Science Fiction Trivia
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97 free Science Fiction trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
42 free Science fiction trivia questions with answers. Science fiction trivia usually stops at spaceships. This quiz covers the whole genre: the 1818 novel that started it, the Czech play that gave English the word robot, the Nebula and Hugo awards and what the trophy is actually shaped like, and the single novel that has won every major prize at once. Film and television get equal weight - the seven versions of Blade Runner, the short story behind 2001, the pitch that sold Star Trek as a Western, the studio boss who saved it, and the Hong Kong fight choreography that made The Matrix look the way it does. Difficulty runs from easy identification questions to expert-level publishing and production detail, and every answer carries the sourced sentence that establishes it. Built for a genre round at quiz night, a book club, or an argument about who really invented cyberspace.
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Q 01Which 1920 Czech play gave the world the word 'robot'?
R.U.R.
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.
Q 02Who wrote the 1920 play that introduced the word 'robot'?
Karel Capek
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.
Q 03Which 1984 William Gibson novel opened his Sprawl trilogy and popularised the word 'cyberspace'?
Neuromancer
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.
Q 04Science fiction's most famous award is named after whom?
Hugo Gernsback
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.
Q 05Which magazine did the Hugo Awards' namesake found?
Amazing Stories
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.
Q 06Members of which convention vote for the Hugo Awards?
Worldcon
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.
Q 07What shape is the Hugo Award trophy?
A finned rocket ship
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.
Q 08Which organisation gives out the Nebula Awards?
The SFWA
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.
Q 09What forms the spiral inside a Nebula Award trophy?
Glitter
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.
Q 10Which 1818 Gothic novel is widely treated as an ancestor of science fiction?
Frankenstein
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.
Q 11What is the subtitle of Mary Shelley's 1818 novel?
The Modern Prometheus
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.
Q 12Who proposed the ghost-story contest at Villa Diodati in the summer of 1816?
Lord Byron
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.
Q 13Under Asimov's First Law of Robotics, what may a robot never do?
Harm a human
Q 21Which Arthur C. Clarke short story mainly inspired 2001: A Space Odyssey?
The Sentinel
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.
Q 22Which Johann Strauss waltz plays as a spaceplane docks with the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
The Blue Danube
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.
Q 23How did Gene Roddenberry pitch Star Trek in his first draft?
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.
Q 14Which 1950 Asimov book, later the loose basis of a Will Smith film, collects nine early stories?
I, Robot
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.
Q 15Which novel won the very first Nebula Award for Best Novel?
Dune
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.
Q 16Which magazine first ran Frank Herbert's desert-planet epic as two serials between 1963 and 1965?
Analog
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.
Q 17What is the substance found only on Arrakis called?
Melange
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.
Q 18Blade Runner was adapted from which Philip K. Dick novel?
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
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.
Q 19Who played Rick Deckard in Blade Runner?
Harrison Ford
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.
Q 20Who composed the Blade Runner score?
Vangelis
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.
Wagon Train to the stars
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.
Q 24Which production company backed the original Star Trek?
Desilu
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.
Q 25Which network cancelled the original Star Trek in 1969 after three low-rated seasons?
NBC
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.
Q 26Which studio head was persuaded to save both Star Trek and Mission: Impossible?
Lucille Ball
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.
Q 27Which H. G. Wells novel describes a Martian invasion of Earth?
The War of the Worlds
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.
Q 28Who directed the 1938 radio drama about a Martian invasion?
Orson Welles
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.
Q 29Which 1927 German silent film is science fiction cinema's great early landmark?
Metropolis
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.
Q 30Which director made the 1927 city-of-the-future epic co-written with his wife, Thea von Harbou?
Fritz Lang
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.