97 Fun Facts About Science Fiction

Which 1920 Czech play gave the world the word 'robot'?

R.U.R. stands for Rossum's Universal Robots; its robots are not metal machines but artificial flesh-and-blood workers, who finally rebel and wipe out the human race.

Who wrote the 1920 play that introduced the word 'robot'?

Karel Capek credited the word to his brother Josef: by his own account he meant to call the artificial workers 'labori' until Josef suggested roboti, from the Czech robota, forced labour.

Which 1984 William Gibson novel opened his Sprawl trilogy and popularised the word 'cyberspace'?

Neuromancer popularised 'cyberspace' and won the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards, yet Gibson wrote it on an old manual typewriter, a machine he later described as clockwork.

Science fiction's most famous award is named after whom?

Hugo Gernsback launched the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction in 1926, yet the man the awards honour was notorious among his writers for paying late or not at all.

Which magazine did the Hugo Awards' namesake found?

Amazing Stories, launched in 1926, was the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction; three years later its founder's publishing company went bankrupt and he lost control of it.

Members of which convention vote for the Hugo Awards?

Worldcon members nominate and vote for the Hugos; first handed out in 1953, they were dropped the very next year and only became a yearly fixture from 1955.

What shape is the Hugo Award trophy?

A finned rocket ship tops the Hugo; Jack McKnight and Ben Jason modelled the first on a 1950s car hood ornament, and each year's organisers design their own base, so no two years' trophies match.

Which organisation gives out the Nebula Awards?

The SFWA, founded by Damon Knight in 1965 as the Science Fiction Writers of America, chooses the Nebula Awards by a vote of its professional-writer members rather than by fans.

What forms the spiral inside a Nebula Award trophy?

Glitter forms a spiral nebula inside the clear block; the awards themselves grew out of a 1965 plan for a yearly best-stories anthology, which turned into a members' ballot.

Which 1818 Gothic novel is widely treated as an ancestor of science fiction?

Frankenstein appeared anonymously on 1 January 1818, when Mary Shelley was 20; Brian Aldiss called it the first true science fiction novel because its hero turns to laboratory experiment to do the fantastic.

What is the subtitle of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel?

The Modern Prometheus likens Victor to the Titan who stole fire for humankind and, in some tellings, shaped the first people from clay, then paid for it with endless torment.

Who proposed the ghost-story contest at Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816?

Lord Byron, renting the Villa Diodati near Geneva in the rainy summer of 1816, challenged his guests to write ghost stories; Mary Shelley's became her famous novel, and Byron's own abandoned fragment inspired Polidori's The Vampyre.

Under Asimov's First Law of Robotics, what may a robot never do?

Harm a human: the First Law forbids it, and all three laws were first spelled out together in the 1942 story 'Runaround', where the robot Speedy is trapped between obeying an order and protecting itself.

Which 1950 Asimov book, later the loose basis of a Will Smith film, collects nine early stories?

I, Robot links its stories through robopsychologist Susan Calvin's memories; the Will Smith film began as an unrelated murder-mystery script, Hardwired, and only later took on the book's title and characters.

Which novel won the very first Nebula Award for Best Novel?

Dune won the first Nebula for Best Novel and tied for that year's Hugo; it grew out of a magazine article Frank Herbert never finished, about taming the shifting sand dunes of the Oregon coast.

Which magazine first ran Frank Herbert's desert-planet epic as two serials between 1963 and 1965?

Analog readers met the story in eight instalments from December 1963; more than twenty book publishers then turned the reworked novel down before Chilton, a firm known for motor-trade titles, took it.

What is the substance found only on Arrakis called?

Melange, the spice, is produced by the sandworms of Arrakis; it extends life, gives Guild navigators their prescience, and turns the eyes of heavy users blue.

Blade Runner was adapted from which Philip K. Dick novel?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Dick's 1968 novel, is set in a post-war San Francisco; Ridley Scott's 1982 film moved the story to a rain-soaked Los Angeles of 2019.

Who played Rick Deckard in Blade Runner?

Harrison Ford fought the voice-over the studio added for the 1982 release; it was cut from the 1992 Director's Cut and from The Final Cut, the only version Ridley Scott fully controlled.

Who composed the Blade Runner score?

Vangelis, fresh from his Oscar for Chariots of Fire, wrote the synthesiser score; it was nominated for a BAFTA and a Golden Globe although the film itself flopped in North America.

Which Arthur C. Clarke short story mainly inspired 2001: A Space Odyssey?

The Sentinel imagines an alien beacon left on the Moon; when humans disturb it, its silence tells its makers that mankind has reached space. Clarke likened the story to the film as an acorn to an oak.

Which Johann Strauss waltz plays as a spaceplane docks with the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

The Blue Danube replaced the music Alex North had been hired to write; Kubrick dropped the whole commissioned score for existing classical recordings, and North only found out at the premiere.

How did Gene Roddenberry pitch Star Trek in his first draft?

Roddenberry's 1964 pitch called the show 'Wagon Train to the stars', after the hit Western anthology; he had written for Have Gun – Will Travel and wanted self-contained weekly adventures.

Which production company backed the original Star Trek?

Desilu, an independent studio, strained its finances by backing two costly hour-long dramas at once; Gulf+Western bought it during Star Trek's run and merged it into Paramount.

Which network cancelled the original Star Trek in 1969 after three low-rated seasons?

NBC dropped Star Trek after three seasons and 79 episodes, despite viewers' letter-writing campaigns to save it; reruns sold to local stations then built the audience that made it a franchise.

Which studio head was persuaded to save both Star Trek and Mission: Impossible?

Lucille Ball had run the studio alone since buying out her ex-husband's share in 1962; with it deficit-financing two costly hour-long dramas, her production chief talked her into keeping both alive.

Which H. G. Wells novel describes a Martian invasion of Earth?

The War of the Worlds, serialised in 1897 and published as a book in 1898, has Martians invade because their own older, cooling world has reached the last stage of exhaustion.

Who directed the 1938 radio drama about a Martian invasion?

Orson Welles was 23 when the broadcast went out on CBS on the eve of Halloween; newspapers reported mass panic, but how many listeners were truly fooled is disputed.

Which 1927 German silent film is science fiction cinema's great early landmark?

Metropolis lost about a quarter of its length to cuts after its premiere; the missing scenes were thought gone for good until a worn 16mm copy surfaced in a Buenos Aires film museum in 2008.

Which director made the 1927 city-of-the-future epic co-written with his wife, Thea von Harbou?

Fritz Lang and Thea von Harbou wrote his films together for over a decade, until he left Germany in 1933; she stayed behind and built a successful screenwriting career under the Nazi regime.

Which music producer re-released the 1927 silent epic of a future city in 1984, shortened and colour-tinted?

Giorgio Moroder swapped the title cards for subtitles and recut the film to about 80 minutes so it kept pace with new rock songs by Freddie Mercury, Bonnie Tyler and Adam Ant.

Which novel about telepathic police won the first Hugo for Best Novel?

The Demolished Man is named for the killer's fate: in a society where telepaths have made murder almost unknown, he is sentenced not to death but to 'demolition', the wiping and rebuilding of his mind.

Which 1999 blockbuster did The Matrix beat to the Oscar for Best Visual Effects?

The Phantom Menace took roughly twice The Matrix's box office, yet The Matrix, made for $63 million, beat the Star Wars prequel in all three Oscar categories the two films shared.

Which national film tradition shaped The Matrix's fight scenes?

Hong Kong action cinema shaped the fights: the Wachowskis hired veteran choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, who put the cast through four months of martial-arts and wire training before filming.

Which word for an instant interstellar communicator did Ursula K. Le Guin coin, later borrowed by Orson Scott Card?

Ansible first appeared in Le Guin's 1966 novel Rocannon's World; Card kept her word for the device in Ender's Game as a tribute, likening it to 'robot', an invented term that entered the language.

Jules Verne ranks second among the most translated authors in UNESCO's Index Translationum, behind which novelist?

Agatha Christie tops the index, with Verne second and Shakespeare third; early English versions of Verne were so heavily cut and altered that English-speaking readers long took him for a children's writer.

What was Jules Verne's sequence of adventure novels called?

Voyages extraordinaires was the umbrella title publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel gave Verne's novels from 1866, promising to sum up the geographical and scientific knowledge of the age in story form; it ran to more than 50 books.

Verne first conceived Captain Nemo as which nationality, avenging Russia's crushing of an 1863 uprising?

Polish was Verne's first choice, but his publisher Hetzel, wary of offending Russia, which France then treated as an ally, had the backstory cut; The Mysterious Island later made Nemo an Indian prince.

Which subgenre emphasises scientific accuracy above all?

Hard science fiction prizes scientific rigour, as in the work of Arthur C. Clarke and Hal Clement, yet the label is flexible: stories classed under it often still feature faster-than-light travel.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy began in 1978 as a sitcom on which network?

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy began on BBC Radio 4 on 8 March 1978, produced by Simon Brett and then Geoffrey Perkins; Adams later reworked it as novels, TV and film, contradicting his earlier versions.

Which fireman is the protagonist of Ray Bradbury's 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451?

Guy Montag is the fireman who burns books and then starts hiding them; the novel is usually read as an attack on censorship, but Bradbury later insisted it was about television killing the habit of reading.

The title of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World comes from which Shakespeare play?

The Tempest gives Huxley his title: Miranda's cry 'O brave new world, that has such people in't' on first seeing the shipwrecked courtiers, which John the Savage quotes with growing bitterness.

In Brave New World's dating system, what does the 'AF' of AF 632 stand for?

AF stands for After Ford: the World State counts years from the 1908 debut of the Model T, so AF 632 is AD 2540, and citizens say 'Our Ford' where we would say 'Our Lord'.

Which band recorded 'Journey of the Sorcerer', the Hitchhiker's Guide theme tune?

The Eagles' Don Henley and Glenn Frey doubted that Bernie Leadon's banjo instrumental belonged on One of These Nights; Douglas Adams later gave it a second life as the radio series theme.

Which fantasy epic did Asimov's Foundation trilogy beat to the one-off 1966 Hugo for Best All-Time Series?

The Lord of the Rings lost out to the Foundation trilogy in a one-off vote; the Hugos then had no series award at all until a regular Best Series category arrived in 2017.

Which Nobel-winning economist credits the Foundation series with turning his mind to economics?

Paul Krugman, the 2008 Nobel laureate, has said he went into economics because it was the closest thing available to Hari Seldon's psychohistory, the predictive science of the Foundation books.

Who voiced the Guide in the 2005 film The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy?

Stephen Fry voiced the Guide in a film Douglas Adams never saw: Adams co-wrote the screenplay but died in 2001, before production began. Peter Jones created the role on radio.

Which candy lures the alien home in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, after the makers of M&M's said no?

Reese's Pieces sales jumped after Elliott laid a trail of them for E.T. to follow. Mars had turned the film down, believing the alien would frighten children.

Which Star Wars planet did George Lucas name after a real town in southern Tunisia?

Tatooine comes from Tataouine, a town Lucas came across while scouting desert locations. The planet's name is never actually mentioned in the final screenplay of the 1977 film.

Which Star Trek actor based the Vulcan salute on a Jewish priestly blessing he saw as a child?

Leonard Nimoy peeked during a synagogue service his grandfather took him to. The split-fingered hand he saw there stands for the Hebrew letter shin.

Which Star Wars character did George Lucas base on Indiana, his Alaskan Malamute dog?

Chewbacca began with Indiana riding in the passenger seat of Lucas's car like a co-pilot. The Wookiee's name even echoes sobaka, the Russian word for dog.

Which NASA space shuttle got its name after Star Trek fans flooded the White House with letters?

Enterprise was due to be christened Constitution until the letters reached President Gerald Ford. Built without engines or a working heat shield, the test orbiter was never capable of spaceflight.

Which computer sings 'Daisy Bell' as it is shut down in 2001: A Space Odyssey?

HAL 9000 sings it as a nod to real history. In 1961 a Bell Labs computer performed 'Daisy Bell', the earliest known song sung by a synthesised computer voice.

Which half-buried landmark does Charlton Heston's astronaut find at the end of Planet of the Apes?

The Statue of Liberty tells him the 'alien' world was Earth all along, long after a nuclear war. The scene was shot in a secluded cove at Malibu.

In Ray Bradbury's time-travel story 'A Sound of Thunder', which crushed creature changes the future?

A butterfly dies under the boot of Eckels, a hunter on a Tyrannosaurus safari, and he returns to a changed present. The 1952 story is often linked to the 'butterfly effect', though that term came later, from chaos theory.

In Daniel Keyes's novel Flowers for Algernon, what kind of creature is Algernon?

A laboratory mouse, Algernon has the intelligence-raising surgery before Charlie Gordon does. When the animal's gains fade and he dies, Charlie sees what is coming for him.

In Doctor Who, the Doctor's TARDIS is stuck in the shape of which piece of British street furniture?

A police box was a common sight in 1960s Britain, so the time machine blended in when its chameleon circuit broke.

Which car replaced a refrigerator as the time machine in early scripts for Back to the Future?

The DeLorean jumps through time when it reaches 88 miles per hour. The device was first conceived as a stationary machine, and at one point it was a refrigerator.

In Jurassic Park, dinosaur DNA is recovered from mosquitoes that were preserved in which substance?

Amber is fossilised tree resin, which can trap insects whole. One minor character oversees a mine of it in the Dominican Republic for the park's founder, John Hammond.

Which actor was first suggested for the human hero of The Terminator before playing the killer cyborg instead?

Arnold Schwarzenegger won the villain's part at a meeting where James Cameron had planned to pick a fight and rule him out. The director ended up sketching his face on a notepad instead.

Which Alien heroine, played by Sigourney Weaver, was originally written as a man?

Ellen Ripley was conceived as male until director Ridley Scott chose, early in production, to make the character a woman. She ends the 1979 film as the last of the Nostromo's crew.

Which Doctor Who villains, known for screeching 'Exterminate!', did writer Terry Nation base on the Nazis?

The Daleks glide because Terry Nation, inspired by a dance troupe in long skirts, wanted aliens that did not look like a man in a suit.

In The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which number is Deep Thought's answer to life, the universe and everything?

42 arrives after 7.5 million years of computing, and nobody is pleased. Deep Thought points out that its makers never knew what the question actually was.

Which rock formation, the first US national monument, is the alien landing site in Close Encounters of the Third Kind?

Devils Tower saw a large rise in visitors and climbers after the 1977 film. Theodore Roosevelt had protected the Wyoming butte back in 1906.

Which Star Trek language, created by linguist Marc Okrand, has its own published translation of Hamlet?

Klingon was deliberately designed to sound alien, with features rare in human languages. In 2010 the Washington Shakespeare Company performed scenes from Hamlet in it.

Which giant monster, awakened by hydrogen bomb testing, first attacked Tokyo in a 1954 Japanese film?

Godzilla reached cinemas months after a real Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon No. 5, was showered with fallout from an American hydrogen bomb test at Bikini Atoll.

Which crop does stranded astronaut Mark Watney grow to stay alive on Mars in The Martian?

Potatoes kept the film crew busy too, since real ones were grown on a sound stage next to the set. In the story, Watney fertilises his with the crew's own waste.

Which dystopian novel, drafted on the Scottish island of Jura, gave English the phrases Big Brother and Room 101?

Nineteen Eighty-Four took the name of Room 101 from a conference room at BBC Broadcasting House. George Orwell finished the book in November 1948 while ill with tuberculosis.

Which Jurassic Park author, a Harvard-trained doctor, also created the medical drama ER?

Michael Crichton earned his medical degree in 1969 but never practised, choosing to write instead. He published his first novels under pen-names while still a student.

Which lush moon, mined by humans for unobtanium, is home to the Na'vi in James Cameron's Avatar?

Pandora sits in the Alpha Centauri star system. Work on the constructed language of its Na'vi people began in 2005, before the screenplay itself was developed.

Which Star Trek character did Martin Luther King Jr. persuade actress Nichelle Nichols not to give up?

Nyota Uhura signified a future of greater racial harmony, King told Nichols, who had planned to return to musical theatre. He was introduced to her as her biggest fan.

Which actor voiced Darth Vader in Star Wars while bodybuilder David Prowse wore the suit?

James Earl Jones felt the part was too small to warrant recognition and chose to go uncredited in the first two films. George Lucas thought Prowse's West Country accent wrong for the villain.

Which Star Wars ship is said to have been shaped after a hamburger with an olive on the side?

The Millennium Falcon was redesigned because its first, longer shape looked too much like the Eagle Transporters of TV's Space: 1999. The olive became the off-centre cockpit.

Which household item do fans of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy carry every 25 May?

A towel is indispensable for galactic travellers in Douglas Adams's books, partly for its immense psychological value. Towel Day was first held two weeks after his death in 2001.

What are the bioengineered humanoids hunted by Rick Deckard in Blade Runner called?

Replicants got their name from a screenwriter's daughter, who worked in biochemistry and suggested 'replicating', the way a cell copies itself. The first models seen live only four years.

Where is the remote American research station that a shape-shifting alien infiltrates in John Carpenter's The Thing?

Antarctica is where a Norwegian helicopter chases a sled dog into the Americans' camp in the opening scene. The story comes from the novella Who Goes There?

Which US president's missile defence plan did Senator Ted Kennedy mock as 'reckless Star Wars schemes'?

Ronald Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative in March 1983. The film nickname stuck after the Washington Post quoted Kennedy's speech the very next day.

Which famous Star Trek catchphrase was never actually spoken in any episode or film?

'Beam me up, Scotty' is a misquotation, yet James Doohan, who played the ship's engineer, chose it as the title of his 1996 autobiography.

Which X-Files agent, played by Gillian Anderson, is credited with inspiring women to pursue science careers?

Dana Scully is a medical doctor as well as an FBI special agent, and 'the Scully Effect' is the name given to her pull on young women choosing science, medicine and law enforcement.

Which animated sitcom by Simpsons creator Matt Groening follows a man frozen for 1,000 years and revived in 2999?

Futurama puts its thawed hero, Fry, to work at Planet Express, an interplanetary delivery company, alongside the one-eyed Leela and the robot Bender.

Which Margaret Atwood novel is set in Gilead, a dictatorship that has replaced the United States?

The Handmaid's Tale was begun in West Berlin in spring 1984 and finished in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, where Atwood was teaching at the state university.

Which small object does Dom Cobb use to check whether he is still dreaming in Christopher Nolan's Inception?

A spinning top that never falls tells Cobb he is in a dream. He walks away to join his children before seeing whether it drops, and the script ends with it 'STILL SPINNING'.

Which breakfast food is the obsession of the psychic girl Eleven in Stranger Things?

Eggo waffles became an icon of the Netflix series, which carried the brand's name to countries where the product is not even sold.

Which crime-ridden American city is the setting of RoboCop, a movie that was mostly shot in Dallas?

Detroit was dismissed as a filming location because it had too many low, old-fashioned buildings. Director Paul Verhoeven wanted a location that suggested the near future.

Which Disney film, set inside a mainframe computer, was among the first to use extensive computer-generated imagery?

Tron was not even nominated for the visual effects prize at the Academy Awards, groundbreaking as it was. Its two nods came for costume design and sound.

In the film Soylent Green, what is the wafer sold as a plankton product secretly made from?

Human bodies are the main ingredient, a secret that unravels once oceanographic reports show the dying seas can no longer supply any plankton.

Which animated robot, left behind to compact Earth's rubbish, learns about love from a tape of Hello, Dolly!?

WALL-E stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter: Earth-class. His beeps are the work of sound designer Ben Burtt, hired because the director kept using R2-D2 as his benchmark.

Which writer created and hosted The Twilight Zone, writing or co-writing 92 of its 156 episodes?

Rod Serling was known as the 'angry young man' of Hollywood for his clashes with television executives and sponsors over censorship, racism and war.

Which physicist advised on Interstellar's black hole and later shared a Nobel Prize for gravitational waves?

Kip Thorne learned something from the film too. Its visual effects gave him new insight into how black holes bend light, which led to published scientific papers.

Which French stage magician directed A Trip to the Moon, the 1902 film where a capsule hits the Moon's eye?

Georges Méliès also played the lead, Professor Barbenfouillis. He ended up selling toys and sweets from a stand in a Paris railway station before film lovers rediscovered him.

Which 1968 Jane Fonda space adventure features a villain whose name was borrowed by the band Duran Duran?

Barbarella sends its heroine to find the scientist Durand Durand. The Birmingham band took his name the day after the BBC broadcast the film in October 1978.

Which artist designed the creature in Alien, basing it on his own painting Necronom IV?

H. R. Giger, a Swiss painter of 'biomechanical' images that blend human bodies with machines, shared the film's Academy Award for visual effects.

In which 1951 film must the words 'Klaatu barada nikto' be spoken to stop the robot Gort?

The Day the Earth Stood Still has its alien visitor teach the phrase to a woman named Helen Benson in case he comes to harm. Screenwriter Edmund H. North invented the language himself.

Which 1997 film starring Ethan Hawke takes its title from the letters of the four DNA bases?

Gattaca is spelled only with G, A, T and C, for guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine. It was shot as The Eighth Day, until a Belgian film reached America with that title first.

In which Kurt Vonnegut novel does Billy Pilgrim come 'unstuck in time' and visit the planet Tralfamadore?

Slaughterhouse-Five grew out of the Allied firebombing of Dresden, which Vonnegut himself survived as an American prisoner of war.

Which company buried unsold cartridges of its E.T. video game in a New Mexico landfill in 1983?

Atari crushed and buried truckloads of stock near Alamogordo. A 2014 dig proved the legend true, though officials put the total at about 700,000 cartridges of various games.

In which puzzle video game does the AI GLaDOS promise cake to anyone who finishes her test chambers?

Portal hides graffiti backstage warning that 'the cake is a lie'. After the final chamber, GLaDOS tries to steer the player into an incinerator instead.