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60 free H. G. Wells trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This H. G. Wells trivia quiz covers the draper's apprentice from Bromley who studied biology under T. H. Huxley and became the father of science fiction. It moves through the astonishing burst of 'scientific romances' he wrote between 1895 and 1901 (The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon), the social comedies Kipps and The History of Mr Polly, the best-selling Outline of History and the utopian and prophetic books that predicted tanks, aircraft, the atomic bomb and something like Wikipedia. You will also find questions on his life: the broken leg that made him a reader, the library at Uppark, his marriages and affairs (Rebecca West, Amber Reeves, Moura Budberg, Margaret Sanger), his Fabian socialism and Labour candidacies, his interviews with Lenin and Stalin, his fights with the Nazis as PEN president, Orson Welles's 1938 broadcast, and the epitaph he chose for himself: 'I told you so. You damned fools.' Some questions are easy for anyone who has read one Wells novel; others will stretch devoted fans. Every answer has been checked against primary sources, chiefly the Wikipedia articles on Wells and his books, and each explanation adds one further detail. Play, see your score, and share it with the readers in your group chat.
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Q 01In which Kent town was H. G. Wells born in 1866?
Bromley
He was born at Atlas House on the High Street, the fourth child of a shopkeeper and cricketer.
Q 02What did Wells's father Joseph do to earn an unsteady income besides keeping a china shop?
Play professional cricket for Kent
A fractured femur in 1877 ended his cricket career and the family's main source of income.
Q 03What childhood accident in 1874 turned young Wells into a devoted reader?
A broken leg that left him bedridden
His father brought him books from the local library to pass the time.
Q 04Wells's miserable teenage apprenticeship at Hyde's Drapery Emporium in Southsea inspired which novels?
Kipps and The History of Mr Polly
He worked thirteen-hour days and slept in a dormitory; The Wheels of Chance also drew on the experience.
Q 05At which West Sussex country house, where his mother was a lady's maid, did H. G. Wells devour the library?
Uppark
He read Plato's Republic, More's Utopia and Defoe there.
Q 06Under which famous biologist did Wells study at the Normal School of Science in South Kensington?
Thomas Henry Huxley
His weekly scholarship allowance was 21 shillings, yet photographs show him thin and malnourished.
Q 07A precursor to The Time Machine appeared in Wells's school magazine under what title?
The Chronic Argonauts
He was among the founders of The Science School Journal.
Q 08Which future children's author did Wells teach at Henley House School in 1889-90?
A. A. Milne
The school was run by Milne's father; Wells's first published work was a two-volume Text-Book of Biology.
Q 09Whom did Wells marry in 1891?
His cousin Isabel
They separated in 1894 when he fell for his student Amy Catherine Robbins, whom he called Jane and married in 1895.
Q 10In which Surrey town did Wells write The War of the Worlds and The Time Machine?
Woking
He lived at 'Lynton' on Maybury Road; the Martians land on nearby Horsell Common in the novel.
Q 11What did Wells name the large family home he built at Sandgate near Folkestone in 1901?
Spade House
His sons Gip and Frank were born there; Frank was grandfather of film director Simon Wells.
Q 12Wells had a son, Anthony, in 1914 with which novelist and feminist 26 years his junior?
Rebecca West
Anthony West became a writer and critic himself.
Q 13Which American birth-control activist had a love affair with Wells from 1920 until his death?
Margaret Sanger
Wells also lampooned Beatrice and Sidney Webb as 'Altiora and Oscar Bailey' in The New Machiavelli after Beatrice criticized his affair with Amber Reeves.
Q 21Doctor Moreau creates his human-like Beast Folk by what method?
Vivisection
The novel is considered the earliest depiction of 'uplift' in fiction.
Q 22Where does the first Martian cylinder land in The War of the Worlds?
Horsell Common
The narrator's unnamed brother escapes to Tillingham in Essex as London is overrun.
Q 23In which British periodical was The War of the Worlds serialised in 1897?
Pearson's
Cosmopolitan carried it in the United States the same year.
Besides the heat-ray, what alien vegetation do the Martians spread in The War of the Worlds?
Q 14Moura Budberg had been the mistress of which Russian writer when Wells first met her?
Maxim Gorky
She repeatedly refused Wells's proposals of marriage.
Q 15What did Wells call the comic sketches he drew for his wife Jane, often about their marriage?
Picshuas
A book about them was published in 2006.
Q 16To what year does the Time Traveller journey in The Time Machine?
802,701
He finds humanity split into the childlike Eloi and the subterranean Morlocks.
Q 17The Eloi in The Time Machine are thought to have been inspired partly by which William Morris utopia?
News from Nowhere
Wells's future is far more savage than Morris's, with the Morlocks preying on the Eloi.
Q 18What is the name of the scientist who makes himself invisible in The Invisible Man?
Griffin
An albino former medical student obsessed with optics, he becomes an icon of horror fiction.
Q 19The Invisible Man arrives during a snowstorm at an inn in which West Sussex village?
Iping
He later reveals his identity to Dr Kemp, an old acquaintance from medical school.
Q 20Who narrates The Island of Doctor Moreau after surviving the shipwreck of the Lady Vain?
Edward Prendick
Moreau was an eminent London physiologist exposed by a journalist for his gruesome vivisection experiments.
Red weed
It spreads wherever there is water but is already dying when the narrator finds it.
Q 25Which prime minister borrowed the phrase 'the gathering storm' from The War of the Worlds?
Winston Churchill
Churchill was an avid Wells reader; the two met in 1902 and belonged to The Other Club.
Q 26On what date did Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre broadcast its famous radio War of the Worlds?
October 30, 1938
Wells and Welles finally met on air in San Antonio in October 1940, and Wells thanked him for boosting sales.
Q 27In The First Men in the Moon, what gravity-blocking substance does Mr Cavor invent?
Cavorite
He and Bedford build a spherical spacecraft with it and find insect-like Selenites living inside the Moon.
Q 28A plot point in The First Men in the Moon was inspired by which inventor's claim of radio signals from Mars?
Nikola Tesla
Wells used the idea of radio communication between astronomical objects.
Q 29In which 1914 novel did Wells coin the term 'atomic bombs' and describe a nuclear weapon?
The World Set Free
He dedicated it to Frederick Soddy; Leó Szilárd read it in 1932, the year the neutron was discovered.
Q 30Which 1901 bestseller, subtitled 'An Experiment in Prophecy', foresaw suburbs, sexual freedom and a European Union?
Anticipations
Its misses included doubting aircraft before 1950 and imagining submarines could only 'suffocate its crew and founder at sea'.