We all remember our first Ray Bradbury. Mine was “There Will Come Soft Rains,” a story I read in grade school. It begins in standard science-fiction fashion. Set in the once-distant year 2026, it depicts a fully automated domicile providing all of a family’s needs. (Today, a “smart home.”) Except . . . there is no family:

The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.

One of several dozen stories collected in Library of America’s recent two-volume compendium of Bradbury’s works, “There Will Come Soft Rains” is included as part of The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury’s “story cycle” imagining how mankind might colonize the Red Planet. And The Martian Chronicles sits, in one volume of the anthology, alongside some of his other major novel-length works: the dystopian Fahrenheit 451, the horror fantasy Something Wicked This Way Comes, and the nostalgic childhood reverie Dandelion Wine. Another volume contains two short-story anthologies, more loosely connected, The Illustrated Man and The October Country, as well as a hefty sampling of his other stories. These two volumes do not contain all of Bradbury’s work — he wrote more than 400 stories. But, along with some essays by the author and some biographical and bibliographical material supplied by their editor, Bradbury biographer and scholar Jonathan R. Eller, they more than suffice to provide a taste of Bradbury’s work.

Bradbury’s corpus defies easy categorization. It spans genres, but often bears the trappings of science fiction’s golden age: interplanetary voyages, time travel, alien visitations, technological innovations. He had imagination to spare. To take one example: “The Fog Horn,” inspired by roller-coaster detritus left on a beach, conjures a vivid fantasy about an ancient sea creature that mistakes a lighthouse’s call for that of its mate. As the lighthouse attendants hide from the beast, Bradbury somehow brings to life something never experienced by man (so far as we know):

We waited a moment. And then I began to hear it. First a great vacuumed sucking of air, and then the lament, the bewilderment, the loneliness of the great monster, folded over and upon us, above us, so that the sickening reek of its body filled the air, a stone’s thickness away from our cellar.

But his work also shows an understanding of human nature and an appreciation for ordinary life, qualities that distinguish it from the cold gee-whizzery of some of his contemporaries. Such characteristics mark his more fantastical stories. Consider the haunting absence of humans from “There Will Come Soft Rains.” And the eponymous rocket man of the short story that inspired a certain Elton John song, whose response to space travel is not wonder but ceaseless anxiety. As he explains to his son, “when you’re out there you want to be here, and when you’re here you want to be out there.” And Bradbury’s more reality-bound works, such as Dandelion Wine, understand life’s messy glory. In that work, this understanding comes through two boys who also, over the course of a classic summer, grapple with the reality of death. “A couple weeks ago, I found out I was alive,” one of them says. “Boy, did I hop around. And then, just last week, . . . I found out I’d have to die someday.”

Of Bradbury’s many motifs, the most prominent is the interplay between fantasy and reality. Ideally, they belong in symbiosis and would not be separated. In many stories — e.g., “Asleep in Armageddon,” “The Veldt,” “The Visitor” — Bradbury examines the peril of unreality overtaking reality. In others — “The Exiles,” “The Pedestrian” — imagination is a tool for mankind’s self-understanding. This is not a contradiction, but an exhortation to healthily balance the two impulses.

However capable Bradbury was of matching his contemporaries’ imaginative feats, he was always up to a little bit more. In one of the essays included here, he explains his approach as an author of science fiction and fantasy. It can function “both as fresh entertainment and as morality cloaked in symbol and allegory”; it can make “outsize images of problems so they can be seen and handled from all sides like those Easter balloons strung along the avenue by Macy’s each year”; and it can “deal so strikingly with themes that concern us all today.”

In this regard, some stories stand out. In “Way Up in the Middle of the Air,” an entire African-American community leaves a backwater, bigoted Southern town for Mars, much to the chagrin of the poor whites they leave behind, who lose their scapegoat. In “The Other Foot,” a thriving African-American community on Mars is visited by white refugees from a war-scarred Earth, who find themselves at the sufferance of their former victims. See also “The Fire Balloons”: Christian missionaries searching for converts on the Red Planet find their own faith humbled in the presence of true grace. And “The Man,” whose main character is a cynical scientist who, having just missed the arrival of Christ on another planet, resolves to chase Him across the universe to meet Him face-to-face rather than merely believe. For Bradbury, the fantastic is not just interesting in itself, but a lens to look back on ourselves.

Bradbury’s most famous such lens is Fahrenheit 451. Not typically assigned to the highest echelon of dystopian literature — there belong 1984 and Brave New World — his tale of a future society that burns books instead of reading them does have flaws. Its conclusion lacks the searing finality of the best dystopias and — a seeming failure of imagination? — its world seems less creatively distinct from our own.

Or perhaps reality caught up with it too fast. The default mode of recreation in the novel involves earplugs that isolate people from the outside world while providing a steady stream of fantasies. Bradbury was later struck by the novel’s prescience when one day he passed a couple walking their dog:

The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleepwalking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.

Other aspects of Fahrenheit 451 are eerily recognizable today. Endless pleasure via instant diversions — and increasing suicide attempts and more of what we now call “deaths of despair.” A collapse of educational standards, the death of the humanities, a flight from any potentially controversial material, the endurance of “comic books” and “three-dimensional sex magazines” even as all other literature is banned — all of this, though not effected by an overweening state, is enforced by it.

Fahrenheit 451 readily distills several Bradburian motifs. One: that technology is a wonder but also a concern as long as humans control it. “The machines themselves are empty gloves into which a hand . . . can be inserted,” Bradbury writes in one analysis of his work. But it’s “always the hand of man,” which “can be good or evil, while the gloves themselves remain amoral.” Of the several stories evidencing that preoccupation, “The Lost City of Mars” is the most direct. In it, human explorers of Mars discover an abandoned megapolis dedicated entirely to fulfilling the desires of its inhabitants; a few of the explorers are then undone by its operation.

For all his flights of fancy, Bradbury is just as capable of seeing the transcendent in the ordinary. Of the several places where he grew up, the one that affected him most was Waukegan, Ill. As Green Town in Dandelion Wine, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and other works, it is the setting for many fictionalized versions of his formative experiences. He depicts it with granularity — yes, Waukegan, its real-life counterpart, really does have a ravine — yet also makes Green Town accessible to all, lending it universality. The Green Town of Dandelion Wine is nearly a century old now, but anyone who’s been a child would recognize the trappings of summer boyhood it so lovingly depicts. Likewise, R. L. Stine, Stephen King, and others have acknowledged — and the TV series Stranger Things ought to — the influence of Something Wicked This Way Comes, a dark novel that nevertheless contains some of the most evocative literary depictions of Midwestern autumn.

No writer’s work is above criticism. Some of Bradbury’s short-story collections intended to have some thematic consistency seem to cohere only loosely, though they are admirable for their sheer imagination. In some stories, narrative is sacrificed to aura and aesthetics. Some are overly products of their time, especially in their ironic, Twilight Zone–esque, one-act-twist format. (Bradbury wrote only once for the show’s original run.) And he returned to certain ideas almost obsessively: Mars, book-burning, Earth-consuming war, machines carrying on their original function after the expiry of their designers.

Weighed against his entire output, such complaints are mere quibbles. Of straddlers between reality and fantasy, Ray Bradbury stands with the 20th century’s best.