Universal Love, Said The Cactus Person is a mind-bending piece of sci-fi which draws on elements of Alexander’s UNSONG. It’s about the futility of achieving true happiness through a system which fundamentally disallows it, presented as a really funny exchange between a grad student(?) who gets high and tries to ask his visions (the aforementioned cactus person, along with a big green bat) to factorise a very large number, in order to prove that they exist.
They rebuff him with a fantastic thought experiment: imagine you are driving a car. You’re an expert, you’ve been driving for many years, you know how to operate it comprehensively, but you’re not happy. You drive across deserts, up mountains, through multistorey car parks, until a wise sage stops you and tells you: the key to finding happiness is not by driving anywhere. You just need to get out of the car.
This is, of course, referencing the student’s attempt to bring true happiness to the world by getting the visions to factorise a large number, thus proving they are real, so he can write a paper, speak at conferences, and tell people about them.
The repeated exhortation to get out of the car is so brilliantly formulated that it stayed with me for a long time. It’s also deeply funny.
Actually, it draws a lot on UNSONG, especially the bit about enslaving our children’s children who make compromise with sin. The solution to universal love is not factorising a large number.