The Egg (2009)
103 comments
·March 31, 2025OscarCunningham
weard_beard
The Show Must Go On.
vegadw
This story makes me cry every time I read it, at the line "You were victimizing yourself". It's not an ugly cry, but a sort of somber pain. I think humans are predisposed - probably evolutionary - to remember the bad more than the good. The world, nature, is unkind and our survival doesn't much depend on our ability to recall positive feelings beyond procreation and good food.
I want, desperately, to be the best steward in providing kindness and assistance to anyone and everyone I can within my means while also living the most fulfilling life I can and sharing my knowledge with others.
If anyone asks me if I'm religious, this is the answer. I've always thought of religion - for the rational, at least - to be a sort of known double-think. A known suspension of belief as a tool. When I need that tool, I think of the egg.
Whenever I think about how cruel someone is being to others, I take some solace in imagining that at some point, they too, will experience their own cruelty. Not in a "they deserve punishment way" but in a "they will understand, someday" way.
siliconc0w
I asked Weir about the The Egg at a signing and whether he planned to write anything similar- I got a weird vibe back, "I shat it out over a weekend" - like be kinda resented it or possibly just people asking about it.
Ashymad
Honestly I am not surprised. I imagine he wrote it quickly as this fun quirky look at the universe but then it got extremely popular, kurzgesatz video released and all. A lot of people based their personal beliefs off of the story.
Imagine you write a small story for fun but then it becomes nearly a religion. It must be a little frustrating for Andy.
m463
> but then it becomes nearly a religion
Life of Brian when he opens the window...
mariusor
Which is strange, because unlike his other works, this one actually has something a reader can introspect about instead of, you know, just reading "efficacy porn".
Chiyote
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Chiyote
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ZeroTalent
This is not plagiarism.
These two works express their ideas in very different ways and with very different details, structures, and styles.
That's like saying that Orwell's 1984 is a plagiarism of Yevgeny Zamyatin's We or that Harry Potter is a plagiarism of Ursula K. Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea.
You are just tackling similar topics. Maybe he took some inspiration from you. You should be proud instead of being butthurt for 15 years.
By the way, the notion that all beings are manifestations of a single consciousness—or that we are all God—is far older than either of you.
K0balt
I think the concept is a common insight among people who introspect a bit. The first time I read the story I was surprised because it closely mirrored one of my own musings. In retrospect that’s probably because it is one of those “obvious” ideas that presents itself from the memetic environment of the moment. That’s also probably why it’s irritating to Weir that it practically became a religion lol.
macavelli64
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null
Chiyote3
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croisillon
Related, some past submissions:
- 2018, 51 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17145811
- 2014, 153 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203095
dang
Thanks! Macroexpanded:
The Egg - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37852535 - Oct 2023 (6 comments)
The Egg - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31687818 - June 2022 (1 comment)
The Egg – In Animation Format - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20856614 - Sept 2019 (1 comment)
The Egg (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17145811 - May 2018 (51 comments)
I am Andy Weir, and I wrote "The Egg". AMA - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15673764 - Nov 2017 (1 comment)
The Egg (2009) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7203095 - Feb 2014 (153 comments)
The Egg - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1489497 - July 2010 (20 comments)
A_D_E_P_T
Hah, it's literally Schopenhauer's hell: Humans as both the tormenting demons and as those doing the suffering. In this case, one human -- which further frames suffering as an inescapable, masochistic cycle. "You were victimizing yourself" says the demiurge.
That everything is predetermined and that time is nonlinear is also something that should trouble every contemplative person.
It's basically a devil's brew of nihilism and determinism that frames existence as a solitary, predetermined journey toward an abstract goal (maturation into godhood?!) that renders individual lives expendable and morally ambiguous. And it plays out over a trillion or so years. Horrifying.
It's especially funny as the author, with very little awareness of what he was writing, tried to strike positive "we are all one" notes... And ended up with something that would give Ligotti nightmares.
bccdee
> And it plays out over a trillion or so years. Horrifying.
Horrifying to whom? The character isn't suffering. They aren't aware of the passage of those trillions of years. There's nothing any more horrifying about this than about bog-standard reincarnation.
And so what if you're the only one? That's not really true in a functional sense. Every human you interact with is indeed a truly conscious individual with a discrete personality and life. You only become integrated as a single organism when the egg "hatches" and you join the broader society of adults.
A_D_E_P_T
> There's nothing any more horrifying about this than about bog-standard reincarnation.
Reincarnation tends to assume at least some degree of continuity and free will.
This thing assumes that you're eventually going to be, e.g., The Elephant Man, or that poor Japanese guy who got cooked by a megadose of radiation and the doctors wouldn't let him die. That, if there's a torture that you've heard of, or any cautionary tale you've seen reported, you are going to experience it or have already -- and without learning anything at all.
bccdee
The guy in the story has as much free will as anyone does. Just because everything's stitched together with time travel, doesn't mean the individual instances of the character aren't making authentic choices in each moment. Free will doesn't mean our choices are non-deterministic and detached from our circumstances and history; I don't know why that would even be desirable. Compatibilism is the only coherent stance on free will.
> and without learning anything at all
Well, you learn something later, when the egg hatches. But blank-slate reincarnation also promises that you'll completely forget the trauma of being the elephant man, at least for the duration of the egg process. Surely the real burden would be remembering all those billions of lives with only your paltry human mind to bear it.
IanCal
If it were true, the idea that I was Hitler and everyone that worked at unit 731 is pretty horrifying.
> There's nothing any more horrifying about this than about bog-standard reincarnation.
Under that wouldn't I be one of many going through some different lives? Rather that there is only one person ever who goes through all lives.
bccdee
> Rather that there is only one person ever who goes through all lives.
So what? They're not really meaningfully one person until all the memories get collected. If they each start as a blank slate, they're all functionally separate people. It's not like they're experiencing loneliness during their lives because of any of this.
> If it were true, the idea that I was Hitler and everyone that worked at unit 731 is pretty horrifying.
That part is supposed to be uncomfortable, but I don't find it existentially horrifying. After all, given that Hitler exists, someone had to be him. Surely it's less horrifying for that person to also be all of Hitler's victims.
wrinkl3
Another (very) short story that plays with this idea is Neil Gaiman's Other People: https://xpressenglish.com/our-stories/other-people/
sdwr
The social plane is built upon the physical. What an out of touch, privileged, insulated attitude, having them the other way around.
_def
Well if you only focus on the bad stuff that happens during a human life, sure.
A_D_E_P_T
As old Schop said: "Pleasure is never as pleasant as we expected it to be and pain is always more painful. The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other."
People look to religion and metaphysics for justice and salvation. This poor "Egg" guy is trapped in a trillion-year cycle of pain and injustice. I guess it's Buddhist hell, too...
bccdee
That's not true at all though. This is how a baby thinks about a needle. Often pain is less painful than we expect, and pleasure is pleasantly surprising.
> The pain in the world always outweighs the pleasure. If you don't believe it, compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is eating the other.
Getting eaten is the last 5 minutes of a prey animal's life. If you asked that antelope whether those few clumsy minutes of bleeding out outweighed a lifetime of frolicking through fields, all the children they sired, all the berries they ate, I think they'd be a bit offended.
Anyway, this has nothing to do with the story. This is a worldview committed to pessimism, where bad must always outweigh good because it is easier to upset ourselves by contemplating bad things than to soothe ourselves by contemplating good things, and therefore the bad must clearly predominate. There are very few things I'm willing to dismiss as a mindset problem, but this is one of them. Schopenhauer should have gone to therapy.
nthingtohide
Eternal afterlife is a incoherent concept.
The Horror of Eternal Life | Isaac Asimov’s The Last Answer
ivm
> It's especially funny as the author, with very little awareness of what he was writing, tried to strike positive "we are all one" notes... And ended up with something that would give Ligotti nightmares.
That's German Romanticism which is the invisible 90% of the iceberg of the modern perception of religions, New Age ideas, and humanistic psychology.
Here's a summary of how the Romantic thought has distorted the Western understanding of Buddhist teachings. I highly recommend it because once you know its signs, you'll start spotting it presence everywhere, not just in Western Buddhism:
https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/PurityOfHeart/Section0009....
Chiyote
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NoMoreNicksLeft
>it plays out over a trillion or so years
At least the duration is short.
jt-hill
Wait, this is Andy Weir? Like, that Andy Weir? Like, The Martian and Project Hail Mary Andy Weir? I had no idea.
voidUpdate
He has a whole load of short stories on his website, and a whole series about a mermaid too
rpmisms
Yep. The Martian began as basically a blog, you know.
Chiyote
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okonomiyaki3000
Just the other day I was thinking this hasn't been posted to HN for a while. I'm glad to see it again. Although I feel no need for religion in my life, I recognize that most people seem to need it. So why not this? I think it's better than any of the other ones.
aitchnyu
Marcus Aurelius was meditating these thoughts in the last 13 years of his life running between the Germanic and Persian fronts while extremely sick. He believed he was one being participating in the universal Nous(Mind), and time and outer space yawns around his human lifetime.
4.23 All that is harmony for you, my Universe, is in harmony with me as well. Nothing that comes at the right time for you is too early or too late for me. Everything is fruit to me that your seasons bring, Nature. All things come of you, have their being in you, and return to you.
4.48 Mark how fleeting and paltry is the estate of man - yesterday in embryo, tomorrow a mummy or ashes. So for the hairsbreadth of time assigned to thee, live rationally, and part with life cheerfully, as drops the ripe olive, extolling the season that bore it and the tree that matured it.
7.9 All things are implicated with one another, and the bond is holy; and there is hardly anything unconnected with any other things. For things have been co-ordinated, and they combine to make up the same universe. For there is one universe made up of all things, and one god who pervades all things, and one substance, and one law, and one reason.
12.30 Everything harmonizes with me, which is harmonious to thee, O Universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late, which is in due time for thee. There is one light of the sun, though it is interrupted by walls, mountains and infinite other things. There is one common substance, though it is distributed among countless bodies which have their several qualities. There is one soul, though it is distributed among several natures and individual limitations. There is one intelligent soul, though it seems to be divided.
Klaster_1
Kurzgesagt adaptation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6fcK_fRYaI
numinix
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoUMY-I_m7c
This was my introduction to it!
pavlov
I really wish browsers would default to Reader mode for documents like this.
It would make "web 1.0" content much more usable, and would encourage people to create simple HTML because the default styling wouldn't look like crap.
prawn
If it's not possible now, I wonder if there could be a meta tag whereby a site owner could assign a page to use any reader-mode available in the browser as a first preference?
syncr0
You can set Safari to automatically open all web pages in Reader mode. Then for websites you regularly visit and want a non reader mode render, you can whitelist them for that.
xutopia
I can't recommend this author enough. Project Hail Mary and The Martian are amazing works of science fiction. Project Hail Mary is actually amazing as an audiobook.
heymijo
I went into Project Hail Mary knowing nothing beyond it was from the author of The Martian. It may have been the most enjoyable reading experience I've ever had.
jjcm
Some other recommendations depending on what you liked about The Egg/Project Hail Mary/The Martian:
If you liked explorative / conceptual Sci Fi, more for the thought exercise than anything else:
- Exhalation by Ted Chiang. A collection of scifi short stories that are quite thought provoking. Some sprinklings of religion in some of them.
- The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury. A classic, also a short story collection. Golden age scifi.
- Project Hieroglyph. A collection of authors that partnered with Phd students to write short stories based on their research papers. Great concept with great stories.
If you liked Andy Weir's focus on engineering/building:
- Bobiverse series by Dennis E. Taylor. A man uploads himself into a Von Neummann probe and replicates himself to play Factorio among the stars.
- Destiny's Crucible by Olan Thorensen. MC gets sent to an alternate earth in a technological past, and attempts to re-introduce modern technology and build industry.
jpm_sd
I enjoyed The Martian (novel and movie) but I didn't care for Artemis or Project Hail Mary. I thought the characters and dialogue were fairly weak, even though the underlying ideas were clever. Also I thought that "main character amnesia" was a frustrating plot device (in PHM).
Overall, his authorial voice reminds me a lot of YouTube hosts? Perhaps that's just the cultural moment we're in.
nartho
His stories are always extremely clever and he has an insane sense of rythm. But I hate his style, it reads like a giant Reddit post. My wife asked why I kept complaining about this book I couldn't put down.
bodine30
I had similar feelings for PHM, but it was hard to put a finger on why. I enjoyed it well enough to make it to the end, but I think I have a limited appetite for his "authorial voice". I read it directly after The Bone Clocks and remember thinking I missed David Mitchell's "voice" and wishing there were a way to experience books through another author's voice. Outside the copyright concerns, this could be an interesting use case for AI, a cover band for literature. It's definitely the only way we'll ever get Wes Anderson Star Wars
psadauskas
I like his concepts, and his stories, but agree about the characters. Every single one of them talks like a snarky sarcastic white dude. All the side characters in The Martian, the teenage girl in Artemis, and the rock alien in Project Hail Mary, all speak in the same voice, that of a jokey middle-aged dad.
malshe
You are absolutely correct, Mary is amazing as an audiobook. Loved both his books.
maxhille
Funny coincidence - I just finished the Project Hail Mary audiobook this morning and loved it.
Any recommendations for the next audiobook?
dmcc365
Mickey7 is pretty good if you enjoyed Project Hail Mary. Alternatively, the Murderbot series.
chrismatheson
I can 2nd the murderbot series.
Also there bobiverse series is great IMHO
dmayle
On the vein of similar books, in the late 80s, early 90's a read a science fiction anthology that had more or less the same exact story as Mickey7.
Humans discover a place (I think on Mars), built by Aliens, but it's a deathtrap. So they send someone in to navigate the deathtrap using a clone, and a sort of remote control (something like Avatar).
Each time the clone dies, the person piloting it survives, but has gained the memory of what went wrong, and can try again (kind of like Edge of Tomorrow).
The point of the story is the very end, when the pilot makes it fully through the space.
Has anoyone every heard of this storay and know the name/author? (Bonus points of you know the anthology as well)
thoughtpalette
Just finished Mickey7, lot's of fun. I gotta see the movie now.
LOVE the Murderbot series, highly recommend.
tstrimple
The main thing keeping me from the murderbot series is the value prop. They are incredibly short which doesn’t play as well with a credit based purchasing system. For seven credits I get a little over 20 hours of content. Project Hail Mary is 16 hours for one credit.
Chiyote
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PufPufPuf
18 years ago you wrote an essay which shares the general premise with this short story: https://charmonium.com/infinite-reincarnation/
What exactly do you mean by "plagiarizing" here? Sharing the basic idea?
Chiyote3
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voidUpdate
I read this some time ago and really enjoyed it, and personally, it does align somewhat with how I feel about the world. I don't treat it like a bible or anything, but the concept of, at some point, being the consciousness inside of everyone, past and future, does make a certain amount of sense to me
'Am I to understand that right now, you and I are the same person in some sort of meta-egg?'
"Not as far as I know."
'Then it seems like you're teaching me to be moral for a reason that doesn't actually apply in the real world.'
"Get back in the box."