With books like Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, sci-fi writer Ray Bradbury made a lasting mark on pop culture by taking readers to strange new worlds. And talk about changing the future: His fantastic, mind-expanding tales also shaped the storytelling of a generation of scribes who came after him.

All of us who were fans of Bradbury mourn his loss, but perhaps none so much as his colleagues in the field of science fiction and fantasy, many of whom saw him and his work as a guiding light, and took a life-long dose of inspiration from him.

As word of Bradbury's death spread Wednesday, Wired contacted some of the greatest authors in sci-fi and fantasy to hear how the legend influenced their own work.

Ray Bradbury, 1920 - 2012:

• How Ray Bradbury Brought the West to Science Fiction

• Ray Bradbury on Sci-Fi, God and Robots: The Late Author's Biggest Ideas

• Remembering Ray Bradbury: A Roundup of Tributes and Memorable Clips

Ursula K. Le Guin, author of A Wizard of Earthsea ————————————————-

My mother and I read and loved The Martian Chronicles in the early '50s, when it was new. It was newer than new, because there'd never been anything quite like it, nor has there been since. SF is so often a control freak's genre, and Ray Bradbury was never under control – his own or anybody else's. He took risks in his writing that could send him over into incoherence and sentimentality or take him straight to beauty, which is always new and always rare. And then with Fahrenheit 451 he gave us the rarest thing of all: a genuine, inescapable Myth for Our Time. His was a courageous heart and a generous soul. May his memory be blessed.

Joe Hill, author of 20th Century Ghosts (and recipient of a Ray Bradbury fellowship) ————————————————————————————

Think about what a shock it must've been the first time moviegoers saw a picture with sound; the first time those giants on the screen opened their mouths and sang. That kind of describes the shock I felt when I first discovered the stories of Ray Bradbury. Everything I read before that was a silent movie. Bradbury provided a vast library of melodies, shouts and sound effects to jolt my timid 11-year-old imagination into full wakefulness and attention. His dreadful merry-go-rounds spun to the vertiginous shriek of the Wurlitzer; his trees whispered bleak secrets in the brisk October breezes; his rockets scaled the skies in a chorus of grinding roars; his children ran through libraries, refusing to be shushed.

Maybe that's all too lyrical. Here it is, more simply: I didn't know, until Bradbury, that a book could make you feel so much. To this day, I cannot think about certain subjects without using Bradbury as a reference point – subjects like Halloween and circuses and sea monsters and the word "wonder" in both noun and verb form.

I met him in San Diego a few years ago. He was being pushed along in a wheelchair, surrounded by people who were in glory to see him, and hear his voice. We were at Comic-Con, marooned among booths selling ray guns and comic books and maps of Martian worlds. Every third person who walked by wore a cape.

"All this," I said, pointing around us, "is your fault." I had to shout to be heard. His hearing wasn't good.

He laughed – it was one hell of a laugh – and nodded and said, "You know, some of it probably is."

He was pleased to be found guilty of inspiring a whole country to imagine more, better, louder, crazier. I got to put a kiss on his shaggy white hair. He didn't seem to mind. Then he was pushed away, at the head of a parade of giddy, euphoric followers. Hey: He led that parade most of his life. I was goddamn glad to be part of it.

Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is beloved by sci-fi fans.

Daniel H. Wilson, author of Robopocalypse —————————————–

Bradbury honed his craft for a long time. By the time I was a kid, the used bookstore that I hit up with my dad every weekend was full of Bradbury's dog-eared masterpieces. His short stories were spread like pearls throughout countless dense anthologies. I never thought of these stories as science fiction. Instead, Bradbury's name reminded me of fireflies on a hot Oklahoma night, or the cold wind that would fall through dead leaves as we ran through the neighborhood on Halloween.

Somehow, he captured the feeling of being a child – the new raw mystery lurking in the seams of what soon becomes the pedestrian background scenery of our lives. As a child, I recognized and dismissed this remarkable authenticity. The way he wrote was simply the way I felt.

Bradbury was not about the shiny gadgets provided to me by the more technically oriented minds of Clarke and Asimov. Instead, it was the emotion and atmosphere of his writing that sank into my psyche and eventually began to resonate. The sweet, haunting futility of our robotic creations after we are gone in "There Will Come Soft Rains." Or the sick, ash-mouthed dread that pervades "The Scythe." As an adult, I came to appreciate Bradbury for holding onto the feel of childhood long after mine had faded. And if I've taken anything away from his work, it's that writing should not be about the gadgets, especially not science fiction.

Jonathan Maberry, author of Rot & Ruin ————————————–

I met Bradbury when I was 14; it was amazing. He took so much time to talk with me and offer advice about writing. That Christmas he gave me a signed copy of Something Wicked This Way Comes. That copy is put away safe, but I buy a new copy every year and read it on Halloween. Bradbury is one of a small group of writers whose books will be read forever.

Mort Castle, co-editor of Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury ————————————————————————————-

For me, the first Bradbury hit came when I was 13 or so and that was Something Wicked This Way Comes, showing me poetic language was not something removed from life and story, something that had to be interpreted according to rules established by a high school teacher and Cliff Note Coercion.

Not long thereafter came the short stories: "I See You Never," with its perfect depiction of regret and inevitability that any Zennist would understand – even without being called a Zennist – and "There Will Come Soft Rains," because, hey, this baby boomer grew up waiting for the A blast.

But perhaps most significant for me as a writer, well ... here is the afterword to "Light," my story in Shadow Show:

I was fourteen or fifteen, reading like the Looney Tunes Tasmanian Devil set loose at the Olde Country Book Buffet, and couldn't help noting that too many artists and writers died young and often not well. Then Ray Bradbury came along on this glutton's word menu and showed me with his "Forever and the Earth" that no, Thomas Wolfe did not have to stay dead – not when we needed him. Years later when the story of Marilyn Monroe seized me – she was "the saddest woman in the world," said her short-term husband Arthur Miller – I set out to give her something a little better than what foolish choices, DNA tics and the Wheel of Cosmic Fortune handed her. This is my third Marilyn story. There will likely be more in the future. Perhaps one day I'll get it completely right. But for now, I'll borrow Mr. Stan Laurel's derby and tip it to his very good friend and advocate Mr. Ray Douglas Bradbury: He showed me the way.

Gordon Van Gelder, editor of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction ———————————————————————-

Ray Bradbury had some of the world's best nightmares and I'm eternally grateful to him for sharing them with us.

He did a lot of other things, too – showed us that dreams of the future are compatible with nostalgia for youth, taught us the poetry of rocketry, and gave us many smiles – but it's the nightmares I value most. Some of them came with the carnival, some lurked in the sea. One of them was just about being locked in a closet.

"I don't try to describe the future," said Ray Bradbury. "I try to prevent it." For me, that one comment defined an entire style of science fiction, an approach that will always be valid as long as we have a future. I'm glad to live in a world where people learned from Bradbury's nightmares.

Robin Hobb, author of The Farseer Trilogy —————————————–

The work of Ray Bradbury that resonated with me the most was Dandelion Wine. The imagery he wrought in that tale comes back to me in the blink of an eye, even though it has been years since I've read it. The new hi-top sneakers, the sound of the push mower, the smells of the cooking.... It's a door to a world that I cherish.

My other favorite is The Martian Chronicles. Each of those stories is like a carefully cut gem, shining in its own individual way, but when they are combined in the one book, they form a whole that is much greater than the sum of its parts.

Most inspiring to me was that Bradbury's writing spans such a broad spectrum. It defies the limits of genre and "literature" to become something that annihilates all boundaries. His books and stories are simply the Bradbury works. Don't try to fence them in; it's just as hopeless to exclude them from any classification.

Fahrenheit 451 was probably Bradbury's most well-known novel.

Elizabeth Bear, author of Range of Ghosts —————————————–

My first conscious memory of reading a Bradbury story is not, as it was for so many, Fahrenheit 451. Instead, it was "All Summer in a Day," a story of life on Venus and the cruelty of children that must have been assigned to us in a grade-school reader. I've written about that story, and I remember being impressed by how thoroughly this grownup understood and could demonstrate the casual cruelty of children and the way they'll gang up on any kid who seems different, who doesn't fit in.

It remains my favorite Bradbury to this day, although rereading it as an adult what I see in it is the craftsmanship, the terrible pellucid language, the way Bradbury takes a tiny domestic dilemma set on a fantastical Venus and forges it into a commentary on human nature and the eternal tension between science and superstition. We hammerers-out of sweeping epics could learn a few tricks from Bradbury's detail work, his precision.

But I'm pretty sure I'd read Bradbury before then – I grew up in an SF-reading household, being a second-generation fan on either side of the family. I was encouraged to read things far beyond my putative grade level, and I know we had paperback copies of The Illustrated Man and The Martian Chronicles. I can't remember ever having not read them. Bradbury's work is part of the Zeitgeist.

And that is the thing that strikes me most about Bradbury. More than any other science fiction writer – by his craft, his humaneness, his skill – he's permeated the world we live in with his vision.

Like Shakespeare, Bradbury is quoted by people who have never read his work.

Ray Bradbury was very good at his job.

Kim Stanley Robinson, author of 2312 ————————————

I felt a bond with Ray Bradbury, because we were both born in Waukegan, Illinois, then were moved by our parents to Southern California when we were children. I feel that we both ended up as science fiction writers partly because of this childhood history; southern California has been a science fictional place for a very long time.

Bradbury was one of the first break-out stars from the science fiction community into mainstream American culture, and this was no coincidence but because of his open and welcoming style, and the way his science fiction always focused on the human side of things, adding strong emotions to what had previously been perhaps drier or simpler. He was a great ambassador to the world for science fiction, and was beloved in the science fiction community as well. He was a truly inspirational figure to many, because of his positive nature and his boundless enthusiasm for reading, which he conveyed so well, and for life in general. His fiction always reminds us that no matter what strange future we move into, human emotions will stay central to our story. His best stories and books will be a permanent part of American literature. We were lucky to have him and I'm sorry he's gone.

David Morrell, author of Creepers ———————————

Ray Bradbury is a permanent monument in my imagination. I can't think of another writer who wrote so many fascinating, evocative, meaningful novels. To me, he was a triple master. He not only created stories that extended the boundaries of what I imagined was possible, but he also gave them a hypnotic atmosphere that gripped me as much as his plots. And they were about something. They had meaning and texture and importance. Some writers can do one or two. But not all three. If Bradbury had written only one book, Fahrenheit 451, he would have been a permanent part of our culture. But he wrote so many other wonders. I felt honored to contribute a story to an upcoming anthology, Shadow Show, in celebration of his work. But of course, in celebrating him, no one could equal him. Now the man from the October country has regrettably returned home.

The short story collection A Medicine for Melancholy contains Bradbury's short story 'Dark They Were, And Golden-Eyed.'

Greg Bear, author of Darwin's Radio ———————————–

Ray Bradbury is, for many reasons, the most influential writer in my life. Throughout our long friendship, Ray supplied not only his terrific stories but a grand model of what a writer could be, should be, and yet rarely is: brilliant and charming and accessible, willing to tolerate and to teach, happy to inspire but also to be inspired, happy to share and even re-live a youngster's awkward joy at discovery. We first met in 1967 and immediately began a lifelong correspondence. My friends and I attended so many Bradbury lectures and events in Southern California that he would spot our grinning faces in the audience and tell us, with a wag of his beefy finger, "I'm not changing a word just because you've heard it already!" Throughout my high school years, my classmates and friends were happy to inform our English teachers that we had the straight scoop on one of Ray's stories, direct from the man himself. I wonder if they actually believed us!

In 1969, Ray took three of us and my Grandmother, who drove (Ray did not drive and we had neither car nor license), out to lunch in Beverly Hills – hamburgers and shakes at Frascati. There, he told us about eating his first steak in Mexico. He was in his mid-twenties, very poor – and from that cross-border odyssey, neither entirely happy nor sane, came so many stories, including "The Life Work of Juan Diaz," where he tried to exorcize the horror of descending into the catacombs of Guanajuato. He concluded our memorable meal by telling us, "When you're rich, you can take me out to lunch!" And so we did – but before we were rich.

In 1970, we invited Ray to be our guest at the first Comic-Con in San Diego, and the fact that he agreed (along with Jack Kirby and a select group of other luminaries) made all of us, the fledgling committee, believe we were creating something real and glorious. He attended every single Comic-Con until just a couple of years ago, when his health would no longer permit it, and drew huge crowds for his talks and interviews.

From the beginning, Ray enthusiastically supported my artwork and writing. As I sold more stories, and finally bundled them into collections, I would deliver freshly printed books to him and he would cry out, "Wonderful! Wonderful!" and encourage me to do more. He never treated me as anything other than a colleague – and for us, he was always that amazing, miraculous kid we got to hang out with. You know, the kid who told his readers they could send him letters care of Life magazine, or spin stories of hanging out with Walt Disney, or of having Ray Harryhausen as the best man at his wedding.

Ray expressed his admiration for Nikos Kazantzakis and his "The Saviors of God: Spiritual Exercises." Later, I relayed Ray's enthusiasm for Kazantzakis to the translator, Kimon Friar, and helped them exchange addresses. When Ray produced his own play of "Leviathan 99" at the old MGM studios in LA, I posted fliers at my college, went to LA, met him after the performance – and commiserated when it folded a week later, leaving him tens of thousands of dollars in the hole. I still have a few of those fliers – and his letter announcing he was back to another round of lectures to pay it all off. He dearly loved theater, and to this day, his plays are performed in Los Angeles and around the world.

It was my privilege to arrange for the Science Fiction Writers of America to present Ray with his Grand Master Nebula in 1989. Nowhere near full payback.

>"Ray was storyteller, showman and alchemist – a master who remixed his own life and made it the stuff of legend."

So I spent a lot of fine times with the man. But behind it all was the genuine love I have for Ray's fiction. To this day, I can't begin a Bradbury story without feeling his immediate presence, his amazing ability to make me nostalgic for a place I've never been, or recognize an emotion or a connection I may not have experienced. Ray was storyteller, showman and alchemist – a master who remixed his own life and made it the stuff of legend, the core within much of the myth of The Twilight Zone and modern American fantasy in general.

For our last visit, just a couple of months ago, my wife and I drove out to the Bradbury family home in the Cheviot Hills of Los Angeles, as we had so many times before. Ray was bedridden, but sitting up, receiving visitors, cheerful, as always, it seems now – and we spent a good hour talking about movies, about work, about new books and writing. As always. I noticed a hefty volume of the collected Buck Rogers newspaper strips, left on the floor by staff or family or previous visitors, and held it for Ray to see – "You did the intro for this, Ray!" "I did?" "Here's your name. A great intro." "Read it to me!" Ray could no longer read much, and friends would come by to read to him...

But I'm drifting again into that awkward tense. This story has to end.

And so here's my ending, and it's all true: I read aloud to Ray his own words, the story of his first love for science fiction, the wonder and joy of discovering Buck Rogers at age 10. One of his literary sons sits by his bedside, reading that fine introduction, and then lifts up, brings close to his pale, difficult eyes, the first page of 1920s-era strips, and Ray is suddenly 10 years old, he's Ray Douglas Bradbury, starting all over, and he beams and cries, "Wonderful! Wonderful! It's all still wonderful!"

And it is.

R. A. Salvatore, author of Charon's Claw —————————————-

The beauty of Ray Bradbury is that you can't classify him as a science-fiction writer or a fantasy writer or any other (insert genre here) writer. Leave out the qualifier, please, unless that adjective is "brilliant." So brilliant that he could subtly terrify a reader with softly apocalyptic views of the future, or stun a reader with shocking twists ("The Small Assassin," a truly devilish short story). Few other writers of the last century could stand beside him; when he showed up at San Diego for Comic-Con a few years ago, his name was whispered with somber reverence throughout the hall. So now he is gone, and the world is diminished. But we still have his work, so much of it, and so good is that work that you can read each piece over and over again and come away with different and profound insights each time.

Rest well, Mr. Bradbury. You're already missed.

Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians ————————————-

Bradbury is one of the few writers who can crush you – casually – with just a title. Something Wicked This Way Comes – I had nightmares about it before I even read it, just seeing its spine on the shelf of my grade-school library was enough. "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed." "The Day It Rained Forever." "The Million Year Picnic." (My adolescence was ruled – as was every nerd's adolescence in the Boston area – by the comic shop of that name in Cambridge, Massachusetts.) Even before you read them those titles open up spaces inside you, where strange things can start happening. And that's before the show even starts.

Bradbury was the writer who broke me out of the child's understanding of science fiction – which is, more or less: I'm getting information about the future! – and made me understand that I was getting information on another axis, from a different dimension entirely, not ahead but underneath. It is not true that you can breathe the air on Mars, the way they do in The Martian Chronicles; I understand that now. What is true, however, is that there are aliens living in our unconscious, and we meet them every day, we can't escape them, whatever planet we're on. Because they are us.

Bradbury was not a soul-mate for me. His home planet was the American Midwest, which to a kid growing up in Massachusetts was as weird a place as Mars. He was also tougher than me: he wrote horror, and I was a wuss. As a child I wasn't ready to face those dark places that Bradbury moved through apparently fearlessly and with impunity. (Like the air on Mars, he found the atmosphere there perfectly breathable.) They freaked me out too much. I was like those astronauts at the end of "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed": I couldn't accept what was right in front of me.

But as I get older and I slowly learn to accept those truths, and I remember and think, yes, Bradbury was right. He warned me about this a long time ago. I should have seen it coming. The Martians were the colonists, all along.

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Other prominent authors posted lengthier articles elsewhere on the web Wednesday, including Neil Gaiman (The Graveyard Book), John Scalzi (Redshirts), Carrie Vaughn (the Kitty Norville series) and David Brin (The Uplift series).