NEW YORK - Ray Bradbury, a giant of American literature who helped popularize science fiction with works such as The Martian Chronicles , died on Tuesday at age 91, his publisher said on Wednesday. Bradbury published more than 500 works including Fahrenheit 451 , a classic novel about book censorship in a future society, and other favourites such as The Illustrated Man and Something Wicked This Way Comes . "Mr. Bradbury died peacefully, last night, in Los Angeles, after a long illness," said a spokesman for his publisher, HarperCollins. As a science fiction writer, Bradbury said he did not want to predict the future - but sometimes wanted to prevent it. Such was the case with Fahrenheit 451 , a book published in 1953 about a totalitarian, anti-intellectual society where banned books are burned by "firemen." The title refers to the temperature at which paper ignites. The novel, which Bradbury wrote on a rented typewriter at the UCLA library, featured a world that might sound [...]