The theme of the conference was -- for once! -- not The Future. It was The Contemporary. This was even worse. 
 Yes, the Contemporary is much much worse than it seems. Or seemed. Things seem quite bad now, but here, a few years back, McCarthy was conducting a mass anthropological excavation of a dysfunctional post-modern world -- vast and inescapable systems, invisible power centers, lost objectivity, sullied data sets, and, at its heart a magnetically fascinating system of waste and decay. McCarthy briskly spins out his concepts in essayistic numbered sub-sections, self-dissecting and recomposing continuously. There's not really a plot, but there doesn't ever need to be. This gives me a new kind of reassurance in the continuing relevance of the classic high-concept late-modern/lightly-post-modern novels of Delillo and the like that I've lately sort of instinctually avoided.