I am quite startled

[pameladean]

I'll put the quiz results behind a cut tag to spare people annoyance. I saw this on pnh's journal first, but several other fannish friends of mine have taken it. I was much startled by how well I did, but I will remark at once that it is quite uncanny how often I had not read the work quoted but had read all three of the alternatives given amongst the multiple choices. I'd have been toast if I'd just had to write down the answers without any prompting.

I also can't help wondering if there are some ringers (i.e., non-existent works) in there, or if there are just some overlapping titles that the quiz-maker chose the lesser-known version of, to be wicked. There's a fair amount of mild wickedness in the choice of the possible answers, and I enjoyed it.

Veteran Reader You have a Geek Lore rating of 75%

If you're not quite as widely or deeply-read as a few, you're still thousands of pages ahead of most. Your grasp of the speculative fiction field is worthy of note. Take a bow.

My test tracked 1 variable How you compared to other people your age and gender: You scored higher than 99% on Geek Lore

Link: The SF/F Opening Lines Test written by winternight2 on Ok Cupid

P.

Comments

[markgritter.livejournal.com]

Very neat quiz. I was lost on quite a few of them (only scored 4); I could usually eliminate one or two possibilities that I knew were wrong.

Still, it said I was 99th percentile as well.

[pameladean]

I found it a great exercise in nostalgia.

If I designed quizzes, I'd go about asking people how they recall books and what sticks with them, and then do a whole series using all their different criteria -- plots, neat ideas, main characters, landscape, prose style (that's really how I got a lot of my answers right when I couldn't actually recall anything else much), and so on.

Luckily, I don't design quizzes.

P.

[scott-lynch.livejournal.com]

There are indeed some completely fictional works in there, as well as a few real works attached to the wrong author...

1300-odd people have taken the test now, and every single one of them, even the people with 0-30%, gets "higher than 99% on geek lore," so it's probable that function is broken. Nothing I adjust within the quiz architecture seems to have any further control over it, grumble.

[darius.livejournal.com]

That's not the only bug -- mine was "higher than 0%" (on a 97% raw score).

Fun quiz anyway, though vexing because I want to go out and find that fictional Vernor Vinge story.

[pameladean]

I am still just boggled at the notion of Harlan Ellison's writing Timescape.

P.

finding that fictional story

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

never read gaiman's sandman (unless you have already succumbed). the library drives me NUTS.

[pameladean]

I wondered about that, since people on my friendslist who scored much higher than I did on the test proper didn't end up with a hundred and fifty percent or something. That's a pity. It's so much better than most quizzes in a lot of ways.

P.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

I did a rotten job, even when things were familiar, but since I remember books in images, not words, I was not surprised.

[pameladean]

I had quite vivid flashbacks to the first section of my Comprehensive Examination for my degree. We were told that it was mostly a warmup exercise and that while it couldn't hurt your grade, it could help it. There they just provided quotations and asked for title, author, and historical context, or as much of that as one could remember. Yikes.

I very seldom recall opening lines per se, though of course some are memorable.

P.

Just call me Ms. Geek

[amyirene-40.livejournal.com]

I did far better then I expected ("Elite Reader: You have a Geek Lore rating of 80%. Sure, fans aren't Slans, but you're definitely something special. Your knowledge of speculative literature has to be pretty damned impressive to achieve this score. Long may you flip those pages!") A lot of the examples mentioned names and places, and those sorts of things I do remember, plus there were the ones like openers for _War of the Worlds_, _Flowers for Algernon_ and _The Stars My Destination_ have been quoted so many times in so many places that I wouldn't have even had to read the books to know which volumes they belonged to.

A pity there isn't an answer key available somewhere - I'd like to know which ones I missed.

Re: Just call me Ms. Geek

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

if you were obsessive like i am, you'd go through the test again and copy salient parts of the quote into google -- i found the right answer for every single question. :)

Re: I am quite startled

[pir-anha.livejournal.com]

i wasn't even gonna take this, since i have very little word-by-word recall of actual things written (or spoken). however, it turned out that what i do have, a well honed sense of gist and an excellent pattern matcher, was quite helpful. if this hadn't been multiple choice i would have done very badly. but since it was, i was almost always able to guess, even if i had not read the book in question.

i had read the short stories though, and the wording from those rang a louder bell.

interesting, to see it so strongly pointed out how much about the book a writer can put into the hook, how much of a sense of the atmosphere.