First Contact: Escape to 55 Cancri cover art

First Contact: Escape to 55 Cancri

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

First Contact: Escape to 55 Cancri

By: Kenneth E. Ingle
Narrated by: Gene Eugene
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £16.99

Buy Now for £16.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

When a lab experiment results in a group of scientists gaining extremely long life, they realize that if they stay on Earth, they'll soon become lab specimens. To escape this, they decide to travel to the stars. Unfortunately, the stars are already occupied.

©2009 Kenneth E. Ingle (P)2010 Books In Motion Science Fiction Space Opera

Listeners also enjoyed...

 Star Quest cover art
Damocles cover art
The Darwin Elevator cover art
The Chaplain's War cover art
Bright Horizons cover art
Seeker cover art
Children of Time cover art
Federation cover art
The Singularity Trap cover art
The Mote in God's Eye cover art
The Salvage Crew cover art
Fear the Sky cover art
Pushing Ice cover art
Footfall cover art
Live Free or Die cover art
The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. 1, 1929-1964 cover art
All stars
Most relevant
On the plus side, the reader had a warm narrative voice and good characterisation.

On the minus side, the writing is very much low space opera and it appears that the only good aliens are subserviant to humans or dead. A group of highly intelligent scientists who claim to be opposed to war attack every alien that they can find, sometimes even before identifying the species. Anyone who doesn't agree with this policy is considered a traitor and must be killed.

This book follows the Ronald Reagan school of interspecies co-operation. This feels like the author's position rather than that of the characters. If that is what you like then you will probably like the approach in this book. If not then maybe another title would be better for you. For my money, this was a poor choice both because of the agenda and indifferent writing.

Political agenda

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.