Steven Johnson on Inventing Air, Google Books, and Catching Up

Tell us about how you research your books--do you go on location or hole up in a library?

The Invention of Air was the first book where I really felt the impact of Google Books—the books they’ve been scanning. Almost all the primary sources—things that Priestley published, which would be very hard to get to—are now available as downloadable, searchable pdfs. You see the original typography, to the point where it’s a bit of a pain because they have the old-fashioned way of doing the esses and the effs. And yet it’s all searchable.

Plus, there are great online archives—Benjamin Franklin’s correspondence is beautifully archived—and so much of this book comes out of the correspondence between those guys [Franklin and Priestley], and Jefferson, so a huge amount of the primary material was there online. It was a little bit like you could write the book in your pajamas.

But there were holes. There were some things I wanted to see. I wanted to see where Priestley had lived. I didn’t go to Leeds but I did go to Birmingham. A few things were hard to get to, so we just called libraries in the U.K. and they sent us faxes. But, I don’t know, 97 percent of it was available online, which was great.

For Ghost Map, I had to do more original research. I think because that was two and half years ago and a lot of stuff just hadn’t been scanned yet. You can really see the progress that’s been made. Ghost Map is a little more centered in a place, so I wanted to be there, to be able to walk around the streets and try to feel what it was like.

Both of these books are in a sweet zone in that there’s a lot of excellent scholarship that’s been done on Joseph Priestley and the 1854 cholera outbreak and John Snow, so there’s great reading there, seeing what academics have said, but there aren’t as many popular accounts. And with each of them, I found a way—I flatter myself—to approach the story from a new angle. Nobody had really written about Snow in the context of the history of cities. So it’s not like I was doing all the primary research myself, but you get to contribute something to the scholarship and popularize the story.

I use Amazon as a research tool, too. When you’re going into a new field, thinking, “I need to know more about ecosystem science,” you find a book that someone has verified as a good book in the field, and follow the “people who bought this book also bought” chain, then you’ll get a little library of good reading material more effectively than any mechanism I know other than talking to an expert.

At one of your talks, you mentioned Priestley was an experimenter from a young age--and that his treatment of mice and insects would have gotten him into a "special needs" classroom today. What were you interested in as a child?

Certainly not science. I was always going to be a writer. My dad says he read some story I wrote when I was in third grade or something like that, I was eight or nine, I wrote some funny ending to a chapter—I was writing some mini novel—and he said, “Steven’s going to be a writer.” I don’t remember that, but I do remember when I discovered about in seventh grade that it was something I did well and that I really liked doing, so pretty much from when I was thirteen or fourteen I knew I was going to be a writer.

What changed was what kind of book I was going to write. I wrote poetry and plays and a little bit of fiction in high school, went to Brown because they had a great creative writing program, and then I got pulled into media theory, semiotic theory, post-structuralist theory…. Then I was going to become more of an academic media critic/theorist…whatever it was people were into in the late ‘80s, early ‘90s.

When I went to Columbia, I was in that mode of, “I’m going to become an academic who will still write for maybe the New Yorker and the Voice or something, but who will be based in academia.” But I’d had this side interest from my college years of being interested in technology. It’s weird because before Wired came along, the whole idea of writing about technology in a non-product-review mode—like, “I give it four mice!”—it was just not cool at all to be into your computer when I was in college (from ’86 until ’90). I’d be, “Hey, I got this screensaver that’s really interesting,” and people would be, “Steven—that’s really nerdy. We’re arts kids, we’re not supposed to be looking at computers.”

So when Wired came along, suddenly there was this liberating, “Oh, I can write about culture, society, and technology, and do it in a unified way.” Then the internet crashed into my life, and I started FEED, one of the first online magazines. Part of the mission there was to write in a non-academic style about the issues that people in media theory and things like that had been wrestling with. My first two books were in that mode, and then I looked up one day at my bookshelf and the last 30 books I’d read had all been science books. I thought maybe I should try and write one myself.

So it’s been this evolution but the common thread was always that I was going to write. When I was in college, I had this all planned—this is my sixth book, and I feel like I’ve been productive—but I’m still catching up to the plan I had when I was in college: “I’ll get the deal for my first book when I’m a senior, and I’ll publish it at 23.” I had this whole thing architected in my head, and I was behind schedule for a while, but I think I’m probably caught up.