Ray Bradbury

While living in Los Angeles, 30-year old writer Ray Bradbury fell in love with science fiction after staring at the cover of the recently published Amazing Stories. It featured a beautiful woman being threatened by a gigantic ant. Later, Buck Rogers and King Kong would become his sources of inspiration. He published some of his stories in several magazines of the time but with little success. It was his full-length novels that later gained him recognition as a science fiction writer.

Bradbury, born in 1920, has lived in Los Angeles since he was 14 years old. He was unable to attend college for financial reasons and was self-taught. Despite his work's futurist tone, Bradbury does not consider himself a science fiction writer. He maintains that Fahrenheit 451, his masterpiece about a future full of censorship, is his only book within this genre. The author of The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles prefers to categorise himself as a fantasy writer.

Bradbury wrote the original Fahrenheit 451 on a borrowed public library typing machine. He later stated that he was not trying to predict the future but to prevent it from happening. As with Fahrenheit 451, many of his books were turned into films, plays, and television series. Among these was The Martian Chronicles, born from a series of stories Bradbury had written separately because his editor did not think they could be sold. Bradbury put them all together to create The Martian Chronicles, for which he was paid a mere $500. His true reward came in time. Bradbury became so popular in the US that they named an asteroid after him and October 2001 was declared ‘Ray Bradbury Month’.