This book examines how Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, H. G. Wells’s The Island of Dr. Moreau, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World represent groundbreaking milestones in British apocalyptic literature, urging readers to recognize their lasting significance and influence. It illustrates how developments in science and technology from 1818 to 1932 bring humanity closer to a fictional apocalypse. Using this idea as a starting point, this book discusses how the hubris inherent in individuals pursuing scientific and technological advancements in the name of perfection is a mere pretext under which the true power dynamics are hidden, ultimately leading to an inescapable apocalypse. In these novels, the potential for apocalypse is revealed through the ‘mad scientist’ trope, which is closely tied to advancements in science and technology. It is this trope that accelerates the impending apocalypse through uncontrollable scientific experiments or a deep yearning for absolute power, both of which are what totalitarian ideologies require. In either case, at the core of these concerns lies one central idea that this book emphasises— the renunciation of humanity’s security and peace in exchange for much power by the powerful.

Shklovsky wrote in 1917 that art makes the stone stony. The claim assumed a baseline, habitual language against which literature registers as friction. Formalism never measured it. By 1930 the movement was finished and the term undefined. This book treats that as unfinished business. Emrah Peksoy argues that the computational analysis of literary corpora with language models supplies what Formalism lacked. It provides an empirical description of linguistic expectation. Once the norm exists, deviation stops being a metaphor. Defamiliarization becomes predictive failure. Literariness resolves into a geometry of fiction, prestige, and foregrounding. Narrative shape becomes a semantic trajectory across the novel. Each measure is derived from theory, tested where it fails, and returned to the reader. The algorithm measures the norm and its violation. The critic still reads. And formalism returns in modern dress as computational formalism.