By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Highway’ is from 1950: an early short story by Ray Bradbury (1920-2012). In just a few pages, Bradbury gives us one of his earliest responses to the atom bomb and nuclear Armageddon.
Bradbury is widely recognised as one of the greatest – and most lyrical – science-fiction writers of the twentieth century, although he preferred to describe himself as a ‘fantasy writer’ or simply as a ‘writer’. Although he is known for novels such as the dystopian classic Fahrenheit 451 and the horror novel Something Wicked This Way Comes, much of Ray Bradbury’s best work was in the short-story form.