Quiz Answer Key and Fun Facts
1. In the "Argonautica" (3rd century BC), Apollonius of Rhodes dramatizes the Greek mythological giant Talos. The giant throws boulders at the Argonauts from the top of a cliff near Crete as they attempt to land. Created by Hephaestus, from what metal was this automaton forged?
2. In 1868, Edward S. Ellis wrote "The Steam Man of the Prairies." The story involves a teenaged boy in the wilderness who builds a steam-powered automaton to pull his carriage. What form of fiction, which was cheap and popular at the time, was Ellis's work?
3. A character created by L. Frank Baum in his "Oz" series, which automaton was whipped by the evil king that owned it, but since it couldn't feel pain, the whipping only kept its copper body polished?
4. The term "robot" was first used by writer Karel Čapek in his 1920 play titled "RUR" (translated into English as "Rossum's Universal Robots"). In which language was the play originally written?
5. Which titan of science fiction popularized the use of robots in that genre, even going so far as to create the Three Laws of Robotics in his 1942 short story "Runaround" and included in his novel "I, Robot" (1950)?
6. With a "four-inch hollow steel needle" projecting from its snout and its "softly illuminated kennel back in a dark corner of the firehouse," the Mechanical Hound is an enforcer of conformity in which 1953 novel?
7. The science fiction novel "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968) features the artificial intelligence unit HAL 9000, which kills the majority of the crew aboard the ship Discovery. Which British author and futurist penned this book?
8. A quiet town in Connecticut features a group of wives that are unusually subservient to their husbands, and protagonist Joanna Eberhart tries to find out exactly how these women--and her friends--have become so pliant. She eventually discovers that the women have been replaced by robots with a similar appearance. What 1972 novel is this?
9. Roger Zelazny's "Home is the Hangman" (1975) won the Hugo Award for Best Novella. It depicts a robot returning to Earth and committing which crime?
10. Robots, automata, and other forms of artificial intelligence are popular in science fiction because they often offer us a vision of humanity that is removed from ourselves. Which of these science fiction novels contains the following quote?
"Trout's leading robot looked like a human being, and could talk and dance and so on, and go out with girls. And nobody held it against him that he dropped jellied gasoline on people. But they found his halitosis unforgivable. But then he cleared that up, and he was welcomed to the human race."
Source: Author
trident
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looney_tunes before going online.
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