Visionary writer anticipated, influenced modern world
Ray Bradbury’s far- seeing and prolific work included Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles
LOS ANGELES — Ray Bradbury, the science fiction- fantasy master who transformed his childhood dreams and Cold War fears into telepathic Martians, lovesick sea monsters and, in uncanny detail, the high- tech, book- burning future of Fahrenheit 451, has died. He was 91.
He died Tuesday night, his daughter Alexandra Bradbury said Wednesday.
Although slowed in recent years by a stroke that meant he had to use a wheelchair, Bradbury remained active into his 90s, turning out new novels, plays, screenplays and a volume of poetry. He wrote every day in the basement office of his home and appeared from time to time at bookstores, public library fundraisers and other literary events around Los Angeles.
His writings ranged from horror and mystery to humour and sympathetic stories about the Irish, blacks and Mexican- Americans. Bradbury also scripted John Huston’s 1956 film version of Moby Dick and wrote for The Twilight Zone and other television programs, including The Ray Bradbury Theater, for which he adapted dozens of his works.
“What I have always been is a hybrid author,” Bradbury said in 2009. “I am completely in love with movies, and I am completely in love with theatre, and I am completely in love with libraries.”
Bradbury broke through in 1950 with The Martian Chronicles, a series of intertwined stories that satirized capitalism, racism and superpower tensions as it portrayed Earth colonizers destroying an idyllic Martian civilization.
Like Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End and the Robert Wise film The Day the Earth Stood Still, Bradbury’s book was a Cold War morality tale in which imagined lives on other planets serve as commentary on human behaviour on Earth. The Martian Chronicles has been published in more than 30 languages, was made into a TV miniseries and inspired a computer game.
The Martian Chronicles prophesied the banning of books, especially works of fantasy, a theme Bradbury would take on fully in the 1953 release, Fahrenheit 451. Inspired by the Cold War, the rise of television and the author’s passion for libraries, it was an apocalyptic narrative of nuclear war abroad and empty pleasure at home, with firefighters assigned to burn books instead of putting blazes out ( 451 degrees Fahrenheit, Bradbury had been told, was the temperature at which texts went up in flames).
It was Bradbury’s only true sciencefiction work, according to the author, who said all his other works should have been classified as fantasy. “It was a book based on real facts and also on my hatred for people who burn books,” he told The Associated Press in 2002.
A futuristic classic often taught alongside George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Bradbury’s novel anticipated iPods, interactive television, electronic surveillance and live, sensational media events, including televised police pursuits. Francois Truffaut directed a 1966 movie version and the book’s title was referenced — without Bradbury’s permission, the author complained — for Michael Moore’s documentary Fahrenheit 9- 11.
Bradbury’s literary style was honed in pulp magazines and influenced by Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, and he became the rare science- fiction writer treated seriously by the literary world. In 2007, he received a special Pulitzer Prize citation “for his distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy.” Seven years earlier, he received an honorary National Book Award medal for lifetime achievement, an honour also given to Philip Roth and Arthur Miller, among others.
“Everything I’ve done is a surprise, a wonderful surprise,” Bradbury said during his acceptance speech in 2000. “I sometimes get up at night when I can’t sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, ‘ My God, did I write that? Did I write that?’, because it’s still a surprise.”
Born Ray Douglas Bradbury on Aug. 22, 1920, in Waukegan, Ill., the author once described himself as “that special freak, the man with the child inside who remembers all.”
He claimed to have total recall of his life, dating even to his final weeks in his mother’s womb.
His father, Leonard, a power company lineman, was a descendant of Mary Bradbury, who was tried for witchcraft at Salem, Mass. The author’s mother, Esther, read him the Wizard of Oz. His aunt Neva introduced him to Edgar Allan Poe and gave him a love of autumn, with its pumpkin picking and Halloween costumes.
“If I could have chosen my birthday, Halloween would be it,” he said over the years.
Nightmares that plagued him as a boy also stoked his imagination, as did his youthful delight with the Buck Rogers and Tarzan comic strips, early horror films, Tom Swift adventure books and the works of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells.
“The great thing about my life is that everything I’ve done is a result of what I was when I was 12 or 13,” he said in 1982.
Bradbury’s family moved to Los Angeles in 1934. He became a movie buff and a voracious reader. “I never went to college, so I went to the library,” he explained.
He tried to write at least 1,000 words a day, and sold his first story in 1941. He submitted work to pulp magazines until he was finally accepted by such upscale publications as The New Yorker. Bradbury’s first book, a short story collection called Dark Carnival, was published in 1947.
Bradbury is survived by his four daughters. Marguerite Bradbury, his wife of 56 years, died in 2003.