LOS ANGELES - Ray Bradbury imagined the future, and didn't always like what he saw.
In his books, the science fiction-fantasy master conjured a dark, depressing future where the government used fire departments to burn books in order to hold its people in ignorance and where racial hatred was so pervasive that some people left Earth for other planets.
At the same time, his work, just like the author himself, could also be joyful, whimsical and nostalgic, as when he was describing the magic of a Midwestern summer or the innocence and fearlessness of a boy who befriends a houseful of ghosts.
Bradbury, who died Tuesday at 91, said often that all of his stories, no matter how fantastic or frightening, were meta-phors for everyday life. And they all came from his childhood.
"The great thing about my life is that everything I've done is a result of what I was when I was 12 or 13," he said in 1982.
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For more than 70 years, Bradbury spun tales that appeared in books and magazines, in the movie theater and on the television screen, firing the imaginations of generations of children, college kids and grown-ups across the world. Years later, the sheer volume and quality of his work would surprise even him.
"I sometimes get up at night when I can't sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, 'My God, did I write that? Did I write that?' Because it's still a surprise," he said in 2000.
In many ways, he was always that 12-year-old boy who was inspired to become a writer after a chance meeting with a carnival magician called Mr. Electrico who, to Bradbury's delight, tapped him with his sword and said: "Live forever!"
"I decided that was the greatest idea I had ever heard," Bradbury said later. "I started writing every day. I never stopped."
Many of his stories were fueled by the nightmares he suffered as a child growing up poor in the Midwest during the Great Depression. At the same time, they were tempered by the joy he found upon arriving with his family in glitzy Los Angeles in 1943.
"I am completely in love with movies, and I am completely in love with theater," he said in 2009.
Tributes from actors and other celebrities poured in upon news of his death.
"He was my muse for the better part of my sci-fi career," director Steven Spielberg said in a statement. "He lives on through his legion of fans. In the world of science fiction and fantasy and imagination, he is immortal."
Although he was slowed by a stroke in 1999 that forced him to use a wheelchair, Bradbury kept up socially and professionally.
As he had done for decades, he continued to write every day, trying to produce at least 1,000 words, in the basement of his Los Angeles home.
His writings ranged from horror and mystery to humor and sympathetic stories about the Irish, blacks and Mexican-Americans.
Bradbury also scripted John Huston's 1956 film version of "Moby Dick" and wrote for "The Twilight Zone" and other television programs, including "The Ray Bradbury Theater," for which he adapted dozens of his works.
He rose to literary fame in 1950 with "The Martian Chronicles," a series of intertwined stories that satirized capitalism, racism and superpower tensions as it portrayed Earth colonizers destroying an idyllic Martian civilization.
"The Martian Chronicles," like Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End" and the Robert Wise film "The Day the Earth Stood Still," was a Cold War morality tale in which imagined lives on other planets serve as commentary on human behavior on Earth.
It has been published in more than 30 languages, was made into a TV mini-series and inspired a computer game.
The "Chronicles" also prophesied the banning of books, especially works of fantasy. It was 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.
Bradbury said he had been told that 451 degrees Fahrenheit was the temperature at which texts went up in flames.
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Did you know?
Born in Waukegan, Ill., Ray Bradbury lived in Tucson at two different times when he was young - first when he was 6 and later when he was 12. He attended both Roskruge School and Amphitheater Junior High. "I've always had a very special love for Tucson," he said. "It was while I lived here that I decided where I wanted to go. I've gone there and I've gone beyond."
Over the years, Bradbury made several return visits to Tucson. In 1974, before a state library meeting, he talked of his love for the Tucson Library. He spent lots of time there and confessed that he often "ran amok in the library."
Tales From the Morgue, 2009
