While Ray Bradbury (1920–) is best known as a science-fiction writer, no one genre adequately subsumes all of his work. Bradbury is at once deeply interested in technology and suspicious of its misuse. He has refused to drive a car or to ride in an airplane, yet has written lyrically about space travel, and his stories are full of speculations about the benefits and dangers of machines (Mogen, p. 22). He tends not to share the traditional interest of other science-fiction writers in speculating on how a new technology might physically operate. Instead, Bradbury’s work is often very like a complex and intelligent fairy tale, in which machines, for good or ill, work the magic. While Bradbury’s stories always have some element of the fantastic, this element may just as easily take the form of a pretty young girl as that of some more classically sciencefictional creature, such as a Martian or a computer- run house. His second book of short stories (after Dark Carnival, 1947), The Martian Chronicles, was followed by novels, drama, poetry, and children’s stories. Included in Bradbury’s works (see Dandelion Wine and Fahrenheit 451, also in Literature and Its Times) are poetic reveries on childhood and small-town life, meditations on love, and protests against censorship, along with tales about spacemen on rockets.
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