Pioneering Science Fiction Writer Ray Bradbury Dies

When Ray Bradbury was 12, he saw a carnival magician who called himself Mr. Electrico. After the performance, Mr. Electrico touched the young Bradbury with his sword and commanded, “Live forever!”

“I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard,” Bradbury later said. “I started writing every day. I never stopped.” In a career that spanned more than seven decades, Bradbury’s imagination fueled hundreds of short stories and almost 50 books, as well as poems, essays, operas, plays and screenplays. He died June 5 in Los Angeles at age 91.

Influenced by H.G. Wells and Jules Verne, Bradbury is often credited with raising science fiction from a type of fiction for children and fantasists to a respected literary genre with books like The Martian Chronicles and The Golden Apples of the Sun.

“Stuff your eyes with wonder,” he wrote, “live as if you'd drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It's more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories.”

His most famous work, the 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, imagined a future society where books were outlawed. Its protagonist, Guy Montag, is a firefighter whose duties include incinerating illegal books. Bradbury was quick to point out that the society he describes in Fahrenheit 451 is able to ban books because people have been distracted from reading by newer, more easily digested media. “You don't have to burn books to destroy a culture,” Bradbury said. “Just get people to stop reading them.”