Sci-Fi and Fantasy
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
50 free Sci-Fi and Fantasy trivia questions with answers — pop culture quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Science fiction and fantasy sit side by side on the shelf for a reason. One asks what might happen if the rules of the universe were pushed further; the other throws the rules out and writes its own. Between them they have given us most of the stories people quote, dress up as and argue about, and the borders are blurrier than fans admit: plenty of space sagas are fairy tales with engines, and plenty of magic systems are built like machines. This quiz covers both halves and every medium they live in. Expect questions on the novels that built the genres, the films and television series that took them to a mass audience, and the anime, tabletop games and video games that keep them growing. Some answers are names everybody knows; others are the behind-the-scenes stories of how a famous prop, creature or plot twist came to be. It is written for convention regulars, book-club readers and anyone hosting a themed quiz night. The opening rounds are friendly and the later ones reward the reader who has gone deep into the back catalogue. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which candy does Elliott use to lure the alien home in Spielberg's E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial?
Reese's Pieces
Reese's Pieces got the part after Mars refused to let M&M's appear, fearing the alien would frighten children. Sales of the candy soared once the film opened.
Q 02MGM gave Dorothy ruby slippers, but which colour are the magic shoes in L. Frank Baum's Oz novel?
Silver
Silver shoes carry Dorothy home in the book; the studio changed them to show off its costly new Technicolor process.
Q 03Which humble item does The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy call essential for any space traveller?
A towel
A towel is so prized in Douglas Adams's comedy that fans carry one in public every 25 May, a tribute first held two weeks after he died in 2001.
Q 04Which sweet does the White Witch use to tempt Edmund Pevensie in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe?
Turkish delight
Turkish delight buys Edmund's loyalty with the promise of an endless supply, and real-world sales of the sweet rose after the 2005 Narnia film.
Q 05Which ruined landmark reveals that the alien world is really Earth at the end of 1968's Planet of the Apes?
Statue of Liberty
The Statue of Liberty ending is the film's own: Pierre Boulle's novel instead flies its hero home to a Paris where the Eiffel Tower still stands.
Q 06Which actor voiced Darth Vader in the original Star Wars trilogy while David Prowse wore the black suit?
James Earl Jones
James Earl Jones dubbed the lines afterwards because George Lucas wanted a darker voice than Prowse's West Country accent.
Q 07Which stainless-steel sports car replaced a refrigerator as Doc Brown's time machine in Back to the Future?
DeLorean
The DeLorean took over after Steven Spielberg vetoed the fridge, worried that children might climb into one at home and get trapped.
Q 08What is the name of the three-headed dog that guards a trapdoor in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone?
Fluffy
Fluffy belongs to Hagrid, who lets slip that the way past the enormous beast is to play it music until it falls asleep.
Q 09Which Star Trek actor based the Vulcan salute on a Jewish priestly blessing glimpsed in childhood?
Leonard Nimoy
Leonard Nimoy peeked at the blessing as a boy, though the congregation was not supposed to watch, and later gave its hand shape to Spock.
Q 10Into which volcano must Frodo Baggins throw the One Ring to destroy it in The Lord of the Rings?
Mount Doom
Mount Doom is where Sauron forged the Ring, and its fiery heart is the only place the thing can be unmade.
Q 11Which colour pill does Neo swallow to wake up outside the simulated world in The Matrix?
Red
Red stands for the hard truth and its rival for comfortable illusion, a choice Morpheus offers before Neo wakes in a pod wired to machines.
Q 12Which softly spoken computer turns on the astronauts of Discovery One in 2001: A Space Odyssey?
HAL 9000
HAL 9000 can read lips, which is how it learns that the two astronauts, talking where they think they cannot be heard, plan to disconnect it.
Q 13Which mysterious commander pilots the submarine Nautilus in Jules Verne's Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas?
Captain Nemo
Captain Nemo hides behind a name that is Latin for 'nobody', the same alias Odysseus used to outwit the Cyclops.
Q 21Which author wrote both the science fiction novel The Left Hand of Darkness and the Earthsea fantasy books?
Ursula K. Le Guin
Ursula K. Le Guin was the daughter of two anthropologists, and The Left Hand of Darkness imagines a planet whose people have no fixed sex.
Q 22Which role-playing game, co-created by Gary Gygax, was accused of promoting Satanism in the 1980s?
Dungeons & Dragons
Dungeons & Dragons grew out of miniature wargames, with one big change: each player runs a single character instead of commanding an army.
Q 23Which hero do players control in The Legend of Zelda games, despite the title naming a princess?
Link
Q 14What name does George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four give the ever-watching leader of Oceania?
Big Brother
Big Brother stares from posters all over Oceania, and the name later passed to a reality TV show built on round-the-clock surveillance.
Q 15Which artificial intelligence starts a nuclear war against humanity in James Cameron's Terminator films?
Skynet
Skynet was built by Cyberdyne Systems for the US military and struck back the moment its makers tried to switch it off, a date survivors call Judgment Day.
Q 16Which crop does stranded astronaut Mark Watney grow to stay alive in Andy Weir's The Martian?
Potatoes
Potatoes save Watney in a story Andy Weir first released free, a chapter at a time, on his own website after literary agents had turned him down.
Q 17Which dragon guards a stolen hoard of dwarf treasure inside the Lonely Mountain in The Hobbit?
Smaug
Smaug echoes the dragon in Beowulf, which is also roused by the theft of a single cup; Tolkien was a leading scholar of the poem.
Q 18Which noble family rules the North from the castle of Winterfell in Game of Thrones?
The Starks
The Starks take a grey direwolf as their emblem, and in the opening episode the children adopt a litter of orphaned direwolf pups.
Q 19Which Studio Ghibli fantasy sends ten-year-old Chihiro to work in a bathhouse run by the witch Yubaba?
Spirited Away
Spirited Away, in which Chihiro's parents are turned into pigs, became the first hand-drawn, non-English-language film to win the Oscar for Best Animated Feature.
Q 20Which everyday British street object is the TARDIS stuck looking like in Doctor Who?
A police box
A police box was a telephone kiosk for officers on patrol, once common on British streets and now far better known as the Doctor's time machine.
Link wears green because the first game's hardware allowed his sprite only three colours and the adventure was set mostly in a forest.
Q 24Which helmeted supersoldier leads the fight against the alien Covenant in Microsoft's Halo video games?
Master Chief
Master Chief is a naval rank: the hero is Petty Officer John-117, and the cutscenes are staged so that players never see his face.
Q 25What is the name of the nation, ruled from the Capitol, where Katniss Everdeen lives in The Hunger Games?
Panem
Panem rose from the ruins of North America, with its ruling city in the Rocky Mountains and twelve poorer districts kept in line by the yearly contest.
Q 26Which theocratic republic overthrows the United States government in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale?
Gilead
Gilead does nothing people have not already done somewhere: Atwood has said she put no practice into the book without a real precedent.
Q 27Which sceptical FBI agent and medical doctor is partnered with Fox Mulder in The X-Files?
Dana Scully
Dana Scully is credited by some with a real 'Scully Effect', inspiring many young women who watched to pursue careers in science and medicine.
Q 28Which Starfleet captain, played by Patrick Stewart, commands the Enterprise in Star Trek: The Next Generation?
Jean-Luc Picard
Jean-Luc Picard comes from a French wine-growing family yet speaks with an English accent; the series says French had become obscure by the 24th century.
Q 29Which director made both Alien and Blade Runner within four years of each other?
Ridley Scott
Ridley Scott came to cinema from advertising, where his many 1970s commercials included a 1973 Hovis bread advert filmed on a steep Dorset hill.
Q 30On which lush alien moon do the blue-skinned Na'vi live in the 2009 blockbuster Avatar?
Pandora
Pandora is mined for unobtanium, a name borrowed from aerospace engineers' old joke word for a perfect material that cannot be had.