Author;

Born: August 22, 1920; Died: June 5, 2012.

RAY Bradbury, who has died at the age of 91, was a celebrated American author whose writing encompassed everything from science fiction and mystery to humour.

He transformed his childhood dreams and Cold War fears into telepathic Martians, lovesick sea monsters and his vision of a hi-tech, book-burning future in Fahrenheit 451. He also wrote the 1956 film version of Moby Dick and wrote for The Twilight Zone TV series.

Bradbury's series of stories in The Martian Chronicles was a Cold War morality tale in which events on another planet served as a commentary on life on this planet. It has been published in more than 30 languages.

Although slowed in recent years by a stroke that meant he had to use a wheelchair, Bradbury remained active, turning out new novels, plays, screenplays and a volume of poetry.

He wrote every day and appeared from time to time at book shops, public library fundraisers and other literary events around Los Angeles.

Bradbury broke through in 1950 with The Martian Chronicles, a series of intertwined stories that satirised capitalism, racism and superpower tensions as it portrayed Earth colonisers destroying an idyllic Martian civilisation.

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 mini-series with Rock Hudson and inspired a computer game.

It 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 books went up in flames.

He claimed it was his only true science fiction work, maintinaing all his other works should have been classified as fantasy.

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 – for Michael Moore's documentary Fahrenheit 9-11.

Although involved in many futuristic projects, including the New York World's Fair of 1964 and the Spaceship Earth display at Walt Disney World in Florida, Bradbury was deeply attached to the past. He refused to drive a car or fly, saying that witnessing a fatal traffic accident as a child left a permanent fear of cars. In his younger years, he got around by bicycle or roller skates.

Bradbury's literary style was honed in pulp magazines and influenced by Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, and he became that rarity: a science fiction writer treated seriously by the literary world.

Other honours included an Academy Award nomination for an animated film, Icarus Montgolfier Wright, and an Emmy for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree.

His fame even extended to the moon, where Apollo astronauts named a crater Dandelion Crater, in honour of Dandelion Wine, his coming-of-age novel, and an asteroid was named 9766 Bradbury.

Born Ray Douglas Bradbury in Illinois, 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 was a descendant of Mary Bradbury, who was tried for witchcraft at Salem, Massachusetts. The author's mother Esther read him The Wizard Of Oz. His Aunt Neva introduced him to the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

Nightmares that plagued him as a boy also stocked 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 HG Wells.

Bradbury's family moved to Los Angeles in 1934 and he became a movie buff and a voracious reader. He tried to write at least 1000 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.

He was so poor during those years that he did not have an office or even a telephone. He wrote Fahrenheit 451 at the UCLA library, on typewriters rented for 10 cents for half an hour. He carried a sack full of dimes to the library and completed the book in nine days, at a cost of $9.80.

A dynamic speaker with a booming, distinctive voice, he could be blunt and gruff. But Bradbury was also gregarious and friendly, approachable in public and often generous with his time to readers as well as fellow writers.

In 2009, at a lecture celebrating the first anniversary of a small library in southern California's San Gabriel Valley, Bradbury exhorted his listeners to live their lives as he said he had lived his: "Do what you love and love what you do.

"If someone tells you to do something for money, tell them to go to hell," he shouted to raucous applause.

He is survived by his four daughters. Marguerite Bradbury, his wife of 56 years, died in 2003.