The Twilight Zone

Author: Rod Serling

The art of science fiction writing is one of the most difficult things to master. You now only have to create characters and tell stories, you have create a world for them to happen in. That's a tough thing to do in a novel or a movie, or even in a series, but how do you manage it in a single episode? Not only that, but how do you maintain that level of creativity every week? Rod Serling, a master of television and radio scripting, took on just that challenge and produced one of the most incredible anthology series ever presented. In style, it was based on the Alfred Hitchcock Presents series, with Serling serving as the face of the program. But the stars were the stories. So many of the classic storylines we know today had their origin in The Twilight Zone. The twist at the end of an M. Night Shatmalan film? Those were perfected by Serling in the late 1950s. The normal being the bizarre that you find in David Lynch and Terry Gilliam movies? Those are keys to the works of Rod Serling. Why It's on the list: some of the finest science fiction writing you'll ever see, and from a man who changed television forever.