The Martian Chronicles
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50 free The Martian Chronicles trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is less a novel than a string of linked tales about people from Earth arriving on Mars, and about what they do to the place and to each other. Published in 1950, it has outlasted most of the science in it because its real subjects are homesickness, greed, loneliness and wonder. This quiz follows the book from start to finish: the first expeditions and the Martians who meet them, the waves of settlers, the war that calls almost everyone back to Earth, and the few who stay. It also covers how the stories became a book, the writers Bradbury learned from, and the radio, television and stage versions that followed. It suits students reading the book for class, book clubs, and anyone who met these stories years ago and wants to see how much stayed with them. Questions run from famous plot turns to details only devoted readers will catch.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Earth disease, carried to Mars by astronauts, kills almost every Martian in The Martian Chronicles?
Chickenpox
Chickenpox reaches Mars with the first rockets, so the Fourth Expedition lands to find the cities silent and the Martians dead in their homes.
Q 02Which NASA rover's touchdown site on Mars is named Bradbury Landing, after the author of The Martian Chronicles?
Curiosity
Curiosity's touchdown spot got the name on what would have been Ray Bradbury's 92nd birthday, weeks after the author died in June 2012.
Q 03A photograph of shadows burned onto a wall in which city inspired Ray Bradbury's There Will Come Soft Rains?
Hiroshima
Hiroshima's preserved shadows became the story's burnt silhouettes of a family, left on one wall of their automated house.
Q 04Which horror writer's doomed mansion does William Stendahl rebuild on Mars in The Martian Chronicles chapter Usher II?
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe's House of Usher rises again on Mars as a trap for Stendahl's enemies, years after his own 50,000-book library was burned on Earth.
Q 05What business does Sam Parkhill open on Mars in The Martian Chronicles, decorating it with glass from Martian ruins?
A hot dog stand
A hot dog stand is Parkhill's bet on a hundred thousand hungry newcomers, but war breaks out on Earth and the customers never arrive.
Q 06At the end of The Martian Chronicles, what does William Thomas show his sons when he promises them Martians?
Their own reflections
Their own reflections in the water are the answer: with Earth destroyed, the family who fled it have become the Martians.
Q 07Which later Ray Bradbury novel shares the book-burning future described in The Martian Chronicles chapter Usher II?
Fahrenheit 451
Fahrenheit 451 followed in 1953, three years after Usher II imagined a great burning of books and one reader's revenge for his lost library.
Q 08Which hero's 1931 Sunday comic strips did Ray Bradbury say The Martian Chronicles could never have happened without?
Tarzan
Tarzan, drawn by Harold Foster, shared a creator with the John Carter of Mars tales, and the young Bradbury memorized both to retell to anyone who would listen.
Q 09Which Star Trek actor narrated a 1975 record of There Will Come Soft Rains and Usher II from The Martian Chronicles?
Leonard Nimoy
Leonard Nimoy's reading resurfaced in 2015, shortly after his death, set to new music on the concept album Soft Rains.
Q 10Which Hollywood leading man starred as Colonel John Wilder in the 1980 television miniseries of The Martian Chronicles?
Rock Hudson
Rock Hudson headed the three-part adaptation, which was filmed at a studio in England and on location on two islands.
Q 11Which emotion drives Ylla's Martian husband to kill the first astronaut from Earth in The Martian Chronicles?
Jealousy
Jealousy dooms the First Expedition: Ylla has a romantic vision of the astronaut Nathaniel York, so her husband Yll goes out to meet the rocket armed.
Q 12Where do Martians lock up the Second Expedition's crew in The Martian Chronicles?
An insane asylum
An insane asylum seems the right place to Martians who think the visitors are hallucinating; a psychologist kills the crew as incurable, then himself.
Q 13What does Benjamin Driscoll plant across Mars to thicken the thin air in The Martian Chronicles?
Trees
Trees shoot up overnight from Driscoll's seeds, a fully grown forest by morning that later settlers name after him.
Q 21Which John Steinbeck novel's short bridging chapters did Ray Bradbury borrow for The Martian Chronicles?
The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath slips brief scene-setting chapters between its main ones, a device Bradbury first met at nineteen, the year the novel came out.
Q 22Which publisher issued The Martian Chronicles after one of its editors suggested linking Ray Bradbury's Mars stories?
Doubleday
Doubleday editor Walter Bradbury, no relation to the author, paid $750 for the outline of the book.
Q 23Under which title was The Martian Chronicles first published in the United Kingdom, with slightly different contents?
The Silver Locusts
Q 14Along which water-filled features of Ray Bradbury's Mars does the Thomas family boat in The Million-Year Picnic?
Canals
Canals carry the family past six dead Martian cities, and they choose the last one as their new home.
Q 15In The Martian Chronicles chapter The Martian, whose shape does a lonely Martian take to live with the LaFarges?
Their dead son
Their dead son Tom, lost to pneumonia years earlier at fourteen, turns up at the elderly couple's door asking only to stay with them.
Q 16In The Martian Chronicles, what does Captain Wilder discover about the family living with Hathaway on Mars?
They are androids
They are androids, built by Hathaway after his real wife and children died of an unknown disease, and Wilder's crew cannot bring themselves to switch them off.
Q 17How does Walter Gripp first reach Genevieve Selsor in The Martian Chronicles chapter The Silent Towns?
By telephone
By telephone: after dialing numbers across an emptied planet, Gripp reaches Genevieve Selsor at a beauty parlor, then drives a thousand miles to find her.
Q 18What does Genevieve Selsor show Walter Gripp that sends him fleeing across Mars in The Martian Chronicles?
A wedding dress
A wedding dress, offered by a woman who believes they are the last two people on Mars, is enough to make Gripp choose a lifetime alone in another tiny town.
Q 19In The Martian Chronicles, which continent do colonists on Mars learn has been destroyed by an accidental atomic blast?
Australia
Australia vanishes when a weapons stockpile detonates early, and the radio message that follows urges every colonist to return to Earth.
Q 20Which Sherwood Anderson book of linked small-town tales did Ray Bradbury name as his model for The Martian Chronicles?
Winesburg, Ohio
Winesburg, Ohio struck Bradbury at 24, and he told himself he would love to write a book as good but set on Mars.
The Silver Locusts echoes a short chapter about emigrants swarming to Mars, and some British editions swapped Usher II for The Fire Balloons.
Q 24Which Argentine author wrote the foreword to Crónicas Marcianas, the Spanish edition of The Martian Chronicles?
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Luis Borges wrote the prologue for the publisher Minotauro, which launched its whole catalogue with Bradbury's book.
Q 25Which honor came to Ray Bradbury in 2007 as a special citation naming The Martian Chronicles among his masterworks?
Pulitzer Prize
The Pulitzer Prize board called Bradbury a lone voice among his peers in facing what total atomic destruction would mean.
Q 26Which American poet's 1918 anti-war poem gave its title to the Martian Chronicles chapter There Will Come Soft Rains?
Sara Teasdale
Sara Teasdale imagined nature settling into peace, indifferent to mankind's extinction, and in the chapter an empty house reads her poem aloud to nobody.
Q 27Which Romantic poet wrote the poem at the heart of The Martian Chronicles chapter —And the Moon Be Still as Bright?
Lord Byron
Lord Byron sent the poem to a friend in a letter at twenty-nine, and another of his lyrics is sung by spellbound Martians earlier in the book.
Q 28Which Canadian astronaut and former space station commander introduced a 2015 edition of The Martian Chronicles?
Chris Hadfield
Chris Hadfield put the book's staying power down to its beautiful Martian landscapes and the idea that people may one day call Mars home.
Q 29Ray Bradbury argued The Martian Chronicles endures because it is really which kind of story, not science fiction?
Myth
Myth, he argued, outlasts the science and machines that date other stories, which is why even physicists forgive his Mars its breathable air.
Q 30Which American network aired the Martian Chronicles miniseries in January 1980, having commissioned it with the BBC?
NBC
NBC showed it in three episodes running just over four hours in total, and Bradbury himself judged the result dull.