Andy Weir is known for combining humor, hard science fiction, and gripping survival stories in his bestselling novels The Martian and Project Hail Mary, which were both adapted into blockbuster films. He’s sticking to that formula for his next project, a time-travel thriller that will launch on Audible on Nov. 5.
Weir is the executive producer for the new Audible Original Exoplanet, written by The Ninth Metal and Red Moon author Benjamin Percy. The full-cast immersive audio production stars Anthony Mackie, Ariana DeBose, and John Leguizamo as the crew of a starship that is torn apart by a quantum anomaly. They all wind up on the same planet, but in different times, and have to try to help each other while being hunted by an alien intelligence seeking to use human technology to manipulate the future.
"I'm obsessed with problems, the kind where one person and a lot of math are all that stand between survival and disaster,” Weir said in a statement. “Benjamin Percy’s writing in Exoplanet takes that and adds a twist that genuinely kept me up at night: what if the people trying to save each other were separated not by distance, but by centuries? You can't see that story. You have to hear it. The crackle across a five-hundred-year gap, the desperation in a voice that doesn't know if anyone's still listening.”
While Weir hasn’t explored time travel in his books before, communication challenges are a recurring theme. The stranded astronaut Mark Watney has to use the Pathfinder probe to reach out to NASA and Project Hail Mary ’s Wyland Grace records messages to send back to Earth along with samples of Taumoeba and has to wait years to learn if his mission was successful.
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