Science Fiction & Fantasy Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

What is the name for the science-fiction mode summed up as high tech and low life, set in a grimy near future of ubiquitous computer networks, body modification, corporate power beyond the reach of weakened governments, and hard-boiled loner protagonists?

Question 2

Which 1974 novel by the Vietnam veteran Joe Haldeman follows a conscript physicist through an interstellar war in which each battle, fought a few light-years away, throws the soldiers centuries into the future by the time they get home?

Question 3

What is the name for the kind of speculative fiction that picks a real turning point, a battle, an election, an assassination, and imagines in detail how the world would have unfolded if it had gone the other way?

Question 4

Which 1865 Jules Verne novel has a club of American artillery enthusiasts, bored after the Civil War, resolve to cast an enormous cannon and fire a manned projectile at the Moon from a site in Florida?

Question 5

Which series by Iain M. Banks, begun in 1987, depicts a galaxy-spanning post-scarcity civilisation with no money, laws or government, run benignly by vast, witty artificial minds that also pilot its spaceships?

Question 6

Which 1973 William Goldman novel, presented as the abridged good-parts-only version of a much longer imaginary classic, tells of a farm girl, the poor boy who loves her, and the Sicilian schemer, giant and revenge-driven Spanish swordsman who kidnap her?

Question 7

Which 1950 book by Ray Bradbury is a mosaic of linked short stories charting wave after wave of human settlers arriving on a Mars of canals and crystal cities, and the quiet dying-out of its telepathic native people?

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About Science Fiction & Fantasy

This quiz is about science fiction and fantasy as literature: the novels and series that defined the two genres, the authors who shaped them, and the vocabulary of subgenres, concepts and awards that fans and critics use. Eighty questions, each describing a book, an author's body of work, or a term, and asking you to name it from four choices, then explaining it. Only world-level, widely known material is used.

The first pack is the canon: The Lord of the Rings, Dune, Foundation and the Three Laws of Robotics, 2001, The War of the Worlds, A Song of Ice and Fire, The Hitchhiker's Guide, Discworld, Earthsea, The Martian Chronicles, the coining of the word robot, Verne's journey underground, A Canticle for Leibowitz, Ender's Game and Stranger in a Strange Land, plus Newspeak and Blade Runner's source novel.

The second pack goes wider: more Wells and Verne, Ringworld, Rendezvous with Rama, Childhood's End, Hyperion, The Dispossessed, The Wheel of Time, Mistborn, the Kingkiller and First Law and Broken Earth series, American Gods and The Sandman, the Culture, The Three-Body Problem, Solaris, Roadside Picnic, We, Oryx and Crake, Flowers for Algernon, The Forever War, Starship Troopers, A Clockwork Orange, The Road, Cat's Cradle, The Stand, The Dark Tower, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, The Princess Bride, Watchmen, Piranesi, Kindred, Parable of the Sower, Snow Crash, The Expanse, Old Man's War, Conan, and the Chronicles of Amber.

The third pack is the language of the field: the Hugo and Nebula awards, cyberpunk and steampunk, space opera and hard SF, alternate history and The Man in the High Castle, the generation ship, terraforming, the singularity, grimdark, the Dying Earth and The Book of the New Sun, portal fantasy, the Hero's Journey, first contact, the New Wave, the multiverse, and Dungeons & Dragons.

The wrong answers are always other books, authors or terms of the same kind, so a shaky guess is easily caught and a sure one quickly confirmed. Because every option is the same sort of thing, a neutral picture, a shelf of old books, a library, a quill and inkwell, an old typewriter, is equally consistent with all four and cannot point to any one of them, so about fifteen questions carry one for atmosphere.

The reach is deliberately wide: British scientific romance from the 1890s, the American pulp and Golden Age, the New Wave, cyberpunk, the modern doorstop fantasy series, and translated masterworks from Russia, Poland and China. Novels, long series, single landmark stories and whole subgenres all count as answers, and the explanations trace how each one fed the next. Titles already used as answers in the Classic Novels quiz, among them Frankenstein, the two most famous twentieth-century dystopias and Verne's undersea and around-the-world books, are not repeated here. Plots, dates and attributions have been checked against standard reference works.