David Seed convincingly makes a case for why Ray Bradbury deserves to be one of the subjects in the University of Illinois Press's Modern Masters of Science Fiction series, detailing how this prolific figure inspired several generations of writers and filmmakers. Seed emphasizes Bradbury's importance beyond SF prose, showing that he also wrote SF poetry, horror and detective fiction, and underlining his contributions to cinema via adaptations of his work and his screenwriting activities. Furthermore, Bradbury shaped public perceptions of NASA and the exploration of space via articles in the press, panel discussions, symposia and comments to the broadcast media.

As the title of the first chapter (“Out of the Science Fiction Ghetto”) indicates, the case that Seed makes for Bradbury's significance is trans-generic: he is part of the SF tradition but also at the nexus of a series of literary conversations whose participants include the nineteenth-century writers Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. These are not exclusively North American conversations, and figures from Britain (William Hazlitt, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Aldous Huxley) are identified as influences on Bradbury too. Seed also makes connections with near-contemporary authors such as Sherwood Anderson, Thomas Wolfe and John Steinbeck, attesting to Bradbury's desire to find common ground between SF and the “realist mainstream” (13).

The book is divided into four chapters, the first outlining the broad evolution of Bradbury's career, the major themes and clusters of his work, and his statements on SF. The second chapter explores how Bradbury has written about Mars, the third focusses on his novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and the fourth and final chapter (there is no separate conclusion) brings together the ways in which Bradbury conceived of space exploration. Seed's writing is always lucid and engaging, with the critical mode primarily that of close reading and contextualization, the latter including cultural forces present in US society. One context to which Seed regularly returns is the mores of publication: in which journals were Bradbury's stories published? How did the short pieces relate to each other in book collections? How did the order and inclusion of short stories in the collections change? How did Bradbury revise his writing in later iterations?

Given Seed's adeptness in thinking through Bradbury's relation to film (his literary use of cinematic techniques, his trilogy of novels about Hollywood, his screenwriting, the filmmakers he influenced, the adaptations of his fiction) it would have been interesting if more space could have been devoted to another visual medium, the comic book. As Seed shows, the motif of burning books in Bradbury's work (most famously deployed in Fahrenheit 451 but evident in earlier texts too) was informed by the burning of comic books in 1948, part of an anti-comics movement that reached its climax in the mid-1950s (90). EC – one of the comics companies heavily attacked in the 1950s – had a creatively rewarding relationship with Bradbury. At first EC adapted his stories without permission but, after Bradbury's inquiries, the adaptations continued with official authorization. These comics were republished in two paperback collections: The Autumn People (1965) and Tomorrow Midnight (1966). Artist Wally Wood's rendering of the well-known short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950) stands out as a sympathetic union between Wood's ability to depict intricate machinery and Bradbury's tale of an automated house that continues to function after its human inhabitants are killed. The relationship with EC is not covered in Ray Bradbury and it represents one area in which the intertextual mapping that Seed conducts so well might be extended.

This book will be of interest to a range of readers. For undergraduates encountering Bradbury's work for the first time, Seed's text is accessibly written and takes little knowledge for granted. Scholars already familiar with Bradbury will find the interpretation of texts enjoyable and illuminating. It is a boon for future researchers, not least because of the extensive selected bibliographies listing the writer's output and the surrounding criticism. Seed has drawn out his subject's rich achievements in an intelligent and thorough study that – like Bradbury's work itself – deserves a wide readership.