Look, I have a bone to pick with novelettes in audiobook form. You're basically paying a credit for something shorter than my Monday morning standup meeting recap. At 1 hour 33 minutes, The Last Astronaut is literally one commute leg — I started it pulling out of 4th and King and finished before the Mountain View stop. That's it. One ride. And now I have feelings about it that I wasn't prepared for at 6:47 AM.
So here's the premise: humanity is going extinct. Not with a bang, not with zombies, not with some dramatic plague. People are just... stopping. The population is dwindling. And one guy decides he'd rather spend his remaining time in space than on a dying Earth. But — and this is the part that got me — he's not running from the extinction. He's running from something personal. Something smaller and more devastating than the end of the species.
The Quiet Apocalypse That Doesn't Need Explosions
If you've read or listened to anything in Dietzel's Great De-evolution series, you know his thing is quiet collapse. This isn't The Martian where you're white-knuckling through engineering problems. There's no mission control drama, no asteroid to dodge. It's basically a character study wearing a spacesuit. The despair is the point — the author captures loneliness not through dramatic monologues but through the accumulation of small, empty moments. That slow accumulation of grief through absence is something Narrow Road Between Desires also does quietly and well, though it earns its longer runtime in ways this novelette simply can't. Our protagonist floating through a dead-silent ship, thinking about people who aren't there anymore.
I'll be honest: I don't have tons of specific detail on Kenneth Foster's narration here because the research is thin. What I can tell you is this — for a story this introspective and melancholy, the performance needs to carry emotional weight without overselling it. The pacing felt appropriate for the material. No weird audio artifacts, no jarring production choices. It's competent. It's fine. It's not Ray Porter making me forget I'm on a train (but then, what is?).
When "Short" Is a Feature, Not a Bug — Except for Your Wallet
Here's my internal conflict. The brevity actually works for the story. This is a novelette. It's supposed to be a single, concentrated emotional hit. And it delivers that. The thing about the protagonist choosing space not as escape from extinction but escape from personal grief — that lands harder because Dietzel doesn't overexplain it. He trusts you to sit in the silence with this guy. In a 12-hour novel, that same premise might've gotten bloated with flashbacks and romantic subplot padding.
But as an audiobook purchase? The ROI on this audiobook is rough if you're spending a full credit. Under two hours is tough to justify at Audible pricing. This is the kind of thing I'd want bundled into a collection or caught on a streaming service.
Compare it to something like The Man Who Watched The World End (same universe, same author) — that one gives you more room to breathe, more world to inhabit. The Last Astronaut feels like an appendix to that larger work. A really good appendix. But still.
Who's Getting in This Spaceship
Perfect for: anyone who likes their sci-fi melancholy and character-driven. If you loved The Midnight Library but wished it was set in orbit and way shorter. If you need a palate cleanser between massive series. If you want to feel something on a Tuesday morning commute and then stare out the window at the Baylands feeling existentially raw.
Skip for: anyone expecting hard sci-fi, action, or even much plot. If you need your space stories to have, you know, space stuff happening. If sub-2-hour audiobooks make you feel cheated on principle. And definitely skip if you haven't read the main De-evolution series — it'll still make sense, but the emotional context is richer if you know the world.
One Commute, One Gut Punch
TL;DR: Worth your commute — literally one commute. It's a small, sad, well-crafted thing that does exactly what it sets out to do and then stops. I respect that. I just wish it cost less or came bundled with the rest of the series. Caught me off guard with how much that final stretch hit, considering I'd barely had my coffee. Dietzel knows how to make extinction feel personal rather than cinematic, and that's a specific skill not enough sci-fi writers have.
