Cormac McCarthy, the now 89-year-old winner of both a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, whose work is compared, not infrequently, to Moby Dick and the Bible, has spent more than two decades as a senior fellow at the Santa Fe Institute think tank. The list of operating principles for the institute (which he wrote) reads in part: “If you know more than anybody else about a subject, we want to talk to you.”
With his two staggering new novels, the companions and it’s clear that McCarthy—best known for delivering stark, gory tales of morality and depravity—has been inspired by his time at the think tank talking to the world’s greatest mathematicians and physicists. His first works of fiction to be published in
