James Gleick

"I really don't think of myself as a science writer," says James Gleick, one of the nation's preeminent practitioners in the field. Gleick, a former New York Times science reporter, columnist for the Times Sunday Magazine and author of two classic science books, is sitting on the deck of his house overlooking the Hudson River. The setting is pastoral, but Gleick seems more tentative than relaxed. He wories that readers will consign him to a single category -- science -- while he sees his own work as much broader than that. "Granted, I'm more interested in technology than most people, and less interested in politics than most. But I don't like to think about categories. I really see myself as a general non-fiction writer."

Maybe so. But few people have made as much of a mark in general interest science books in such a short time. Gleick was a relative newcomer to the field in 1987, when Viking published Chaos, a narrative about the scientists developing new theories to explain disorder in the universe, which became an instant hit. His next book, Genius (Pantheon, 1992), a biography of the eclectic physicist Richard Feynman, also met with laudable sales and reviews.

Now, Gleick has written a genuinely genre-defying book -- Faster: The Acceleration of Just About Everything, out next month from Pantheon. Bringing together science, technology, social commentary, psychology, philosophy and even self-help, if you read it the right way, Faster presents a vision of a society hurtling in no particular direction, whose members "multi-task" to create leisure time they never get to enjoy.

Faster shares certain elements with his earlier works -- compelling ideas presented at an exhilarating pace through examples and analogies, all supported by copious research. These are the qualities Gleick most prizes in nonfiction reporting, and he attributes them to his role models, who include J. Anthony Lukas, Tom Wolfe and Gay Talese. "They all seemed to have the same values," he says. "Telling the truth, going to the place and hanging out."

That sense of hanging out, or being there, infuses Gleick's reporting. In Faster, for example, he takes readers to such diverse locales as an air traffic controllers center in Dallas, an action-movie set north of San Francisco and a telephone directory assistant's office in Manhattan. "I'd always considered that to be one of the world's nightmare jobs -- nonstop. But it soon became clear to me that the people who work there like what they do. They compete with one another, but at the same time are able to let their minds wander."

It's an insight he never could have gotten had he not spent time on location with people.

Gleick was jumping categories from the very beginning. After excelling in mathematics in high school in New York, he majored in English and linguistics at Harvard, where he "spent a lot of energy trying to wriggle out of the few science requirements they had." He moved to Minneapolis, where he founded a short-lived alternative weekly; a year later he returned to New York, where he secured a copyediting job at the New York Times. He broke into reporting by writing a magazine profile of a famously multidisciplinary thinker, the linguist-mathematician Douglas Hofstadter. Later Gleick profiled two mathematicians who were stretching the boundaries of their own particular disciplines -- Mitchell Feigenbaum, who studied how simple systems can produce wildly unpredictable results, and Benoit Mandelbrot, who in discovering fractals showed how a pattern can repeat itself endlessly in nature, whether in the branches of a tree or the shape of a coastline.

Gleick thought these and other like-minded scientists were creating a new understanding of the natural world, one that could explain the behavior of previously disparate, complex phenomena, such as weather, populations or even cotton prices. Publishers were entranced by Gleick's synthesizing vision. Several approached him to write a book on the subject, including Dan Frank of Viking. "We had known each other at age 11 in summer camp," Gleick recalls. The two conferred over lunch and later made a deal. (Gleick has been with Frank, now at Pantheon, ever since.) Gleick, by then a science reporter for the Times, took four months off to do the reporting for his book and wrote mornings, evenings and weekends to deliver the manuscript.

Chaos: Making a New Science, appeared in a midsize printing of 20,000 books. No one anticipated the stir it would cause. A National Book Award nomination came almost immediately, and copies flew off the shelves faster than the publisher could supply them. Eventually, half a million copies sold in hardcover and paperback. His cross-disciplinary approach struck a chord. Letters came in from readers as diverse as legal scholars and literary researchers telling him that the phenomenon he described in the physical and biological worlds applied equally to theirs.

The success of Chaos helped Gleick earn a sizable advance to write about Feynman, another hero of multidisciplinary thinking. (Gleick left the Times to pursue his reporting, although he continued to write columns and articles.) Five years in the making, Genius is a rich evocation of the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, whose accomplishments ranged from helping to build the A-bomb to uncovering the cause of the space shuttle disaster.

By 1992, when Genius was published, Gleick had become fascinated by the Internet -- "right from its earliest, geeky beginnings," he says. "I'd been running around interviewing scientists and they all had e-mail, and I wanted e-mail." But when he set himself up with it, Gleick found the network less than satisfactory, especially when pursuing one of his passions, contract bridge, on the computer. Hampered by the need to type arcane Unix commands, he contacted a programmer he knew and suggested they design a user-friendly interface. After months of intensive work, he and his partner came out with Pipeline, a precursor to the Net browsers of today. In 1995 they sold the venture for a reported $10 million. Gleick, while declining to specify his earnings, admits he made "some millions" of dollars.

That windfall, plus the revenues from his books, enabled Gleick and his wife -- Wall Street Journal reporter Cynthia Crossen -- to build a retreat about an hour's drive north of Manhattan. The house is a celebration of flagstone and cedar, each level offering stunning views of the river below and the hawks soaring above. Gleick takes us upstairs to his office, a turretlike room with views so panoramic that he has to draw the shades in order to work. The only hint in the building of anything less than ideal is that in order to ascend to the room he must take an elevator.

A Shattering Event

In December of 1997, Gleick was flying his airplane, a canard-winged Long EZ, with Harry, his eight-year-old adopted son. Gleick, a pilot with many years' experience, was bringing his plane in for a landing when it crashed short of the runway, killing the boy. Gleick, who was pulled from the wreckage in critical condition, lost one leg and almost lost the other. He declines to talk about the accident other than to say that it "shattered my life. If you have children you can only imagine... no, you can't even imagine," he says, and trails off.

Gleick spent months in the hospital and many more in painful rehabilitation as he learned to use his artificial leg. He had been writing a column for the Times magazine, called "Fast Forward," which offered thoughts about our social and technological future. During his hospital stay, at the urging of his editor, he began writing again.

The work proved therapeutic -- it had always been a place where he could give rein to his startling, quirky, challenging perceptions. In one column, for example, he muses about the evolution of technology and society by watching a rerun of the TV show Lost in Space. One scene, supposed to take place in the then-distant future, shows photographers taking pictures of a rocket launch, popping flashbulbs. "Yes, flashbulbs. Remember them?

"And what," the column continues, "are those shiny round disks resting on the desks of this advanced, high-tech, space-mission control room? Ashtrays... no one guessed, a generation ago, that a 1997 control room would be a no-smoking zone." This is the future that Gleick wants us to consider -- "not shiny and gleaming... [but] all mixed up like a junkyard, the old and the new jumbled together."

Many of the ideas Gleick first sowed in his column eventually came to fruition in Faster. Gleick opens the book with a description of the Directorate of Time, the military installation where atomic clocks dissemble each second into billions of segments, in order to produce an accurate standard. He then discusses how more stuff has been crammed into less time in our current society -- shades of the junkyard of his earlier column. Gleick parades before us remote controls, computers, 500-channel TVs, "door close" buttons on elevators whose real purpose is to keep riders from becoming impatient and athletic competitions decided by a hundredth of a second. He looks at the tightening nets of speed and efficiency coaxed around complicated systems, such as airline schedules, in which a mishap in one location can cause a cascade of errors in many others (remember Chaos?). He portrays a sense of individual hurry that we experience but may not notice in our daily lives -- as in the grad student who flips on his computer each morning, brushes his teeth during the boot sequence, and fires up his Net browser as he gobbles down breakfast in order to save "two or three minutes a day" -- and a feeling of universal rush as we all connect to each other over the Internet.

"We live in a buzz," he explains in the book, and adds during our interview that that's not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, Gleick worries that some readers may fault him for not decrying the accelerating state of the world. Yes, there is an obvious increase in "Hurry Sickness," as he calls it -- the modern equivalent of what we used to call Type A behavior -- but dealing with constant stimuli may be something human beings can adapt to.

"The typical reaction to this is, w is us'," he says, "but the truth is, we're all multi-tasking. I think we're evolving -- not in any biological way, but in the sense that our brains are being challenged by our culture in a way they were not challenged in the past, except, perhaps, in times of war."

An admitted multi-tasker, Gleick concedes that he gets distracted at times, but says he generally finds that he can productively sit at his computer and alternately write, read his e-mail, do some programming and play games.

He adds that rather than merely decry modern communications, people should learn to use them effectively. He pointedly complains that the publishing industry has been slow to occupy cyberspace. "Publishers should be creating a Web site for every one of their authors," he says. Gleick maintains his own site (www. around.com), with excerpts from his columns and books, a hot button for reader feedback and a purchasing link to Amazon.com. He believes every author should become part of the online community and participate in copyright and sales. "Authors," he says, "need to take more control."

The need for control may indeed be a key issue. People might see themselves as victimized by technology and speed, but they don't have to be if they exercise sufficient discipline and assertiveness, he suggests. It's a strategy that seems to apply not only to the world that Gleick describes in Faster but to the author who rebels at being confined to a genre.

"We shouldn't think of ourselves as victims," says Gleick. "We make choices in our lives. Sometimes we have to remind ourselves that there are a bunch of goodies in front of us and the one that looks the brightest or tastiest this instant is not the one that's going to leave us satisfied."

Starr is codirector of the Program in Science Journalism at Boston University and author of Blood: An Epic History of Medicine and Commerce (Knopf).