Once Upon a Time Trivia Quiz

Answer: A Christmas Carol

This story is often cited as an early example of time travel literature, since the main character, the miserly businessman Ebenezer Scrooge, was not merely presented with visions of the past and future by visiting ghosts, but was described as travelling with the spectres to and within the periods in question. Even though Scrooge was only able to observe events in those distant times and could not make any form of interaction, his journeys through time were pivotal in making him see the error of his miserly and misanthropic ways.

Answer: Mark Twain

Mark Twain disliked certain romantic ideals of the Middle Ages, such as the glorification of war and the notion of rank and caste - things that he had seen portrayed in the works of Sir Walter Scott, and identified in the collective mindset of the South prior to the Civil War.

This prompted him to write a story which satirised the medieval period, as well as his own. In telling this tale of a contemporary American who suffers a blow to the head and is transported back to King Arthur's Camelot, Twain created one of the seminal works of time travel literature.

His story is also one of the first to feature a protagonist who uses modern knowledge to change events in a past era.

Answer: The Time Traveller

In the 1960 movie version of this story, the inventor was granted the name of H. G. Wells, himself. In the 2002 movie version, the protagonist was Dr. Alexander Hartdegen. In Wells' novella, however, the inventor was simply called the Time Traveller. In this story, an English gentleman uses a time machine of his own making to travel to the year 802,701 AD, where he finds that humans have evolved into two types - one simplistic, idle and peaceful, and the other cunning, industrious and degenerate, with the latter preying upon the former.

Although this work achieved lasting fame, it was not the first story that Wells had written on the subject of time travel. In 1888, he had composed a short story called "The Chronic Argonauts", in which an inventor accused of witchcraft escapes a mob via his time machine.

Answer: 535 AD, Rome

American science fiction author L. Sprague de Camp was inspired by Mark Twain's "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", but wanted to expand upon the ramifications of a modern man travelling back in time. Hence he contrived "Lest Darkness Fall", in which an archaeologist called Martin Padway finds himself transported to 535 AD, during a thunderstorm at the Pantheon in Rome. Using his knowledge of future events and technologies (and a rudimentary grasp of Latin), Padway attempts to prevent the onset of the Dark Ages by introducing innovations which might prop up the ailing Roman Empire.

He also finds that becoming a person of influence in such an era has its perils. This novel is seen as an early example of "alternative history" fiction, where the events of the past are altered so as to create a time line of history quite different to the one we know.

Answer: Grand Tour: Disaster in Time

This movie (which was also released with the title "Timescape") may have fallen short of achieving legendary status, but the original story on which it was based remains a classic. "Vintage Season" was published under the pseudonym "Lawrence O'Donnell", which was used by Catherine L. Moore, a female pioneer of sci-fi literature.

In the novella, visitors from the future are on a "tour" of "vintage seasons" of the past, i.e., extended periods of time where the weather is near-perfect in a particular locale.

They also have a fascination with disasters, and the impending arrival of a meteorite in the US town in which they are staying allows them to kill two birds with one stone, so to speak. The focus of the story, however, is on the experiences of the landlord of their rental house in 1946, who gradually discovers their secret.

This novella earned a place in 1973's "The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume Two: The Greatest Science Fiction Novellas of All Time".

Answer: Tyrannosaurus rex

In "A Sound of Thunder", a company called Time Safari Inc. offers wealthy would-be hunters the chance to go back to any time in the past and hunt an animal of their choosing, as long as it has been determined that the creature is about to die anyway. A tyrannosaur would obviously be one of the most challenging quarries imaginable, but it is something much smaller that causes a huge problem in this particular time travel tale. "A Sound of Thunder" was one of the first stories to emphasise the importance of not changing the past, in case something is altered in the present.

A film adaptation of this story was made in 2005, and a parody of it also appeared in a 1994 episode of "The Simpsons", called "Time and Punishment".

Answer: Isaac Asimov

This novel is considered to be among Isaac Asimov's best work, although his initial shorter version of the tale was rejected by the magazine "Galaxy Science Fiction". The title of the story is a play on words, since Eternity, in this case, is the name of an organisation which attempts to benevolently steer humanity's course by altering past events in such a way as to protect the human race from the worst of its tragedies.

This has unrecognised consequences, however, and when someone is sent back in time to ensure that Eternity itself comes into existence, it becomes apparent that another party has been sent back to ensure that the organisation never comes into being.

Answer: Jesus Christ

The initial premise of this story was driven by one of the more interesting questions that the notion of time travel engenders - namely, if you really could travel back in time, who would you visit? The protagonist of "Behold the Man", Karl Glogauer, finds his expectations unmet when he arrives in Nazareth in the year 28, for the actual son of Mary and Joseph is deformed and retarded. To cut an epic story short, Glogauer himself steps into the role of Jesus, using his knowledge of the Gospel sermons and parables to create the actual following and biography that is later recorded in the Bible.

This controversial story won the 1967 Nebula Award for Best Novella, and was expanded by Moorcock into a full novel in 1969.

Answer: Slaughterhouse-Five

This novel, often rated by critics as one of the top 100 of the 20th century, tells the tale of Billy Pilgrim, an American POW in WWII who survives the firestorm of Dresden in an underground slaughterhouse, only to be abducted by time-travelling aliens later in life.

The fatalistic mentality of these beings, who know their fate in advance, becomes that of the protagonist, as he time-travels and relives all parts of his life (and death) in no particular order. Questions about free-will and the inevitability of war are explored in this book, which is in fact semi-autobiographical, since the author had indeed been a POW in Dresden at the time of the allied bombings in 1945.

Answer: Jack the Ripper

This story provides a twist to standard time-travelling themes, in that a device is used to travel into a future period contemporaneous with the author of the novel. In "Time After time", Jack the Ripper escapes Victorian England by using a time machine that has been built by his unsuspecting acquaintance, the author H. G. Wells.

When Wells discovers the Ripper's identity, he chases after him into San Francisco of 1979, which, to the disappointment of Wells, is not the utopia of the future that he had imagined.

A film adaptation of this novel was made by Alexander's friend Nicholas Meyer, shortly after the book was published, and starred Malcolm McDowell as Wells, and David Warner as the Ripper. Karl Alexander wrote a sequel to this story in 2009, called "Jaclyn the Ripper".

Answer: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

A sequel to "The Hitchhiikers Guide to the Galaxy", this book continues the adventures of Earth holocaust survivor Arthur Dent and his oddball alien companions, as they escape nasty Vogons and seek the Ultimate Answer of Life, the Universe and Everything. Somewhere along the way, they ask to go to the nearest restaurant, and their ship takes them through time (but not far through space) to Milliways, a restaurant which offers a view of the universe coming to its end.

The meals and service are astronomically expensive, but affordable as long as the time-travelling patrons deposit a penny in an account prior to leaving, and let the interest accumulate for billions of years.

In homage to this novel, Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles named its eatery the Cafe at the End of the Universe.

Answer: Tachyons

Author and astrophysicist Gregory Benford won a number of awards, including the 1980 Nebula Award and the 1981 John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel, for this story about a scientist in Earth's future who finds a way to warn a scientist in Earth's past about an impending environmental disaster that the world faces, in the hope that the catastrophe may be averted.

This is done via messages transmitted in Morse Code with tachyons (subatomic particles which in real life are only hypothetical).

These particles can only travel faster than light, and in doing so, they must also travel backwards in time. "Timescape" offers a scientific point of view on a range of conundrums and paradoxes associated with time travel, as well as a warning about ecological issues affecting the planet.

Answer: Plane

"The Langoliers" is one of four novellas in Stephen King's 1990 book "Four Past Midnight". In the story, ten passengers on a flight from Los Angeles to Boston wake up and find themselves to be the only people left on the plane, after it flies through a rip in time.

This tale presents another variation on time travel ideas, where the past is merely a shallow representation of previous times, and is constantly destroyed by "langoliers" - beings that literally eat times past. The novella also inspired a two-part television movie adaptation in 1995, which starred Dean Stockwell and David Morse, among others.

Answer: A circle of standing stones

This novel, published in the UK as "Cross Stitch", was the first in a long-running series, and was awarded the 1992 RITA Award for Best Romance Novel. Whilst it is more a work of historical fiction than a sci-fi story, its entire premise hinges on the transportation of nurse Claire Randall through time via the ancient standing stones of Craigh na Dun in Inverness, Scotland.

After innocently entering the stone circle, the protagonist suddenly finds herself in 1743 in the midst of the Jacobite Risings, where she is suspected of being an English spy (or worse, a witch), and enters into a series of adventures.

The book itself is an epic 850 pages long.

Answer: Nantucket

Having an entire modern town transported back in time is a premise that invites many intriguing possibilities, and S. M. Stirling's "Island in the Sea of Time" makes use of many of them when it describes how the Massachusetts island of Nantucket, along with a US Coast Guard ship, is transported back to the Bronze Age. Culture clashes, technological dilemmas, power struggles, megalomania, and survival in a pre-modern world are some of the themes explored in this novel, which is the first in a trilogy known as the "Nantucket Series".

Its two sequels are "Against the Tide of Years" and "On the Oceans of Eternity", and over the course of these stories, the entire ancient world is transformed through the intervention of the anachronistic newcomers.