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.
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Q 01Which 1968 film did Arthur C. Clarke co-write with its director, Stanley Kubrick?
2001: A Space Odyssey
The film reached cinemas in spring 1968 before the novel was finished, and Clarke complained that made his book look like a novelisation.
Q 02In which country did Arthur C. Clarke live from 1956 until his death in 2008?
Sri Lanka
He moved to what was then Ceylon to pursue scuba diving and later received the island's highest civil honour, the Sri Lankabhimanya.
Q 03Along with Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, Clarke was one of science fiction's so-called what?
Big Three
Clarke and Asimov agreed a 'treaty': asked who was better, each would say Clarke was 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
It first appeared in a 1968 letter to Science and was added to the 1973 revision of his essay 'Hazards of Prophecy'; he said three laws were good enough for Newton so he would stop there.
Q 05Clarke's 1945 paper proposed satellites in which orbit as ideal telecommunications relays?
Geostationary
The idea was published in October 1945, and the International Astronomical Union officially calls that orbit the Clarke Orbit.
Q 06In which magazine did Clarke's 1945 satellite paper 'Extra-Terrestrial Relays' appear?
Wireless World
Asked why he never patented the idea, he liked to say 'a patent is really a licence to be sued'.
Q 07In which English county was Clarke born, in the seaside town of Minehead?
Somerset
He grew up on a farm at Bishops Lydeard, stargazing and collecting fossils, and went to Huish's Grammar School in Taunton.
Q 08During the Second World War, Clarke served in the Royal Air Force as a specialist in what?
Radar
He worked mostly on ground-controlled approach, the landing system that later proved vital during the Berlin Airlift, and turned the experience into his only non-SF novel, Glide Path.
Q 09Which organisation, devoted to space travel, did Clarke join as a teenager in 1934 and later chair twice?
The British Interplanetary Society
He was chairman in 1946-47 and again in 1951-53, and it was among its core members that he first circulated his satellite idea.
Q 10Which 1948 short story, rejected by a BBC competition, became the seed of Clarke and Kubrick's 1968 film?
The Sentinel
Kubrick and Clarke met in New York in 1964 and decided to build their film loosely on it, writing a novel first to let their imaginations run.
Q 11In the novel version of the 1968 Kubrick film, the Discovery's mission is to which planet?
Saturn
Kubrick switched the film to Jupiter because he and Douglas Trumbull could not build convincing rings; Clarke used Jupiter himself in the sequels.
Q 12In the 2001 novel, on which moon does Bowman find the second, much larger monolith?
Iapetus
In 2007 Clarke sent a video greeting for NASA's Cassini flyby of that very moon, months before his death.
Q 13What does 'TMA-1', the designation of the monolith dug up on the Moon in 2001, stand for?
Tycho Magnetic Anomaly One
The slab's sides are in the exact ratio 1:4:9, the squares of the first three integers, and it screams a radio burst when sunlight first hits it.
Q 21As Rama nears the Sun, which planet's government fires a nuclear missile at the alien ship?
Mercury
Crewman Boris Rodrigo intercepts and disarms it, exploiting the 12-minute radio lag between the missile and its controllers.
Q 22In Childhood's End, what are the mysterious aliens who take peaceful control of Earth called?
The Overlords
When they finally show themselves after decades, they look like the traditional Christian image of demons: horns, leathery wings, barbed tails.
Q 23In Childhood's End, who is the alien Supervisor for Earth who meets the UN Secretary-General?
Karellen
He serves the Overmind, a cosmic intelligence, and the aliens act as a 'bridge species' guiding humanity's children into merging with it.
Q 14What is the man-ape whose tribe meets the monolith at the start of the 2001 novel called?
Moon-Watcher
His rival, the leader of 'the Others', is One-Ear; the monolith teaches Moon-Watcher's tribe to use tools and kill for meat.
Q 15Which of Clarke's sequels to 2001 was made into a 1984 film directed by Peter Hyams?
2010: Odyssey Two
Clarke has a cameo feeding pigeons outside the White House, and a Time cover in the film shows him as the US President and Kubrick as the Soviet Premier.
Q 16Clarke's 2061: Odyssey Three involves a visit to which celestial object on its next inner Solar System pass?
Halley's Comet
The book also features a spaceship crash on Europa, where native life is developing under the Monolith's protection.
Q 17In 3001: The Final Odyssey, whose freeze-dried body is found beyond Neptune and revived?
Frank Poole
He was the astronaut killed by HAL during a spacewalk a thousand years earlier.
Q 18Which 1973 Clarke novel about a giant alien cylinder swept the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards?
Rendezvous with Rama
It was the first title of a record three-book deal; the ship's name comes from the Hindu god because the older Greek and Roman names had run out.
Q 19What do the explorers of Rama name the frozen band of water dividing the alien ship's interior?
The Cylindrical Sea
They name the island in the middle of it New York, and later find microorganisms in the melting water.
Q 20What do the crew exploring the alien ship Rama call the part-biological, part-robotic creatures inside?
Biots
The name is coined after Surgeon-Commander Laura Ernst dissects a three-eyed, three-legged spider-like specimen that fell from a platform.
Q 24Which 1950 short story did Clarke expand into the first part of Childhood's End?
Guardian Angel
The finished novel sold out its first printing in 1953 and is still often called his best; the Syfy channel made it a miniseries in 2015.
Q 25Which structure, linking the ground to a satellite in high orbit, is built in The Fountains of Paradise?
A space elevator
Clarke thought the 'orbital tower' might one day be seen as as important as his satellite idea; the novel won both the Hugo and Nebula awards.
Q 26Sri Kanda in Clarke's The Fountains of Paradise is a thinly veiled version of which real Sri Lankan mountain?
Adam's Peak
In the story a Buddhist temple on the summit refuses permission for the tower until a colony on Mars offers to build a smaller one to the moon Deimos.
Q 27What underwater discovery did Clarke and Mike Wilson make off Trincomalee in 1956?
The ruins of the original Koneswaram Temple
He described the carved columns and elephant-head stones in his 1957 book The Reefs of Taprobane, and the find made the area popular with divers.
Q 28The wreck Mike Wilson found off Great Basses Reef in 1961 belonged to which ruler?
The Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb
It yielded fused bags of silver rupees and cannon; Clarke had to watch the salvage from shore because he had just been paralysed by illness.
Q 29Which 1951 Clarke book did Wernher von Braun reportedly use to convince Kennedy a Moon landing was possible?
The Exploration of Space
It won the International Fantasy Award's non-fiction category in 1952 and prompted Robert Heinlein to start writing to him.
Q 30For which US network did Clarke commentate on the Apollo 11 Moon landing on 20 July 1969?
CBS
The fame of 2001 was such that Apollo 13's command module was later named Odyssey.