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The Egg

The Egg

Short storyPhilosophyScience Fiction
Pages
3
Published
2009
Language
English

Synopsis

A man dies in a car accident and wakes in a formless space beside a being who calls itself God. There, he learns the truth about his existence: he has lived and died countless times before, and every other person who has ever lived — and ever will — is him, experiencing one life at a time across all of history. The conversation that follows reframes cruelty, kindness, and the purpose of a single human life as steps in one soul’s slow maturation. Barely a thousand words long, the story trades plot for a single overturning idea, delivered through a quiet exchange between teacher and student. First shared free online in 2009, it became Weir’s most widely read short work, translated by readers into dozens of languages and adapted for animation and music.

Prose complexity
3/10

Vibe

Thought-ProvokingReflectiveHopeful
Mystery BoxMentor Figure
Writing5.0Impact5.0Characters5.0Plot5.0Atmosphere5.0

Genres

Philosophy Science Fiction

About the author

A
Andy Weir

Born in 1972 in Davis, California and raised in Livermore, Andy Weir is the son of a Lawrence Livermore physicist and an electrical engineer. He began working as a programmer at fifteen for Sandia National Laboratories, studied computer science at UC San Diego without graduating, and spent roughly twenty-five years as a software engineer at companies including AOL, Palm, MobileIron, and Blizzard, where he worked on Warcraft II. He wrote science fiction as a hobby for years, publishing free on hi...

Characters

YouProtagonist

The unnamed everyman whose death opens the story and who receives the revelation about the nature of his existence.

GodSupporting

The god-like being who guides the protagonist through the conversation and explains how the universe works.

All characters in The Egg

Frequently asked questions

  • Where can I read ‘The Egg,’ and is it free?

    Andy Weir first posted it free on his website, Galactanet, on August 15, 2009, and it remains freely available online. Readers have since translated it into dozens of languages, and it also appears in his collection The Egg and Other Stories.

  • Is the Kurzgesagt video of ‘The Egg’ official?

    Yes. In September 2019 the animation studio Kurzgesagt released an authorized adaptation that was more than two years in the making, which introduced the story to a much wider audience.

  • Did the rapper Logic base an album on ‘The Egg’?

    Yes. Logic’s 2017 album Everybody draws its central concept from the story, and Weir’s idea of a single soul living every life runs through the record.

  • What is the core idea of ‘The Egg’?
  • Is ‘The Egg’ a novel or a short story?

    It is a very short story — around a thousand words — built as a single conversation. Despite its length it is Weir’s most widely read short work and is frequently collected and adapted.

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