“The Fear Index” by Robert Harris (Alfred A. Knopf, 286 pgs., $25.95)

The title of Robert Harris’ new thriller, “The Fear Index,” comes from the volatility index, or VIX — also known as the “fear index” — which measures expectations of violent swings in the market, as Wall Street watchers know from the harrowing meltdown of 2008. This fleet-footed, if sometimes hokey, novel takes place in the rarefied world of hedge funds, featuring one that has achieved huge returns by short-selling and using trading algorithms that “thrive on panic.”

It’s an energetically researched tale based on one of the back stories to the crash of 2008: bankers’ hiring physicists to devise hugely complex trading programs that few really understand, and those new strategies running dangerously amok. It’s also a familiar story of hubris and its fallout.

In fact, “The Fear Index” — like such recent novels as Kevin Guilfoile’s “Cast of Shadows” (2005) and Laurence Gonzales’ “Lucy” (2010) — is a variation on that ever-popular template, Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein.” Once again, we’re introduced to a scientist who dares to play God by creating a new form of life (in this case, a computer program named VIXAL that evolves into a form of artificial intelligence). Once again, that new being leaves a spiral of havoc in its wake.

To underscore the Frankenstein parallels, Harris sets his novel in Geneva, where Shelley conceived the idea for the original, and uses as an epigraph to his opening chapter a quotation from that earlier novel: “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.”

Weaving copious research into a breathless narrative, much as he did in his historical best-sellers, “Fatherland” and “Pompeii,” Harris in the opening chapters does an agile job of limning the elite world inhabited by Dr. Alexander Hoffmann. He is a brilliant scientist who helped create computer systems used to analyze data generated by the giant particle accelerator known as the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva and who is now the brains behind a wildly successful hedge fund that uses secret algorithms, based on his earlier work on “emergent machine reasoning.”

Once given a task, Hoffmann’s program can, in theory, “operate independently and teach itself at a rate far beyond the capacity of human beings.” One incarnation correlates “recent market fluctuations with the frequency rate of fear-related words in the media — terror, alarm, panic, horror, dismay, dread, scare, anthrax, nuclear.”

Along the way Harris introduces us to the quantitative analysts, or “quants,” at Hoffmann Investment Technologies, who have helped their boss’ machine deliver the fund’s astonishing 83 percent returns: geeks who are a far cry from the macho masters of the universe depicted in so many Wall Street novels and movies. He also introduces us to the phenomenally rich investors, who have allowed the company’s slick frontman, Hugo Quarry, to talk them into handing over their millions to a computer program.

Expounding upon themes that will be familiar to his loyal readers, Harris explores both the promises and perils of technology, and, as in his first novel, “Fatherland” — which imagined what might have happened if Nazi Germany had won World War II — he expertly conjures a paranoid world where everyone seems to be watching everyone else.