A quote from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, itself written near Geneva, opens the book. While Harris points out that many hedge funds have relocated there for both tax reasons and to be near the large hadron collider at Cern, from where they might recruit the mathematicians and physicists needed to develop increasingly sophisticated computer models, "as soon as you think of setting a book in Geneva, then Frankenstein does loom large". It is not only a man-made monster running out of control that provides the literary and scientific underpinning to the novel: Darwin features prominently and the shade of Orwell hangs over the book, with its emphasis on surveillance, sinister corporations and an anti-democratic dystopia.
Set on British general election day 2010, Robert Harris's latest novel is a characteristic combination of ripping yarn, political and historical verisimilitude and diligent research into a hither-to closed world. The Fear Index is set within the mysterious opulence of a Geneva based algorithmic hedge fund. The company at the heart of his story has developed an artificially intelligent, "self-learning" computer model that trawls the world for information and allows its traders to anticipate market movements prompted, usually, by some disaster or failure. But having delivered this novel about predicting the future – it could be claimed as easily by the science fiction community as the thriller world – Harris was surprised to see on the BBC website a few weeks ago the headline "Supercomputer predicts revolution" and a story about how the Arab spring was foreshadowed via "automated sentiment mining" in which websites were searched for increased preponderance of words such as "terrible" and "horrific".It is a peculiarly apt concern.
"Orwell has always been a huge influence on me," he says. "He first came to mind regarding this project about 12 years ago when I read a book by Bill Gates in which he said one day the McDonald's headquarters in America would know when a Big Mac was sold in Newbury and then a computer algorithm would work out when the cattle had to be slaughtered in Chicago. I got very interested in these ideas but couldn't find a way to make them work in fiction. Then came the financial crash and I realised I could marry the two things. These algorithms that were driving companies were nowhere more dominant than in the City.
