Dystopian Fiction Trivia
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100 free Dystopian Fiction trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Dystopias are the futures we write to warn ourselves. The word itself was coined in Parliament in the 1860s, the first great novel of the genre was smuggled out of Russia, and every decade since has added new nightmares: surveillance states, engineered castes, clones raised for spare parts, children made to fight on television. These 100 questions range across the whole genre rather than dwelling on one book: the invented slang and truth drugs of the classics, the teenage rebels of young-adult fiction, and the films and series that turned bureaucratic and corporate nightmares into pop culture, from rain-soaked replicant hunts to a game show with lethal rules. Around half are pitched for anyone who has read a set text or seen the films; the rest reward the genre's completists. Play on your phone with instant answers and explanations, or print it for a book club, a classroom or a pub quiz.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Newspeak word from Nineteen Eighty-Four means holding two conflicting beliefs as true at once?
Doublethink
Doublethink is Oceania's discipline of simultaneously accepting two conflicting beliefs, summed up in the Party slogans 'War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength'.
Q 02Which playground game, overseen by a giant doll named Young-hee, opens the deadly contest in Squid Game?
Red Light, Green Light
Red Light, Green Light opens the games, and its doll is a childhood memory turned killer: she was modelled on Young-hee, a girl drawn in the school textbooks older Koreans grew up with.
Q 03Which effect did The Matrix popularise, freezing the action while the camera appears to swing around it?
Bullet time
Bullet time was shot with a rig of still cameras fired a fraction of a second apart, so playing the stills in order sweeps the viewpoint around action that barely moves.
Q 04In which 1997 film does Ethan Hawke's Vincent borrow Jude Law's blood, urine and hair to pass as genetically 'valid'?
Gattaca
Gattaca is built from G, A, T and C, the letters of guanine, adenine, thymine and cytosine, the four nucleobases of DNA. Ethan Hawke's Vincent passes as a 'valid' using samples from Jude Law's character.
Q 05Which 2006 film, from a P. D. James novel, is set in a 2027 Britain after 18 years of infertility?
Children of Men
Children of Men's director, Alfonso Cuarón, invented its mother-to-be: Kee, the first woman pregnant in eighteen years, is not in the original novel, where a woman named Julian carries the child.
Q 06Which Mad Max film won six Academy Awards, the most at its ceremony?
Mad Max: Fury Road
Mad Max: Fury Road won six Oscars from ten nominations, all for crafts such as editing and costume design: more than any other film that night, though Best Picture went to Spotlight.
Q 07Which 1982 film sends Rick Deckard to 'retire' four Nexus-6 replicants in a Los Angeles of 2019?
Blade Runner
Blade Runner cost Philip K. Dick a payday by his own choice: he turned down about $400,000 to write a novelization, so that his original novel was reissued instead.
Q 08Which Alan Moore and David Lloyd comic supplied the Guy Fawkes mask later popularised at protests by Anonymous?
V for Vendetta
V for Vendetta's mask carries an irony: Warner Bros., the studio behind the film version, owns the rights to the design and earns a fee on every official mask sold, so the protesters who wear it add to a media giant's profits.
Q 09Which 1994 Newbery winner by Lois Lowry makes Jonas the Receiver of Memory in a community that has surrendered colour?
The Giver
The Giver was a long labour of love for Jeff Bridges, who first wanted the title role for his father, Lloyd; by the time the film came out in 2014 he was old enough to play it himself.
Q 10In Zamyatin's We, the One State builds its citizens' homes almost entirely from what material?
Glass
Glass walls keep every citizen in sight of the Guardians, the secret police; curtains may be lowered only on appointed 'sexual days', after handing in a pink ticket.
Q 11Banned at home, Zamyatin's We first appeared in 1924 in which language, decades before Soviet readers could buy it?
English
English, because the banned manuscript was sent abroad and translated for a New York publisher; a Russian edition followed only in 1952, and Soviet readers waited until 1988.
Q 12In H. G. Wells's 1895 novella, the underground Morlocks emerge at night to eat which childlike surface-dwellers?
The Eloi
The Eloi are the far-future heirs of the idle rich, and Wells's twist is that the Morlocks, descended from their workers, now fatten them like cattle.
Q 13Which Anthony Burgess novel is narrated in Nadsat, a teen slang mixing Russian words with Cockney rhyming slang?
A Clockwork Orange
Q 21Which young-adult novel has Tally Youngblood awaiting the operation every citizen receives at 16?
Uglies
Uglies hides a second cut: the operation that makes everyone beautiful also leaves lesions on the brain, which keep the new Pretties placid.
Q 22Which 1999 Koushun Takami novel, filmed a year later, makes a Japanese school class kill one another until one remains?
Battle Royale
Battle Royale was Takami's first and only novel, completed in 1996 but unpublished until 1999, when it became a surprise bestseller; the students wake in a classroom, surrounded by troops, wearing metal collars.
Q 23Which British author flooded London into a tropical lagoon in his 1962 novel The Drowned World?
J. G. Ballard
A Clockwork Orange lost its ending in America: US editions cut the 21st and final chapter until 1986, closing the book on Alex's relapse rather than his growing up.
Q 14Which aversion therapy leaves Burgess's droog Alex sickened by the thought of violence after drugged film screenings?
The Ludovico Technique
The Ludovico Technique has a cruel side effect: one of the films is scored with Beethoven, so the music Alex loves now sickens him just as the violence does.
Q 15Golding got the plot of Lord of the Flies from which R. M. Ballantyne boys' adventure novel he thought unrealistic?
The Coral Island
The Coral Island, with its focus on Christianity and the civilising influence of British colonialism, prompted Golding to ask his wife whether he should write instead about castaway boys behaving as real ones would.
Q 16Which Kazuo Ishiguro novel follows Kathy, Ruth and Tommy, Hailsham pupils raised as clones to donate their organs?
Never Let Me Go
Never Let Me Go is also a song on Kathy's treasured cassette: she dances to it alone at school, unaware that one of the adults is watching her in tears.
Q 17Who won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for The Road, a father and son's trek across an ash-covered America?
Cormac McCarthy
Cormac McCarthy called his young son John the book's co-author: many of the boy's lines, he said, were things his own son had really said to him.
Q 18Which Emily St. John Mandel novel is named after a comic drawn by Miranda Carroll, clung to by a pandemic survivor?
Station Eleven
Station Eleven's TV adaptation ran into its own subject: filming of the pandemic story was paused by COVID-19, and when it resumed it had moved from Chicago to the Toronto area.
Q 19Which Octavia Butler novel, beginning in a collapsing 2024, has teenager Lauren Olamina found the religion Earthseed?
Parable of the Sower
Parable of the Sower finally put Octavia Butler on the New York Times best-seller list in September 2020, twenty-seven years after it came out and fourteen years after her death.
Q 20Which John Brunner novel, set in an overpopulated 2010, won the 1969 Hugo with a collage style taken from Dos Passos?
Stand on Zanzibar
Stand on Zanzibar takes its title from a sum: by 2010, Brunner reckoned, everyone on Earth standing shoulder to shoulder would cover an island the size of Zanzibar.
J. G. Ballard turned the disaster novel upside down: his hero, the biologist Kerans, sides with the heat and ends by heading south, deeper into the flooded tropics, instead of north to safety.
Q 24Which 1984 novel was the first to take the 'triple crown' of the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards?
Neuromancer
Neuromancer popularised 'cyberspace', yet William Gibson said he had never so much as touched a PC when he wrote it, and he rewrote the first two-thirds twelve times.
Q 25Which Kurt Vonnegut story, set in 2081, has the Handicapper General fit the gifted with weights, masks and ear radios?
Harrison Bergeron
Harrison Bergeron ends with Diana Moon Glampers, the Handicapper General, shooting the escaped Harrison and his ballerina mid-kiss on live television; a 2009 short film retold it as 2081.
Q 26Under which pen name did Stephen King publish The Running Man, set in a 2025 where a game show hunts its contestants?
Richard Bachman
Richard Bachman existed because publishers then believed readers would accept only one book a year from an author, and King was writing faster than that.
Q 27Which Hugo-winning novel has Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany ruling a partitioned United States in 1962?
The Man in the High Castle
The Man in the High Castle contains its own banned novel, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, in which the Allies won; Amazon adapted Dick's book for television in 2015.
Q 28Which author foresaw an American oligarchy crushing a workers' revolt in his novel The Iron Heel?
Jack London
Jack London told it as a rebel's manuscript that breaks off in mid-sentence, footnoted by a scholar writing seven centuries later, after the Oligarchy has finally fallen.
Q 29In which Ayn Rand novella has the word 'I' been abolished, leaving the hero known only as Equality 7-2521?
Anthem
Anthem was first published in Britain by Cassell in 1938; the hero rediscovers the word 'I' in the books of an abandoned house and renames himself Prometheus.
Q 30Which Ursula K. Le Guin novel has George Orr's 'effective' dreams rewrite reality, exploited by his psychiatrist?
The Lathe of Heaven
The Lathe of Heaven takes its title from an old translation of Chuang Tzu that Le Guin later learned was wrong: a scholar wrote to tell her that ancient China had no lathes.