Isaac Asimov Trivia
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98 free Isaac Asimov trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Isaac Asimov coined the word robotics by accident, wrote or edited more than 500 books across nine of the ten Dewey Decimal classes, and was afraid of flying despite sending humanity across the galaxy. He invented the Three Laws, dreamed up psychohistory on the subway and called The Last Question his own favourite story. This Isaac Asimov trivia quiz covers the Foundation and Robot series, Nightfall and The Gods Themselves, the Brooklyn candy store, Boston University, the Clarke-Asimov Treaty and the illness that was hidden until after his death. Every answer is sourced and explained.
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Q 01Isaac Asimov was a professor of which subject at Boston University?
Biochemistry
Biochemistry was his subject at BU's School of Medicine, but writing came to pay more than the university did, so he stepped back from academic work.
Q 02In which country was Asimov born?
Russia
Russia was his birthplace, and with no birth record kept in his village, Asimov picked January 2, 1920, as his birthday and celebrated it.
Q 03What kind of business did Asimov's parents run in Brooklyn?
A candy store
A candy store, where his father sold the pulps but banned Isaac from reading them until he argued that science fiction was educational.
Q 04Roughly how many books did science fiction writer Isaac Asimov write or edit?
About 500
About 500 books came from a man who typed his first drafts at 90 words a minute and kept about 95% of each draft in the final version.
Q 05Which word did Asimov coin without realising it was new, in his 1941 story Liar!?
Robotics
Robotics went on to name a real engineering field, and it is still used with the meaning Asimov gave it in his fiction.
Q 06What does Asimov's Second Law require a robot to do?
Obey orders
Obey orders: the Second Law requires it and outranks the Third, so a robot must follow a human command even when obeying will destroy it.
Q 07Asimov's First Law bars a robot from injuring a human or, through what, allowing one to come to harm?
Inaction
Inaction is dropped from the law in Little Lost Robot, because robots kept dragging researchers out of radiation that people could briefly bear but robots could not.
Q 08What name did Asimov give the extra law he later placed ahead of the original three?
The Zeroth Law
The Zeroth Law is the duty to protect humanity as a whole, which robots such as Giskard and Daneel came to place above the First Law.
Q 09Which fictional science lets Hari Seldon predict the future in the Foundation series?
Psychohistory
Psychohistory made young Paul Krugman want to be Hari Seldon, and he turned to economics as the closest real science.
Q 10Which historical work inspired the premise of the Foundation series?
Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire shaped Asimov's pitch for one short story, but talks with editor John W. Campbell turned it into a whole series.
Q 11Seldon's plan shortens the post-Empire dark age to 1,000 years, from roughly how long?
About 30,000 years
About 30,000 years of barbarism was the forecast, and because the Empire's fall had too much momentum to stop, Seldon's plan could only nudge events.
Q 12Which mutant, whose rise took Hari Seldon's plan by surprise, conquers the Foundation in Asimov's series?
The Mule
The Mule controls others' emotions, and once he conquers the Foundation, the hidden Second Foundation has to come out of hiding to save the plan.
Q 13Which 1982 novel revived Asimov's Foundation series after three decades and won the 1983 Hugo for Best Novel?
Foundation's Edge
Q 21Asimov's detective Elijah Baley and robot R. Daneel Olivaw were introduced in which 1954 novel?
The Caves of Steel
The Caves of Steel set Earth's people in vast domed cities, which the claustrophile Asimov counted the ultimate windowless enclosures.
Q 22Which 1972 Asimov novel won the Hugo, Nebula and Locus awards for Best Novel?
The Gods Themselves
The Gods Themselves was Asimov's reply to critics who said he avoided aliens and sex, with a middle section set among aliens who mate in threes.
Q 23Robin Williams starred in the 1999 film of which Asimov robot story?
The Bicentennial Man
Foundation's Edge came about because his publisher approached Asimov in 1981 and persuaded him to return to the series for a fourth novel.
Q 14Who plays Hari Seldon in the Apple TV+ adaptation of Foundation?
Jared Harris
Jared Harris plays a man the original trilogy shows mostly as a recording, whose image appears in the Time Vault at each crisis to explain what just happened.
Q 15Which 1941 Asimov story did a Science Fiction Writers of America poll vote the best science fiction short story?
Nightfall
Nightfall grew from Campbell doubting an Emerson line that people would adore the stars if they appeared one night in a thousand years.
Q 16Which 1956 story about entropy did Asimov name as his personal favourite?
The Last Question
The Last Question was so often recalled by fans who had forgotten its title that Asimov learned to recognise it, once naming it before a fan described it.
Q 17What is the name of the giant computer that appears in several of Isaac Asimov's stories?
Multivac
Multivac, in the story Franchise, replaces a national election by picking one voter whose choices it judges representative of the whole country.
Q 18In Asimov's robot stories, what job does Susan Calvin hold at US Robots and Mechanical Men?
Chief robopsychologist
Chief robopsychologist Susan Calvin shuts down the mind-reading robot in Liar! by showing it that its kindly lies hurt people too, trapping it in a conflict.
Q 19What did Asimov call the public's fear of robots?
The Frankenstein complex
The Frankenstein complex was the fear Asimov said his Three Laws were invented to answer, so his robots could be built as safe machines.
Q 20Which star plays Del Spooner, a Chicago detective who distrusts robots, in the 2004 film I, Robot?
Will Smith
Will Smith's detective came from Hardwired, a murder-mystery script by Jeff Vintar with no Asimov link, which the studio reworked after buying the I, Robot title.
The Bicentennial Man ends with Andrew having himself made mortal, and he is declared human on his 200th birthday as he dies.
Q 24Asimov's novelisation of which 1966 film reached shops before the movie itself?
Fantastic Voyage
Fantastic Voyage's script struck Asimov as full of plot holes, so he won permission to rework its shaky science his own way.
Q 25Under what pen name did Asimov write the Lucky Starr juvenile novels?
Paul French
Paul French kept Asimov's name off books meant to launch a TV series, because he feared television would turn them into something awful.
Q 26In Pebble in the Sky, what happens to Earth's people at 60?
Execution
Execution awaits them at 60 under a custom called the Sixty, bad news for the time-lost hero Joseph Schwartz, who is already 62.
Q 27Asimov's first sold story, Marooned Off Vesta, went to which magazine in 1938?
Amazing Stories
Amazing Stories bought it in October 1938, after Astounding's editor John W. Campbell had turned down Asimov's first few stories.
Q 28With Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, Asimov was grouped as one of science fiction's what?
Big Three
Big Three was the label for Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke, the writers credited with carrying science fiction into its mid-20th-century golden age.
Q 29Where was the Clarke–Asimov Treaty on who was the best SF writer negotiated?
In a New York taxi
In a New York taxi, Clarke and Asimov agreed each was best in his own field, so Clarke dedicated a book to the second-best science-fiction writer.
Q 30During World War II Asimov worked as a civilian chemist at which naval facility?
Philadelphia Navy Yard
Philadelphia Navy Yard work paused his Columbia PhD, which he finished in 1948, and put him beside fellow writers Robert Heinlein and L. Sprague de Camp.