Is the Twilight Zone classic science fiction?

[BobPage]

I am a huge fan of Rod Serling. I base ALL of my supposed science fiction writing off of this one gentlemen. Is that a bad thing? Every fictional story I have come up with has been in the vain of the Twilight Zone. I think we need more Twilight Zone...

 

[BobPage]

I guess what I am asking, is this: Is the Twilight Zone considered science fiction?

 

[TheDustyZebra]

I can't imagine what else it would be. I'm going with "yes".

 

[ratsy]

I just watched the very first episode of the original last week, and it was a little different but actually quite engaging. I was a huge outer limit fan in the 90's too. I love that anthology type show. They are essentially short stories for the TV.

 

[Droflet]

Yep. And you could do worse than model your writing after the great Rod Serling. Oh, BTW, welcome aboard.

 

[psikeyhackr]

Some were SF, some were Fantasy.

psik

 

[BobPage]

Thanks Droflet.

 

[JoanDrake]

Mostly SF, and they were little morality plays. Serling was brilliant in his recognition of how well that form, then very popular in SFF, fit into the early television series format. The one thing it lacked, (I think) were any 2 parters, but such were unheard of in television then, as was also any sort of ongoing subtext. A late version of the show was an hour long and showed that Serling was just as good in them as the shorter ones

Another thing that's great about them is seeing all the stars that later went on to amazing careers.

Welcome. May all your threads be as interesting as this one.

 

[Dave]

It is always difficult to pigeonhole any genre (the best stories usually being those that break all the definitions) and SFF is even harder to categorize as we have frequently found in threads on this forum, because science fiction means different things to different people. Personally I would compare The Twilight Zone to Ray Bradbury stories. Now, they are are found in the Science Fiction shelves of bookshops, but Bradbury himself said that he didn't write science fiction, and that he had only ever written one science fiction story (which I take to be Fahrenheit 451, but maybe he meant something else.) So, he clearly thought he wrote Fantasy. Certainly The Twilight Zone has elements of supernatural, but then so does The X-Files or Warehouse 13 or a good many other supposed SF shows . Maybe it is "whatever you want it to be."