Science fiction author Ray Bradbury dies

Science fiction and fantasy writer Ray Bradbury, whose dystopian works served as cautionary tales about perilous futures and reflected the anxieties of post-war America, has died at the age of 91.

Bradbury’s publisher HarperCollins confirmed his death on Tuesday in Los Angeles after an unspecified “lengthy illness”, as tributes poured in from fans and family, alike, for a man seen as one of the genre’s greatest authors.

His most-remembered work, Fahrenheit 451, was a Cold War-era work about the evils of censorship and thought control in a totalitarian state. The novel reached a worldwide audience as a film adaptation by Francois Truffaut in 1966.

“The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me,” Bradbury said in 2000.

“The feeling I have every day is very much the same as it was when I was 12,” he said on his 80th birthday.

In all, the award-winning author wrote nearly 600 short stories and 50 books, including The Martian Chronicles about human attempts to colonise Mars and the unintended consequences.

“In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ray Bradbury has inspired generations of readers to dream, think, and create,” HarperCollins said in a statement.

International fame followed the 1950 publication of The Martian Chronicles, a novel assembled from a stack of short stories, praised by critics as a morality tale set in the very near future.

Dual potential

Bradbury was not the first to examine the dual potential for good and bad in science and technology, but he sought out a larger audience.

Before him, science fiction had mostly been published in pulp magazines, aiming for mass-circulation magazines such as Mademoiselle and The Saturday Evening Post.

He helped bring modern science fiction into the literary mainstream.

US school children know Bradbury’s stories, which are found in more than a thousand schoolbook anthologies.

Danny Karapetian, Bradbury’s grandson, told a science fiction blog: “He influenced so many artists, writers, teachers, scientists … .

“His legacy lives on in his monumental body of books, film, television and theatre, but more importantly, in the minds and hearts of anyone who read him, because to read him was to know him”.

More than eight million copies of his books have been sold in 36 languages.

Bradbury also branched out into film, television and theater, with an Academy Award nomination for his 1962 animated film, Icarus Montgolfier Wright, and an Emmy award as a television writer for The Halloween Tree.

He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and an asteroid bears his name: 9766 Bradbury.

Early life

Ray Douglas Bradbury was born August 22, 1920 – an event he claimed to remember – in Waukegan, Illinois, the third son of a telephone lineman and Swedish immigrant Esther Marie Bradbury.

The family moved to Los Angeles, where Bradbury attended Los Angeles High School and joined the drama club with plans to become an actor.

He graduated in 1938, but skipped university in favour of independent study at a local library, reading Leo Tolstoy and Fyodor Dostoyevsky and others, while selling newspapers on the street.

“Don’t worry about things. Don’t push,” he once said.

“Just do your work and you’ll survive. The important thing is to have a ball, to be joyful, to be loving and to be explosive. Out of that comes everything and you grow.”

Bradbury is survived by his four daughters and eight grandchildren.

His wife, Marguerite, predeceased him in 2003, after 57 years of marriage.