Andy Weir based the story The Egg on a conversation from the MySpace religion and philosophy forum in 2007 that was about the essay Infinite Reincarnation.
I first met Andy Weir in 2007 on the MySpace religion and philosophy forum. I had posted a shorter version of Infinite Reincarnation to the MySpace forum and Andy Weir commented on the post, asking me questions about my view of the universe and my belief in reincarnation.
The essay is based on a philosophy I have been working on since 2003 that uses physics alone to put the pieces of our spiritual aspects together in a way that can prove and demonstrate spiritual truth without relying on literature and unfalsifiable claims. The philosophy is largely built on pantheism, the idea that the universe itself is God, specifically the energy.
After our conversation Andy asked my permission to write up the conversation into a story, to which I gladly agreed as long as it wasn’t commercialized. He sent me the draft of the story a little while later, and it did in fact only take him 40 minutes to write it. Andy Weir then sat on The Egg until Aug of 2009 when he published the story on his website.
Once The Egg went viral in 2010, many people asked him where he got his inspiration from. He lied. He claimed he just made it up, when he most certainly did not. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that Andy did not actually come up with The Egg on his own, Andy is an atheist that only drinks and has smoked weed once. What’s even worse is that he’s compared The Egg to believing in mermaids. Even today he claims the 2011 book The Martian is what launched his career instead of the 2009 The Egg which went viral in 2010 and is why The Martian took off.