NEW YORK _ The future doesn't come with a voice. It lacks an address, whether traditional or e-mail. It's missing a final script, though folks like to argue about that.

But make no mistake about it. The future has an agent, and his name is john@brockman.com.

John Brockman, if you're old-fashioned. Chief impresario, at age 54, of the explosion in highbrow books about science. Chief instigator of the expansion of serious publishing into cyberspace. The future shares him with about 250 authors, all of whom are probably smarter than anyone you know.

To the publishing execs who return calls from the CEO of Brockman Inc. at almost the speed of light, he's the business maverick who has already singlehandedly revolutionized nonfiction publishing twice: first by cornering the market on representing computer software texts in the early '80s, next by shepherding brilliant scientists into writing big-money books for the general public, a la Carl Sagan and Stephen Hawking.

To those top scientists, who include physicist Murray Gell-Mann, discoverer of the quark, and controversial evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, Brockman is the gravy train. To monitors of cyberspace such as ``Wired,'' the San Francisco-based Vanity Fair of the Internet, he's ``the Michael Ovitz of the new intellectual elite.''

And to that prickly elite, a dozen of whose members speak out in Brockman's recent book, ``The Third Culture'' (Simon & Schuster), he's a provocative author and intellectual himself. He is the lead catalyst for the book's title concept: that populist scientists and cybersavvy thinkers now form a ``third culture,'' replacing old literary types and narrow-minded researchers as the true public intellectuals of our time.

How did it all happen to the artsy son of Boston's onetime carnation king (as in flower wholesaler)?

Simple, he says. Keep yourself ahead of the curve, follow your own judgments instead of focus groups, and the market will follow.

``I only represent what's interesting to me,'' explains Brockman, stylishly clad in trademark black and white as he chats in his expensive midtown office. ``That's a very wide range of things. Science per se is not of interest to me. I'm interested in ideas.''

He intimates that he's known something for years that all of publishing's winners understand and all the losers miss: Shrewd business in future print culture means smartening up, not heading south toward people who don't want to read.

``In a culture that's definitely dumbing down under the sway of media conglomerates,'' Brockman stresses, ``where is a well-educated person going to go for entertainment? The only place is a book. That's why I'm bullish on the book business and the kind of books I'm doing.''

Those books ``are not for everybody.'' In fact, he encourages his clients to write their books ``for peers in another subject'' who ``don't have the jargon, but are absolutely on the same intellectual level.'' That method has resulted in such already celebrated contemporary tomes of science and philosophy as Daniel Dennett's ``Consciousness Explained.'' For that instant classic, Brockman snared the formerly obscure M.I.T. philosophy professor a six-figure advance and the lucky publisher (Little, Brown) got a surprise best-seller and critical cachet to boot.

In the world of science, John Brockman is now the agent everyone would love to have, the ticket to stardom.

`Colorful ... controversial':

``No question he's colorful, no question he's controversial, and no question that he helps people become writers,'' says Clifford Stoll, whose book, ``Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway'' (Doubleday), caused a big stir in the spring. ``He turned me from an astronomer and a computer jock into a writer. Whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, I'm not sure.''

Like most agents, Brockman charges 15 percent. Unlike most agents, he makes millions. The money flows in from markets around the world thanks to technological savvy that allows Brockman to sell properties directly to international publishers without the local co-agent most publishers use.

His penthouse office overlooks Fifth Avenue and East 59th Street, with a to-die-for terrace garden and an ambience of power even the Trump-meister didn't enjoy when he owned the Plaza Hotel across the way.

It's a singular environment for a singular career. When Brockman first came to New York in 1963, he ran with artists such as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. He produced events _ ``Intermedia '68,'' which he staged at a variety of art museums, and the Filmmaker's Cinematheque _ and worked with Warhol to design a multimedia disco.

By the end of the '60s, Brockman's intermedia happenings had catapulted his doings into Life magazine, and helped him become cover boy for the ad campaign for the movie ``Head,'' directed by Bob Rafelson and written by Jack Nicholson (the poster of young Brockman still graces an office wall).

Brockman remembers those as heady intellectual days, before the New York art world became ``a world of collectors.''

``Warhol and Rauschenberg,'' he recalls, ``were reading (Marshall) McLuhan. ... The avant-garde was totally enamored with the scientists.''

That environment enabled Brockman to walk the walk between art and science. The turning point of his career came in 1973, when he was invited to a conference at Esalen of maverick thinkers. His fellow attendees included anthropologist Gregory Bateson, ``Whole Earth'' editor Stewart Brand, and Alan Watts.

``I was literally drafted by these people into becoming an agent,'' recalls Brockman, who had picked up an MBA from Columbia during his 20s. ``The deals they had were unbelievable. Unbelievably bad. When I got there, they said, ``Well, you're in New York. ...''

Brockman left the conference as the agent of Brand, John Lilly, Bateson and a few others. ``I thought, I could just do this three or four hours a day, just set up a company, and make a nice living, and write. ... In a few months, I had dozens and dozens of clients, all word of mouth.''

During the '70s, Brockman co-authored books on new technologies with fellow maverick Edwin Schlossberg (later to be also known as Mr. Caroline Kennedy), one of which was ``The Home Computer Handbook,'' a groundbreaker.

Then came the early '80s and the lucrative business in computer software books. Once that field grew crowded, the heart of Brockman's current business took off. Referrals by distinguished clients led to more distinguished clients, ultimately producing Brockman's elite stable.

Asked to pinpoint the intellectual area that most attracts him, Brockman says it's the place where the ``empirical and the epistemological'' meet. That is, he's fascinated by deep questions about knowledge, but only when they're approached scientifically, empirically. That means through experiments that produce results, through claims that can be challenged and proven wrong.

His classically pragmatist and American approach to ideas (he agrees that Americans are not so much anti-intellectual as anti-hot air) accounts for some of his bashing of literary intellectuals in ``The Third Culture.''

``I think we need both,'' Brockman concedes of the literary and scientific cultures. He even confesses that when he first came to New York, he waited eagerly for famous New York intellectuals like Hannah Arendt. But restricting the notion of culture today to their concerns strikes him as mere nostalgia. His beef is not with writers but with the alleged scientific illiteracy of the critical and journalistic establishment.

``A 1950s education in Freud, Marx and modernism,'' he writes in ``The Third Culture,'' ``is not a sufficient qualification for a thinking person in the 1990s.'' Too much of literary culture, he goes on, lacks any empirical content, amounting to ``comments on comments, the swelling spiral of commentary eventually reaching the point where the real world gets lost.''

``It's the point Murray Gell-Mann makes in the book,'' he comments over lunch. ``Gell-Mann says, `You may occasionally find a scientist who is ignorant of Shakespeare, but you will never find a scientist who is proud of being ignorant of Shakespeare.'''

Some agents might be satisfied, complacent, with where Brockman stands today. If they ruled the spread he calls home with wife and partner Katinka Matson and their 15-year-old son _ 75-acre Eastover Farm in Bethlehem, Conn. _ they might well tip over into catatonia.

Instead, just this month, Brockman and David Bunnell, the sensationally successful founder of PC World, MacWorld, New Media and other computer magazines, are launching Content.Com Inc., a digital publishing company whose first venture will be an Internet service, BookChannel.

Content.Com aims, according to its business plan, ``to become the first and dominant major, full-service commercial digital publisher.'' Brockman and Bunnell want their Web site _ Megasite _ to become the ``default place on the Internet for thinking people and their children.''

BookChannel in particular will launch things because, Brockman explains, Internet denizens are, above all, readers. If the plans work out, it will offer a dizzying array of services, from high-quality forums led by top writers, to shopping options, to a top-quality book review that Brockman envisions as the electronic equivalent of the New York Times' all-powerful supplement. Advertisers will foot the bill.

Brockman and Bunnell hope to attract the best and most logged-on. Given their track record, deep pockets and the caliber of people on Content.Com's board of advisers _ such top minds about computers as Marvin Minsky and Esther Dyson _ their confidence is understandable.

``The community is the content,'' Brockman declares. ``The people who are going to make money in this business will not be the content providers. It will be the filterers, the aggregators, the people who create sites or communities _ the dinner party you want to go to.''

The cerebral and cyber mindspinning could go on all afternoon. Brockman, though, makes sure to remind visitors that he's both human and an agent.

For one thing, he doesn't believe in spending his whole life in front of a screen _ those are cows on his farm, not cybercows _ and prefers phone calls to e-mail.

On the agent side, he makes no apologies for his rep as a no-nonsense hardball player for his clients. ``I'm running a business, not creating a culture,'' he says. ``And I'm in business to make money. I'm not in business to help people.''

Which even he can't always do. Hotshot or not, Brockman still experiences an agent's quotidian agony. ``What I have to deal with every day,'' he admits, ``is authors complaining, `Why isn't the book in the store? Why isn't the book getting reviewed?''' Brockman tries to remind them of the other 49,999 books fighting for shelf space each year.

``In other countries,'' he remarks, ``you wouldn't even get published. Here, everybody can get published.''

They just can't get John Brockman to represent them.