1. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, Billy Pilgrim is captured by an alien spaceship and taken to which planet?

   1. Tralfamadore

   2. Temazepam

   3. Trapezoidium

   4. Tralala

2. In HG Wells’s War of the Worlds, where do the Martians land?

   1. Paris

   2. London

   3. Woking

   4. Devizes

3. What are the terrifying aliens in Roald Dahl’s sequel to Charlie and the Chocolate Factory called?

   1. Vicious Kids

   2. Vermicious Knids

   3. Vermilion Snids

   4. Maltesers

4. In Michel Faber’s novel Under the Skin, extraterrestrial Isserley is roaming the Scottish highlands looking for …

   1. Heather

   2. Children

   3. The Edinburgh festival

   4. Male hitchhikers

5. The Betelgeusians in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Universe are very similar to human beings, but have one key disability for getting along in the UK:

   1. They cannot understand sarcasm

   2. Rain makes them terminally unwell

   3. They refuse to queue

   4. Awkward silences make them murderously angry

6. In Iain M Banks’s Cuture novels, the Oct are said to have:

   1. Eight-sided torsos, thick purple fur and 200 eyes

   2. Twenty hands, each with eight fingers, and a permanently startled appearance

   3. Ovoid bodies, blue torsos covered with green hair and eight limbs

   4. Eight dimensions, in each of which they assume quite distinct forms

7. In Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, the hermit elephant differs from its earthly equivalent because

   1. … it has unusually thin skin

   2. … it is constantly forgetting what it is doing

   3. … it has a large, humanoid nose rather than a trunk

   4. … when death approaches, it seeks the most public place possible

8. Battlefield Earth, in which our alien overlords are the terrifying race of 9ft tall, 1,000lb Psychlos, was whose brainchild?

   1. L Ron Hubbard

   2. Allen Carr

   3. Ayn Rand

   4. William Shatner

9. In Doris Lessing’s Canopus in Argos series, extraterrestrial visitors report back on life on Earth. What name does Lessing give our planet?

   1. Cotoneaster

   2. Shikasta

   3. Alabaster

   4. Canasta

10. He’s as old as the universe and travels in time and space, but whose creation is Qfwfq?

    1. Jorge Luis Borges

    2. Margaret Atwood

    3. Italo Calvino

    4. CS Lewis

Solutions

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

Scores

1. 0 and above.

   So bad it makes us question your humanity. Is English literature entirely alien to you?

2. 3 and above.

   Not bad, but you're still rather earthbound in your reading. Go beyond, seeker!

3. 8 and above.

   Out of this world! A team of UFOlogists has been dispatched to investigate you.