1. Which author said that “science fiction is no more written for scientists than ghost stories are written for ghosts”?

   1. Frank Herbert

   2. Brian Aldiss

   3. Ursula K Le Guin

   4. Iain M Banks

2. Which prolific science fiction author took 20 years to write their first 100 books, ten years for their second 100 and five years for their third?

   1. Isaac Asimov

   2. Robert E Howard

   3. Michael Moorcock

   4. Arthur C Clarke

3. Who (possibly apocryphally) ended his career as a journalist by writing a story about a racehorse making a break for freedom during a race thusly: “The horse jumped over the f****** fence”?

   1. Philip K Dick

   2. Terry Pratchett

   3. Douglas Adams

   4. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr

4. What did the Brontë children call their imaginary worlds, for which they drew maps, writing their stories in tiny script?

   1. Fenlandia and Pelion

   2. Angria and Gondal

   3. Gondor and Cirith Ungol

   4. Karskin and Holt

5. How has Michael Moorcock memorably described the “Grand High Fantasy” written in the idiom of Tolkien?

   1. As epic pooh

   2. A whole new universe of bad

   3. As mindbendingly wonderful

   4. As derivative crap

6. What are HG Wells’s underground Moon dwellers called, in The First Men in the Moon (1901)?

   1. Lunatics

   2. Artemisians

   3. Lunians

   4. Selenites

7. When was Orson Welles’s infamous radio adaptation of Wells’s The War of the Worlds broadcast, in which listeners took the report of an invasion of Earth by Martians to be true, causing widespread panic?

   1. 1937

   2. 1947

   3. 1938

   4. 1953

8. What happens to Gulliver in Hungarian author Frigyes Karinthy’s sequel to Gulliver’s Travels, Utazas Faremidoba?

   1. Gulliver travels to the Moon, where he meets a race of ghostlike aliens

   2. Gulliver travels to the planet Faremido where he meets intelligent machines

   3. Gulliver invents the hot air balloon and travels to Mars

   4. Gulliver is startled to find a race of tiny aliens living at the bottom of his garden

9. What is the capital planet in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series called?

   1. Arrakis

   2. Shikasta

   3. Mesklin

   4. Trantor

10. When was the word robot first used to describe artificial life, in Czech playwright Karel Capek’s play Rossumovi univerzalni roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots), which tells of millions of artificial workers created to be slaves?

    1. 1900

    2. 1920

    3. 1940

    4. 1810

Solutions

1:B, 2:A, 3:D, 4:B, 5:A, 6:D, 7:C, 8:B, 9:D, 10:B

Scores

1. 0 and above.

   What planet are you from?

2. 4 and above.

   There are far more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of on your reading list, clearly

3. 8 and above.

   Out of this world