How would you describe Ray Bradbury's writing style?

Ray Bradbury was a writer who worked primarily within the genres of science fiction and fantasy. He was a master of the short story format. Indeed, it should also be noted that one of his most notable books, The Martian Chronicles, was in fact a fix-up, by which previously published short stories were combined to form a singular narrative. Longer works include Something Wicked This Way Comes and Fahrenheit 451, but even these books are not particularly lengthy—not in the way that, for example, The Lord of the Rings, or many modern works of fantasy and science fiction often tend to be.

Stylistically, Bradbury favored a very imagery intensive, highly descriptive style of prose, rich with metaphor and poetic language. Consider the first paragraphs which open "Rocket Summer," the first chapter of The Martian Chronicles:

"One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof, children skiing on slopes, housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets.

And then a long wave of warmth crossed the small town. A flooding sea of hot air; it seemed as if someone had left a bakery door open. The heat pulsed among the cottages and bushes and children. The icicles dropped, shattering, to melt. The doors flew open. The windows flew up. The children worked off their wool clothes. The housewives shed their bear disguises. The snow dissolved and showed last summer's ancient green lawns."

Bradbury had a gift for painting pictures with words, for drawing metaphor and imagery together to create striking vistas. This is probably his most notable quality as a writer—his extremely lush and sensory approach to prose.

Thematically Bradbury's fiction tended to focus a great deal on the human condition. His stories were primarily about people (indeed, you will often find very little in the way of technological or scientific explanation). From this perspective, his science fiction is very much in line with what is commonly referred to as soft science fiction. Additionally, he also tended to reflect quite a lot on themes relevant to then contemporary American culture, and to the Cold War. Take Fahrenheit 451, for example, with its commentary on conformity and pop culture, along with its concerns of nuclear annihilation.

Bradbury's writing style is lyrical and descriptive. Lyrical writing touches our emotions. Descriptive writing uses imagery. Imagery makes a scene come alive by using the five senses of sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell.

Bradbury writes poetically, using many metaphors and similes. We tend to read him as much for the richly sensory language he uses as for the stories he tells. In "All Summer in a Day," for example, Bradbury doesn't just tell us what the main character, Margot, looks like; he compares her to a faded photo and a ghost so as to show how much the ceaseless rain has sapped her spirit:

She was a very frail girl who looked as if she had been lost in the rain for years and the rain had washed out the blue from her eyes and the red from her mouth and the yellow from her hair. She was an old photograph dusted from an album, whitened away, and if she spoke at all her voice would be a ghost.

In the same story, Bradury doesn't merely say that the children long to see the sun, nor does he use ordinary language to describe it, such as calling it a yellow ball in the sky. He compares it many different items: Margot, for example, likens it to a penny, a fire in a stove, a yellow crayon, and a "coin large enough to buy the world with." The blue sky, when the sun comes out, is compared to a "blazing blue tile." These are all comparisons a child would make, and yet they are fresh and vivid. Such descriptive language is Bradbury's signature style.