H. G. Wells Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
60 free H. G. Wells trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This H. G. Wells trivia quiz covers the draper's apprentice from Bromley who studied biology under T. H. Huxley and became the father of science fiction. It moves through the astonishing burst of 'scientific romances' he wrote between 1895 and 1901 (The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, The War of the Worlds, The First Men in the Moon), the social comedies Kipps and The History of Mr Polly, the best-selling Outline of History and the utopian and prophetic books that predicted tanks, aircraft, the atomic bomb and something like Wikipedia. You will also find questions on his life: the broken leg that made him a reader, the library at Uppark, his marriages and affairs (Rebecca West, Amber Reeves, Moura Budberg, Margaret Sanger), his Fabian socialism and Labour candidacies, his interviews with Lenin and Stalin, his fights with the Nazis as PEN president, Orson Welles's 1938 broadcast, and the epitaph he chose for himself: 'I told you so. You damned fools.' Some questions are easy for anyone who has read one Wells novel; others will stretch devoted fans. Every answer has been checked against primary sources, chiefly the Wikipedia articles on Wells and his books, and each explanation adds one further detail. Play, see your score, and share it with the readers in your group chat.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which Kent town was H. G. Wells born in 1866?
Bromley
Bromley is where Wells was born, at the china shop his parents kept on the High Street. The business never paid its way, and as the family sank he was sent out to work as a draper's apprentice.
Q 02How did Wells's father Joseph earn money besides keeping a china shop?
Play professional cricket for Kent
Play professional cricket for Kent: Joseph Wells bowled for the county in 1862 and 1863, once taking four Sussex wickets with four successive balls. An injury in 1877 ended his playing days and cut off that income.
Q 03What childhood accident in 1874 turned young Wells into a devoted reader?
A broken leg that left him bedridden
A broken leg that left him bedridden for weeks gave the boy his first long spell with books, which his father fetched from the library. Wells later called the break a stroke of good fortune that saved him from life as a shop assistant.
Q 04Wells's miserable teenage apprenticeship at a Southsea drapery inspired which novels?
Kipps and The History of Mr Polly
Kipps and The History of Mr Polly both start their heroes as drapery apprentices, as Wells was, working thirteen-hour days and sleeping in a dormitory. He escaped in 1883 by persuading his parents to let him become a student teacher.
Q 05Which ancient book in the library at Uppark, where his mother was housekeeper, set the teenage Wells questioning society?
Plato's Republic
Plato's Republic showed the teenage Wells, he wrote, that law and custom might be thrown into the melting pot and made anew. He read it lying on the grass above the great house, and soon turned to socialism.
Q 06Under which scientist, now remembered as 'Darwin's Bulldog', did Wells study at the Normal School of Science?
Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley taught Wells for a single year, which Wells called the most educational of his life. Nothing else at the school held him, and he left in 1887 without a degree.
Q 07A precursor to The Time Machine appeared in Wells's school magazine under what title?
The Chronic Argonauts
The Chronic Argonauts ran in the Science Schools Journal in 1888 until Wells broke it off after three instalments, unable to go on. He later mocked its 'rococo' title and spent seven years reworking the idea into The Time Machine.
Q 08Which future children's author did Wells teach at Henley House School in 1889-90?
A. A. Milne
A. A. Milne was a small boy at the school, which his father ran, when Wells rushed his class from sums to algebra in a year. Wells wrote that it launched two or three university careers; Milne won a mathematics scholarship to Cambridge.
Q 09How was Isabel, the first wife Wells left for one of his students, related to him?
His cousin
His cousin: Wells fell for Isabel while lodging with her mother, his aunt Mary, and married her in 1891. Three years later he ran off with a pupil, Amy Catherine Robbins, who became his second wife.
Q 10In which Surrey town was Wells living when he wrote The War of the Worlds?
Woking
Woking was home from 1895, and Wells wrote that he cycled round the district marking down places and people for destruction by his Martians. The town has since put up a seven-metre Martian tripod sculpture in its centre.
Q 11After Wells refused the architect's trademark heart on its front door, his new Sandgate home took which name?
Spade House
Spade House was named for the spade-shaped letter plate Wells accepted in place of C. F. A. Voysey's usual heart. Ill health had driven him from London to the Kent coast, where both his sons were born in the new house.
Q 12Wells had a son, Anthony, in 1914 with which novelist and feminist 26 years his junior?
Rebecca West
Rebecca West and Wells called each other Panther and Jaguar, and the pet name went into their son's own: he was born Anthony Panther West. The affair lasted about ten years, and the two stayed friends until Wells died.
Q 13Which American campaigner had an on-and-off love affair with Wells from 1920 until his death?
Q 21Doctor Moreau creates his human-like Beast Folk by what method?
Vivisection
Vivisection, surgery on living animals, is Moreau's method, and his creatures call the laboratory the House of Pain. The results never hold: they keep slipping back, and after his death they revert to beasts.
Q 22Where does the first Martian cylinder land in The War of the Worlds?
Horsell Common
Horsell Common fills with sightseers once the cylinder is found, and a deputation walks towards the pit waving a white flag to show that humans are intelligent too. The Martians answer with the heat-ray.
Q 23In The War of the Worlds, what finally kills the Martians after every human weapon has failed?
Bacteria
Margaret Sanger
Margaret Sanger, the birth-control pioneer, met Wells in 1920, and he backed her cause as well as courting her. He wrote the introduction to her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization.
Q 14Moura Budberg was the mistress of which Russian writer when Wells stayed at his Petrograd flat in 1920?
Maxim Gorky
Maxim Gorky was Wells's host, and Budberg, Gorky's secretary and companion, began an affair with the visitor. She later settled in London and stayed close to Wells until he died, but always refused to marry him.
Q 15What did Wells call the comic sketches he drew for his wife Jane, often about their marriage?
Picshuas
Picshuas were the quick sketches Wells began drawing in 1893 to amuse Jane and himself. Many were thrust into drawers and survived, so he later used them in his memoirs to trace how the marriage changed over thirty-five years.
Q 16In The Time Machine, which underground creatures prey on the gentle Eloi in the year 802,701?
Morlocks
Morlocks keep the machinery running below ground and climb up at night to feed on the Eloi. Wells made the two peoples the far descendants of Victorian workers and the leisured rich, a warning about where the class divide might lead.
Q 17The Eloi in The Time Machine are thought to have been inspired partly by which William Morris utopia?
News from Nowhere
News from Nowhere pictures a future England without money, where work is a pleasure. Wells had gone to hear Morris speak as a student, and his own future turns that gentle paradise into a trap for its idle inhabitants.
Q 18What is the name of the scientist who makes himself invisible in The Invisible Man?
Griffin
Griffin makes himself invisible but cannot undo it, turns to robbery and terror, and is finally beaten down by a mob. Only as he dies does his battered body fade back into view.
Q 19Which Wells novel opens with a stranger arriving through a snowstorm at an inn in the Sussex village of Iping?
The Invisible Man
The Invisible Man opens at the Coach and Horses, where the landlady takes her lodger's bandages for the marks of an accident. When she presses him over an unpaid bill, he tears them off in a rage and shows her nothing at all.
Q 20Who narrates The Island of Doctor Moreau after surviving the shipwreck of the Lady Vain?
Edward Prendick
Edward Prendick gets back to England but can no longer bear crowds, seeing the animal about to break out in every face. He ends his days in the country with his books, his chemistry and the stars.
Bacteria do what armies could not: the Martians have no resistance to Earth's germs, and the narrator finds them dead among their machines. Wells has him call the killers the humblest things on Earth.
Q 24What alien vegetation do the Martians spread across England in The War of the Worlds?
Red weed
Red weed grows from seeds the invaders bring with them: in the novel, plants on Mars are blood-red where Earth's are green. It runs wild wherever there is water and chokes both the Wey and the Thames.
Q 25Which future prime minister wrote to Wells in 1906, 'I owe you a great debt'?
Winston Churchill
Winston Churchill sent that letter two days before a landmark speech that echoed Wells's ideas on the state, and later said he could pass an exam in his books. The two met in 1902 and stayed in touch until Wells died.
Q 26Orson Welles's famous radio version of The War of the Worlds was broadcast in 1938 as a special for which occasion?
Halloween
Halloween: the play went out on 30 October, and Welles signed off by calling it the Mercury Theatre's version of dressing up in a sheet and saying 'Boo!'. If the doorbell rang and nobody was there, he added, that was no Martian.
Q 27In The First Men in the Moon, which gravity-blocking substance carries two Englishmen to the Moon?
Cavorite
Cavorite is named after its inventor, Mr Cavor. The first sheet sets too soon: the air above it turns weightless and rushes upward, wrecking his house before the sheet itself shoots off into space.
Q 28A plot point in The First Men in the Moon was inspired by which inventor's claim of radio signals from Mars?
Nikola Tesla
Nikola Tesla is named in the novel itself: a Dutch electrician using Tesla-style apparatus to listen for Mars instead picks up broken messages in English, sent by the scientist left behind inside the Moon.
Q 29In which 1914 novel did Wells coin the term 'atomic bombs' and describe a nuclear weapon?
The World Set Free
The World Set Free imagines bombs that go on exploding for days. Leo Szilard read it in 1932, conceived the nuclear chain reaction the next year, and kept his patent secret because, he wrote, he had read Wells and knew what it would mean.
Q 30Which 1901 non-fiction bestseller by Wells predicted that faster transport would spread cities out into suburbs?
Anticipations
Anticipations got the suburbs right but fumbled the sea: Wells wrote that his imagination refused to see a submarine doing anything but suffocating its crew and sinking. He still called the book the keystone of his work.