Science Fiction & Fantasy Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

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 2

Which 1898 novel opens with the narrator watching cylinders fall from the sky onto the commons of Surrey, from which emerge towering three-legged machines that sweep the countryside with a heat-ray and choke it with a red weed?

Question 3

Which unfinished series, beginning with a 1996 novel subtitled A Game of Thrones, is set on a continent where summers and winters each last years, and follows the noble houses that scheme, marry and murder for a throne made of melted swords?

Question 4

Which 1961 Robert A. Heinlein novel brings to Earth a young man who was born on Mars and raised by Martians after the first expedition died, so that he is biologically human but understands nothing of human customs, money, clothing, jealousy or religion?

Question 5

What is the name for the retro-futuristic style that imagines advanced technology, computers, airships, automata, built with Victorian materials and methods: brass, steam, gears and clockwork?

Question 6

Which tabletop role-playing game, published in 1974 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, let players each control one adventurer exploring a fantasy world narrated by a referee, rolling many-sided dice to resolve fights and feats?

Question 7

Which 1962 Anthony Burgess novella is narrated by a teenage gang leader in a near-future Britain, in an invented slang built largely on Russian roots, as he leads nights of what he calls ultra-violence before being caught?

📚 All Quizzes

Browse every category and see the full list of quizzes on BriskQuiz

→

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.