Ray Bradbury

At 11 he wanted to be a magician, but a year later his ambition changed when the gift of a toy typewriter began a lifetime of conjuring words. He graduated from high school in 1938 but did not go to college because of lack of funds. He continued to educate himself, however, by spending his nights in the library as he sold newspapers on LA street corners all day. “I read everything in the library,” he said later. “That library educated me, not the college.”

His writing began in earnest with contributions to pulp magazines such as Amazing Stories, Weird Tales and Astounding Science Fiction. His first paid piece, Pendulum, written with Henry Hasse, was published in Super Science Stories in November 1941; he earned $15. By 1943 he began writing full time, graduating to periodicals including Harper’s and The New Yorker.

Bradbury was not accepted for war service because of his poor eyesight, and instead he wrote numerous radio scripts for the Red Cross and the Los Angeles Department of Defence. He made many friends in the film world, including Walt Disney and the genius of special-effects cinema, Ray Harryhausen, who acted as best man when, in 1947, Bradbury married Marguerite Susan McClure. The couple were to have four daughters.

His first collection of short stories, Dark Carnival (1947), contained what Bradbury himself described as “night-sweats and terrors”. The Martian Chronicles, a series of short stories about the conquering and colonisation of Mars despite the efforts of the gentle, telepathic Martians, followed three years later. Bradbury, unlike most SF writers, was not concerned with how the astronauts got to Mars and how they breathed, but with their human reactions to a new world.

A cautionary tale, the book reflected the fear of nuclear war that was prevalent in the 1950s, the issues of racism, censorship and the fear of foreign political powers. Rivalled only by his Fahrenheit 451 (1953) as his most famous work, it was initially ignored, but an enthusiastic review by Christopher Isherwood, whom Bradbury had met in an LA bookstore, helped to establish its reputation as a modern classic.

More than 300 short stories were to follow, published first in magazines and then collected throughout the 1950s and 1960s in books such as The Illustrated Man, The Golden Apples of the Sun and The Machineries of Joy, titles that hint at the mysterious worlds and curious creatures they contain.

Bradbury’s universe was full of allegorical beings: the beautiful soul trapped in the body of a freak, or the demon behind the mask of an innocent child. Among the most memorable of his creations were a sea serpent that mistook the sound of a lighthouse fog horn for the mating cry of a female; a newborn child who avenges itself on its parents for bringing it, unwillingly, into the world; a bone specialist who fillets a man till he is nothing more than a jellyfish; and a robotised house that continues to operate long after the family that lived there have been destroyed in a nuclear explosion. Some of his tales today seem oddly familiar, often because other writers and film-makers have used similar ideas. There is, for instance, the time traveller who goes back to the past and accidentally steps on a butterfly, thereby changing the course of history, or the man who buys his wife a robotic husband, leaving him free to travel and pursue adventure.

Bradbury was always a sunny, affable man but, curiously for someone whose fiction often involved robots and rockets, was fearful of modern technology, refusing to travel in lifts, never learning to drive a car (preferring to pedal his way around Los Angeles on a bicycle) and refusing to fly in an aircraft until he was 62. “I don’t try to describe the future,” he said of his writing, “I try to prevent it.”

His work often contained fearful predictions for the future — such as the book-burning society depicted in his first novel Fahrenheit 451 — and a passionate nostalgia for the safer world of the past. Fahrenheit 451, his favourite work, has often been compared to George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. It portrayed a totalitarian society beset by censorship and anti-intellectualism in which firemen, rather than put out fires, set fire to books — the title refers to the temperature at which paper catches fire. It also anticipated a society dominated by large plasma TV screens and trite interactive programmes.

He wrote the book in the UCLA library stacks on rented typewriters in which he inserted a dime for half an hour’s typing time. Hugh Hefner was so impressed by the manuscript that he serialised it in his new magazine, Playboy. More than 50 years later, Michael Moore used the title for Fahrenheit 9/11, his documentary about the Iraq war, without consulting Bradbury, much to the author’s displeasure.

The American small town of the 1920s provided Bradbury with the setting for many of his stories, including the semi-autobiographical Dandelion Wine (1957), and his haunting American-gothic novel Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), in which a sinister carnival arrives by steam train in the dead of night, bringing evil and darkness into the good, safe world of fictional Green Town, Illinois (the equivalent of Waukegan, his birthplace).

The joy and excitement that he brought to his work reflect an eternal boyishness and go some way to explaining why children have always enjoyed his stories. With his distinctive style he switched into several genres, producing works of horror and dark fantasy, mysteries, poetry, plays, children’s books and film scripts as well as innumerable articles and introductions.

He wrote the screenplay for John Huston’s 1956 film, Moby Dick (Huston, it is said, barely spoke to him because he was so appalled by his aversion to cars and planes) and for his own Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983). Although many of his other books and stories were filmed, only François Truffaut’s Fahrenheit 451 (1966) partially succeeded in translating Bradbury’s unique style of storytelling to the screen.

Among his work, Bradbury’s personal preference was always for his poetry, of which he wrote several volumes, among them When Elephants Last in the Dooryard Bloomed (1973) and The Haunted Computer and the Android Pope (1981).

He lived a quiet, calm life in Los Angeles with his wife, daughters, granddaughters and cats for most of his writing career. Although permanently at work he always found time to handle a huge correspondence with friends and admirers all over the world.

Many writers and film-makers have cited Bradbury as a major influence — among them Stephen King, Steven Spielberg and Lionel Shriver. The latter observed that Bradbury was distinguished by “a joy, a lightness, a wonder, a sense of magic and a childlike celebration of being alive”.

In his old age he was vehemently anti-internet and very much pro-books, appearing in the news for his quest to save American public libraries.

Among the many accolades he received were the Benjamin Franklin Award, the O. Henry Prize and, in 2004, the National Medal of Arts.

When the Apollo 15 astronauts landed on the Moon in 1971 they named a crater Dandelion Crater to honour Bradbury for his book Dandelion Wine.

But probably Bradbury’s greatest achievement was in providing the habitual reader of science-fiction with a taste of literary excellence while, at the same time, opening the minds of a more literate readership to the marvels of a genre that, critically, was all but ignored.

Bradbury’s wife, Marguerite, predeceased him in 2003, and he is survived by his four daughters.

Ray Bradbury, author, was born on August 22, 1920. He died on June 6, 2012, aged 91