Arthur C. Clarke Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
60 free Arthur C. Clarke trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Arthur C. Clarke trivia for science fiction readers, space nerds and anyone who has ever quoted the line about advanced technology and magic. The quiz covers the whole of Clarke's life: the Somerset farm boy who joined the British Interplanetary Society as a teenager, the RAF radar officer, the 1945 Wireless World paper that gave the geostationary orbit its nickname, and the move to Ceylon in 1956 for the diving. The books get proper attention - Childhood's End and the Overlords, the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey with Stanley Kubrick, HAL and the Discovery, Rendezvous with Rama and its awards sweep, The Fountains of Paradise and the space elevator, and the two lesser-known Odyssey sequels. There are also questions on the three laws, the Clarke-Asimov Treaty, his television series on mysteries, the CBS Apollo 11 broadcast, the knighthood, and the gamma-ray burst that arrived hours before he died. Expect a spread from easy to genuinely obscure. Every answer has been checked against a reference page and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In 2001: A Space Odyssey, which song does the computer HAL sing as it is being shut down?
Daisy Bell
Daisy Bell was the song a real computer had been made to sing in a pioneering speech-synthesis demonstration; Clarke had seen it, and gave the tune to the dying HAL.
Q 02In Clarke's story 'The Nine Billion Names of God', who rents a computer to finish listing the names?
Tibetan monks
Tibetan monks believe the universe exists only so that every name of God can be written down; as the machine prints the last of them, the stars quietly begin to go out.
Q 03Along with Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, Clarke was one of science fiction's so-called what?
Big Three
Clarke, Asimov and Heinlein were dubbed the Big Three of science fiction; under the 'Clarke-Asimov Treaty', each would call Clarke the better SF writer and Asimov the better science writer.
Q 04Complete Clarke's third law: 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from...' what?
Magic
Magic rounds off the third law, which joined Clarke's first two in a later edition of his essay; three laws were good enough for Newton, he joked, so he would modestly stop there.
Q 05Clarke's 1945 paper proposed satellites in which orbit as ideal telecommunications relays?
Geostationary
Clarke's October 1945 paper argued that three satellites in geostationary orbit, about 36,000 km above the equator, could relay signals worldwide; the orbit is often called the Clarke Orbit.
Q 06In which magazine did Clarke's 1945 satellite paper 'Extra-Terrestrial Relays' appear?
Wireless World
Wireless World printed the paper in October 1945; within twenty years Syncom 3, parked in the orbit it described, was relaying the Tokyo Olympics to viewers in the United States.
Q 07In which English county was Clarke born, in the seaside town of Minehead?
Somerset
Somerset is where Clarke grew up on a farm, hunting for fossils and building his own telescopes out of lenses and cardboard tubes.
Q 08During the Second World War, Clarke served in the Royal Air Force as a specialist in what?
Radar
Radar was Clarke's wartime trade: he ran the trials of the first ground-controlled approach set, built to talk pilots down in bad weather, and turned the experience into Glide Path, his only non-SF novel.
Q 09Which organisation, devoted to space travel, did Clarke join as a teenager and later chair twice?
The British Interplanetary Society
The British Interplanetary Society was where Clarke first tried out his satellite idea, talking it over with fellow members before he put it into print.
Q 10Which 1948 short story, rejected by a BBC competition, became the seed of Clarke and Kubrick's 1968 film?
The Sentinel
The Sentinel did not even place in the BBC contest, yet it became the seed of the film; Kubrick proposed that he and Clarke write a complete novel first and derive the script from it.
Q 11Unlike Kubrick's film, Clarke's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey sends the spaceship Discovery to which planet?
Saturn
Saturn is the goal in the novel, written alongside a film that stops at Jupiter; when Clarke came to write a sequel, he followed the film rather than his own book.
Q 12In the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, on which moon does Bowman find the second, much larger monolith?
Iapetus
Iapetus is where Bowman spots a black speck that proves to be a giant twin of the lunar monolith; as his pod nears it, the slab opens and swallows him, hurling him across the galaxy.
Q 13What does 'TMA-1', the designation of the monolith dug up on the Moon in 2001, stand for?
Tycho Magnetic Anomaly One
Q 21As Rama nears the Sun, which planet's government fires a nuclear missile at the alien ship?
Mercury
Mercury's colonists, the Hermians, judge Rama too dangerous and fire a nuclear missile at it; crewman Boris Rodrigo flies out to meet the bomb and disarms it with a pair of wire cutters.
Q 22In Childhood's End, what are the aliens whose ships appear above Earth's major cities called?
The Overlords
The Overlords rule Earth benevolently from their ships for decades before revealing themselves, and they look like the traditional Christian image of demons: horns, leathery wings and barbed tails.
Q 23In Childhood's End, who is the alien Supervisor for Earth who meets the UN Secretary-General?
Karellen
Tycho Magnetic Anomaly One was found through the magnetic disturbance it caused near the crater Tycho; once dug up, it let out a piercing radio signal at its first touch of sunlight in three million years.
Q 14In the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, what is the man-ape whose tribe first meets the monolith called?
Moon-Watcher
Moon-Watcher is taught by the monolith to use tools, so his starving tribe learns to hunt for meat and its endless hunger becomes a thing of the past.
Q 15Which of Clarke's sequels to 2001 was made into a 1984 film directed by Peter Hyams?
2010: Odyssey Two
2010: Odyssey Two was the first of three sequels from an author who had never meant to write any, and it follows Kubrick's film wherever the film and the first novel differ.
Q 16Clarke's 2061: Odyssey Three involves a visit to which celestial object on its next inner Solar System pass?
Halley's Comet
Halley's Comet gets its first human landing in the novel, before the ship is diverted to Europa, the one world the monoliths had declared off limits to humans.
Q 17In 3001: The Final Odyssey, which astronaut's frozen body is found adrift in space and revived?
Frank Poole
Frank Poole, the astronaut killed by HAL in 2001, is found frozen a thousand years on and brought back to life to explore a world he no longer recognises.
Q 18Clarke and Kubrick both denied that HAL's name in 2001: A Space Odyssey was a coded dig at which company?
IBM
IBM sits one letter along the alphabet from H-A-L, but the pair insisted the name simply came from the words heuristic and algorithmic.
Q 19What do the explorers of Rama name the frozen band of water dividing the alien ship's interior?
The Cylindrical Sea
The Cylindrical Sea, a frozen band ringing Rama's interior that thaws as the ship nears the Sun, holds a central island the explorers dub New York for its skyscraper-like structures.
Q 20In Rendezvous with Rama, what do the explorers call the creatures they find at work inside the alien ship?
Biots
Biots, short for biological robots, got the name after Surgeon-Commander Laura Ernst dissected a wrecked one and found it part living tissue and part machine.
Karellen, the alien Supervisor for Earth, deals only with Secretary-General Rikki Stormgren at first; his race serves the Overmind, a cosmic intelligence into which humanity's children finally merge.
Q 24Which 1950 short story did Clarke expand into the first part of Childhood's End?
Guardian Angel
Guardian Angel became the novel's opening part, in which the aliens' unseen spokesman promises that his kind will show themselves only after fifty years.
Q 25What kind of megastructure is built in Clarke's novel The Fountains of Paradise?
A space elevator
A space elevator has to rise from the equator, so Clarke set the novel on a fictional twin of Sri Lanka that he slid south until it sat on the line.
Q 26Sri Kanda in Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise is a thinly veiled version of which real Sri Lankan mountain?
Adam's Peak
Sri Kanda stands in for Adam's Peak (Sri Pada), the island's conical sacred mountain with a footprint-shaped hollow at its summit revered by several faiths, which Clarke moved south toward the equator for the story.
Q 27What did Clarke and Mike Wilson find underwater off Trincomalee in 1956?
The ruins of the original Koneswaram Temple
The ruins of the original Koneswaram Temple lay strewn across the seabed below Swami Rock, where the Hindu shrine had stood until Portuguese soldiers looted and destroyed it in the 1620s.
Q 28What did Clarke's diving partner Mike Wilson find scattered around a wreck on Great Basses Reef in 1961?
Silver coins
Silver coins, rupees struck in 1702 for the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, had fused into solid lumps of about a thousand, still shaped like the sacks that once held them.
Q 29Which 1951 Clarke book on spaceflight became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection?
The Exploration of Space
The Exploration of Space earned Clarke a sizable sum from the book club and sold well on both sides of the Atlantic, a success that let him turn to writing full time.
Q 30For which US network did Clarke commentate on the Apollo 11 Moon landing on 20 July 1969?
CBS
CBS sat Clarke beside anchor Walter Cronkite as Apollo 11 touched down, then called him back to comment on the Apollo 12 and 15 missions.