Q 01/05

What finally kills the Martian invaders in The War of the Worlds after every human weapon has failed?

A) Seawater

B) Starvation

C) Bacteria

D) Sunlight

Answer · why

C) Bacteria

Bacteria finish the Martians because their own world has none, so they arrive with no defence against earthly disease. The narrator finds them lying d...

Q 02/05

Which 23-year-old director's 1938 radio play of The War of the Worlds convinced some listeners Martians had landed?

A) Orson Welles

B) John Houseman

C) Cecil B. DeMille

D) Alfred Hitchcock

Answer · why

A) Orson Welles

Orson Welles apologised at a hastily called press conference the next morning, and no punitive action followed. The publicity brought him to national ...

Q 03/05

Which American magazine, later a women's fashion title, serialised The War of the Worlds in 1897?

A) Harper's Bazaar

B) Cosmopolitan

C) Vanity Fair

D) McCall's

Answer · why

B) Cosmopolitan

Cosmopolitan was a general literary monthly when it ran the Martian invasion, decades before it turned into a women's magazine. British readers follow...

Q 04/05

Which American inventor leads Earth's counter-attack on Mars in an unauthorised 1898 sequel to The War of the Worlds?

A) Nikola Tesla

B) Alexander Graham Bell

C) George Westinghouse

D) Thomas Edison

Answer · why

D) Thomas Edison

Thomas Edison is the hero of Edison's Conquest of Mars, a Boston Post serial by astronomer Garrett Serviss. It sends the inventor to fight the Martian...

Q 05/05

Which basic human invention is entirely absent from the Martians' machines in The War of the Worlds?

A) The wheel

B) The lever

C) The screw

D) The mirror

Answer · why

A) The wheel

The wheel appears nowhere in anything the Martians bring to Earth, which the narrator finds astonishing. Their machines run on sliding parts and a kin...