Andy Weir’s brand of science-driven survival storytelling is heading somewhere movies and television cannot quite reach: directly into the listener’s imagination. Audible’s Exoplanet is a full-cast science-fiction thriller written by Benjamin Percy and executive produced by the author of The Martian and Project Hail Mary. The Audible Original launched November 5, 2026, with Anthony Mackie, Ariana DeBose, John Leguizamo, and Ray Porter leading the cast.
The story begins when the starship Wild Blue Yonder is ripped apart by a quantum anomaly and its surviving crew members are scattered across different eras on the same hostile alien world. Mackie plays Chief Engineer Jeff Shaw, who lands in the present and is assisted by a virtual companion voiced by Porter. DeBose’s First Officer Becca Bang is trapped in an alien past, while Leguizamo’s Science Officer Logan Bowers awakens in a machine-controlled future. Audible lists the finished production at four hours and eight minutes.
That setup gives Exoplanet a clever audio-native hook: the crew cannot simply see one another, but they can leave messages that cross centuries. Their survival depends on interpreting voices from impossible points in time while confronting an intelligence that appears to be using human technology for its own purposes. The result blends the stranded-engineer tension associated with Weir’s fiction with a temporal mystery that can unfold through static, echoes, overlapping transmissions, and shifting soundscapes.
Weir’s involvement is more than a name on the marketing. Audible describes the project as a survival story built around the author’s familiar combination of rigorous problem-solving, danger, and emotional stakes, while Percy wrote the scripts specifically for performance. The production also features sound design from Skywalker Sound and an original score by Rob Cairns, giving the series a cinematic scale without requiring a screen. Supporting performers include Cherry Jones, Sufe Bradshaw, Charlie Plummer, and Aida Osman.
For Percy, the format is familiar territory. His audio work includes Marvel productions such as Wolverine: The Long Night and Marvel’s Wastelanders: Old Man Star-Lord, experience that helps explain why Exoplanet is structured around distinct character voices and carefully timed revelations. The series also places the theatrical strengths of Mackie, DeBose, and Leguizamo at the center rather than treating narration as an afterthought.
Exoplanet arrives as Audible continues positioning audio drama as a destination for large-scale genre storytelling, not merely an alternative way to consume a novel. Its combination of a recognizable science-fiction author, a comic-book and literary writer, major film performers, and premium sound production makes it a particularly ambitious test of that idea. Fans can listen exclusively through Audible, where the seven-episode story turns a broken spaceship, a dangerous planet, and a centuries-wide communications problem into one performance-driven thriller.
