The perceptive critic Peter Nicholls, writing in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia (Doubleday, 1979), is reluctant to place Bradbury's work in the science fiction genre. On the contrary, he finds Bradbury's themes "traditionally American" and says that Bradbury's choosing "to render them [his themes] on several important occasions in sf [science fiction] imagery does not make RB [Ray Bradbury] a sf writer, even though his early years were devoted to the form." Nicholls concludes that Bradbury is, in fact, a "whimsical fantasist in an older tradition."
Humanist Gilbert Highet, in his "Introduction" to The Vintage Bradbury (Vintage, 1965), agrees with Nicholls. He finds Bradbury to have such illustrious European predecessors as Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (1840–1889), E.T.A. Hoffman (1776–1822), H.G. Wells (1866–1946), and (Joseph) Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936). Early American fantasists include Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849), Ambrose Bierce (1842–1914), H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937), and Charles G. Finney (1905–1984). In fact, Finney's Circus of Dr. Lao (1935) was a major influence on Bradbury's works. Note, too, that the only science fiction writers whom Bradbury consistently mentions are those whom he considers his "teachers' — Leigh Brackett and Henry Kuttner.
