The Egg and The Martian

A friend sent me this article recently.

Now, I haven’t read The Martian by Andy Weir. I haven’t seen the film either, though I hear both are pretty good. I’ll get round to them one day.

The fact that I intend to get round to them one day meant that I nearly didn’t read this piece for fear of spoilers but I can promise it doesn’t contain any. It’s not actually that good an article to be fair, it’s an interview with a computer programmer who just happens to have written an unbelievably popular book and while the story of his road to success is somewhat interesting it seems to have taken him as much by surprise as anyone and so he’s not really able to offer any insight into his own sudden rise to fame.

The most interesting thing I took from the article was actually just a piece of web trivia - Andy Weir wrote The Egg!!

It’s quite possible you have never heard of The Egg but I remember when it first started getting linked around all over the internet.I remember really liking it. I think I even read it to my Mum.

For a little while it did the rounds, getting posted on Reddit and Facebook and all those other outlets and then - as memes tend to do - it tailed off and I’d forgotten all about it. If I ever noticed the author's name at the top I definitely forgot that detail.

Then it cropped up in this article. It was apparently written by Andy Weir in 2009, long before The Martian. I read it again just now, probably for the first time since that year and it’s still cool. I have issues with first person narrative and it reads a bit like a first draft but the concept and the setting are really good.

If you never read it before - check it out. If you read it in 2009 - check it out again. If you read it recently then, well done, aren’t you clever and down with the kids. That’s the last time I recommend you anything!