Science Fiction & Fantasy Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which 1970 Larry Niven novel sends a mixed team, an old human, a cowardly two-headed herbivore alien and a fierce cat-like warrior alien, to investigate a band of solid material a million miles wide, spun around a distant sun so that its inner surface has the area of millions of Earths?

Question 2

Which 1968 novel by Arthur C. Clarke, written alongside a film of the same name and partly from his own short story The Sentinel, traces a black rectangular slab that nudges ape-men toward tools and, millions of years later, is dug up on the Moon and beams a signal toward Jupiter?

Question 3

What is the name of the science-fiction and fantasy prize, voted on by the fans who attend or support the annual World Science Fiction Convention and handed out in the shape of a chrome rocket ship, first given in 1953?

Question 4

Which 1969 novel by Ursula K. Le Guin is set on a frozen world whose humanlike inhabitants are sexless most of the time and take on male or female characteristics only during a monthly fertile period, so that anyone can bear a child?

Question 5

Which 1953 Arthur C. Clarke novel has huge silent ships appear over every major city, after which unseen overlords quietly end war, cruelty and poverty, revealing themselves only decades later as looking exactly like the traditional image of demons?

Question 6

Which 1962 Philip K. Dick novel, set in an America divided after an Axis victory between a Japanese-run Pacific coast and a Nazi-run east, follows characters who consult the I Ching and circulate a banned novel imagining that the Allies won instead?

Question 7

What is the name for the storytelling pattern set out in Joseph Campbell's 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, in which a protagonist leaves the ordinary world, is tested through trials and a supreme ordeal in a strange one, and returns transformed and bearing a boon?

📚 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.