reaching across decades. Nobody gets off this rock alone, which is the one thing none of them can arrange.
This one is out on 5 November, so my full review will follow once I have listened to it properly. In the meantime, the premise is worth your attention.
Andy Weir executive produces and Benjamin Percy writes, which puts a hard science instinct next to a horror-adjacent voice, and the shape of the thing is unusual: one crew, one planet, three timelines, told in four hours with a full cast led by Anthony Mackie and Ariana DeBose. The sound design comes from Skywalker Sound in Dolby Atmos, so headphones are the point rather than an afterthought.
While you wait, Project Hail Mary is the obvious companion, and The Martian is the book that made this tone a genre of its own.
Exoplanet comes from an unusual team: Andy Weir executive produces, Benjamin Percy writes, Skywalker Sound builds the Dolby Atmos sound design, and Anthony Mackie, Ariana DeBose and John Leguizamo lead a full cast. Four hours and eight minutes, one starship called Wild Blue Yonder, one exoplanet, three timelines.
Worth saying plainly, because it is the whole point of the offer: with the free trial you can have this audiobook without paying for it. You start the trial, you download it, you cancel, and the title stays in your library for good, the same way a bought audiobook does. Nothing forces you to listen during the trial and nothing expires afterwards, so a four hour thriller can sit there until a free evening shows up. Do remember to cancel if this is the only title you wanted.
At just over four hours it is built for a single long drive or a couple of evenings, and a full cast recording is the reason to use headphones rather than a speaker. Speed control matters here because the timelines move fast, the sleep timer is useful when you start one more chapter than you meant to, and the player keeps your position across devices so a chapter break on the way home does not become a rewind.
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US-based editor & staff writer focused on audiobooks. Honest reviews, curated “best of” lists, and practical guides with an accessibility lens.
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