Ray Bradbury is an interesting writer who has unjustly suffered from critical neglect. In a sense he has been the victim of a genre. To consider his work as "science fiction" or "fantasy"--no matter how good--is to damn it, for invariably these modes are dismissed as secondary. Such categories and distinctions fail, however, to describe Bradbury's writing. Not only is it varied, but individual examples are hard to pigeonhole. He is a science fiction writer who knows little about science: in his tales of space and the future the emphasis is less on technology than on the abuser of technology. To Bradbury, science is the forbidden fruit, destroyer of Eden, and continuing mark of man's fall. In like manner, Bradbury is a fantasist whose fantasies are oddly circumscribed: he writes less about strange things happening to people than about strange imaginings of the human mind. Corresponding, then...