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50 free Dystopian Fiction trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 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 50 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 50 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; the giant doll was modelled on Young-hee, a character from the covers of the South Korean textbooks Chul-soo and Young-hee in the 1970s and 1980s.
Q 03Which effect did The Matrix popularise, freezing the action while the camera appears to swing around it?
Bullet time
Bullet time represents a character's heightened perception by letting a shot play in slow motion while the camera appears to move through it at normal speed; Morpheus recruits the hacker Neo into the rebellion.
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 Alfonso Cuarón film, from a P. D. James novel, is set in a 2027 Britain after 18 years of infertility?
Children of Men
Children of Men adapts P. D. James's 1992 novel; Clive Owen's reluctant escort protects Kee, the first pregnant woman in eighteen years, as infertility pushes civilisation toward collapse.
Q 06Which 2015 George Miller film, with Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa, won six Academy Awards from ten nominations?
Mad Max: Fury Road
Mad Max: Fury Road won Best Film Editing, Best Production Design and Best Costume Design among its six, and its wasteland plot has Tom Hardy's Max join Furiosa against the warlord Immortan Joe.
Q 07Which 1982 Ridley Scott film sends Rick Deckard to 'retire' four Nexus-6 replicants in a Los Angeles of 2019?
Blade Runner
Blade Runner's replicants are bio-engineered by the Tyrell Corporation for off-world colonies, and the Voight-Kampff test spots them through their emotional responses to questions.
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 masked anarchist V wages a theatrical campaign against a fascist Britain; the 2005 film cast Hugo Weaving as V and Natalie Portman as Evey Hammond, from a Wachowskis screenplay.
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's Jonas shares unusual pale eyes with the current Receiver; Jeff Bridges wanted to film it for nearly twenty years, at first with his father Lloyd in the title role, before the 2014 film with Meryl Streep.
Q 10In Zamyatin's We, the One State builds its citizens' homes almost entirely from what material?
Glass
Glass lets the state watch everyone; the narrator, D-503, is the engineer building the spaceship Integral, and the nation is run by a power known as the Benefactor.
Q 11Banned at home, Zamyatin's We first appeared in 1924 in which language, decades before Soviet readers could buy it?
English
English came first, in Gregory Zilboorg's translation for E. P. Dutton in New York; the Russian text was not printed until 1952, also in New York, and reached Soviet bookshops only in 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 small, childlike humanoids the Time Traveller meets when he stops in AD 802,701, and the Morlocks abduct them after dark; the book is credited with popularising the very idea of a time-travel vehicle.
Q 13Which Anthony Burgess novel is narrated in Nadsat, a teen slang mixing Russian words with Cockney rhyming slang?
Q 21Which Scott Westerfeld novel has Tally Youngblood awaiting the operation that turns every 16-year-old into a 'Pretty'?
Uglies
Uglies grew out of Westerfeld's email exchanges with Ted Chiang about his story 'Liking What You See: A Documentary', and from a friend whose new Los Angeles dentist suggested cosmetic surgery.
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 1962 J. G. Ballard novel turns London into a tropical lagoon after solar radiation melts the polar ice caps?
A Clockwork Orange
A Clockwork Orange was published on 17 March 1962, and American editions dropped its 21st and final chapter until 1986, ending 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 is sold by the Minister of the Interior as a way to rehabilitate criminals in just two weeks: Alex is strapped to a chair, his eyes clamped open, and injected with drugs while violent films play.
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 was shortlisted for the 2005 Booker Prize, and Mark Romanek's 2010 film cast Carey Mulligan as Kathy, Andrew Garfield as Tommy and Keira Knightley as Ruth.
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 told Oprah Winfrey his young son John Francis was his co-author, since some of the book's conversations were ones they had really had; John Hillcoat's 2009 film starred Viggo Mortensen.
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 follows the Traveling Symphony, a troupe performing Shakespeare around the Great Lakes twenty years after the Georgia Flu, and it won the Arthur C. Clarke Award in May 2015.
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's creed holds that 'God is Change' and that believers can 'shape God', with humanity destined to spread the seeds of Earth to other planets; Butler published it in 1993.
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 first appeared in part in New Worlds magazine in 1967, and besides the Hugo it took the 1969 BSFA Award and the 1973 Prix Tour-Apollo.
The Drowned World
The Drowned World follows biologist Robert Kerans, who is drawn toward the swamp rather than the old order; Ballard linked its drowned-city imagery to memories of Shanghai and called it a return toward a second Triassic age.
Q 24Which 1984 novel is the only one to take the 'triple crown' of the Hugo, Nebula and Philip K. Dick awards?
Neuromancer
Neuromancer popularised cyberspace and 'jacking in', ideas Gibson had introduced in his short story 'Burning Chrome', and its sequels Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive completed the Sprawl trilogy.
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 was meant to be King's long-term alias, but he was outed shortly after the fifth Bachman novel, Thinner; Arnold Schwarzenegger's 1987 film changed Ben Richards almost beyond recognition.
Q 27Which Hugo-winning Philip K. Dick 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 1908 Jack London novel about an American oligarchy is called the earliest of modern dystopian fiction?
The Iron Heel
The Iron Heel's Oligarchy holds North America for three centuries before a revolution ushers in the Brotherhood of Man, and its publisher asked only that one footnote he thought libellous be cut.
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 a mistranslated passage of Chuang Tzu, and the hero's name is read as a nod to George Orwell; Dr Haber's Augmentor pushes Orr into ever more intolerable worlds.