Looking For a Good Book

Just in time for the holidays comes this great stocking-stuffer for that know-it-all geek in your life (if you can’t think who that would be, it’s probably you).

The Science Fiction and Fantasy Quiz Book is just that.  A book full of trivia in the form of quiz’s.  There are no frills to this book; no essays on topics covered.  There are a few scattered black and white drawings of sci-fi/fantasy figures, though nothing obvious (no trademark infringements here!).  The drawings are fine – not outstanding but not cheesy amateur work, either.  The purpose of this book is not to entertain or enlighten, but to test your knowledge on all things sci-fi/fantasy.

But I think it might almost work better to call it the The Geek’s Quiz Book, because the book covers literature, film, television, radio, comics, and video games.  I guess the modern fantasy/Sci-Fi fan needs to be much more well-rounded than those of us from a different age.

I went through all the questions in the book and found that I did, not surprisingly, quite well with the questions pertaining to authors and books.  I did moderately well with film, television, and radio questions, and really really poorly with anything having to do with anime or video games.

The quizzes are broken down to three different segments, Easy, Medium, and Hard.  Each quiz appears to be about ten questions in length and they are in a variety of formats: multiple choice, true or false, short answer, and match-up.  For the most part, I thought author Joseph McCullough did a fine job of placing the questions in the right categories (easy, medium, hard), though I did highlight two questions (“In what city would you find Arkham Asylum?” and “What famous puppeteer animated and provided the voice for Yoda in The Empire Strikes Back?”).  Both of these are listed in the “hard” category, which I question.  Given that these are written for sci-fi fans, these seem pretty easy.  But two questions out of 104 quizzes seems like a pretty good record.

I can imagine that it’s difficult to put together a quiz book like this, to get the right amount of variety to really test the modern fan.  Although I wasn’t interested in anything to do with a few subjects, I understand their place in the book.  I did, though, think for a while that there were too many questions regarding The Lord of the Rings books and films (particularly, I think, in the Easy and Medium sections).  I’m certainly not opposed to these, I just thought we could do with fewer of these in order to have a better variety.

This isn’t the sort of book you would typically buy for yourself, but it would make a great gift for anyone who thinks that they know a lot of sci-fi trivia.

Looking for a good book?  The Science Fiction and Fantasy Quiz Book is a nice assortment of trivia to test your knowledge of modern science fiction and fantasy and would make a terrific gift.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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The Science Fiction and Fantasy Quiz Book

author: James McCullough

publisher: Osprey Publishing

ISBN: 147281083X

hardcover, 192 pages