The purpose of life, according to the greatest SciFi writer you've never heard of...

The greatest Sci-Fi writer you've never heard of: Robert Silverberg. He wrote 10,000 words a day, published his first novel at 21, won all the Sci-Fi awards that exist, and became so rich he bought the NYC mayor's mansion at 26.

Robert Silverberg wrote my favorite sci-fi book of all time: The Book Of Skulls. A dark, hypnotic, and politically incorrect look at the TRUE nature of masculinity ...packaged inside a slick metaphysical horror story .

Silverberg on obsession: “There is something every man feels driven to do, something that pricks him at the core of his soul so long as it remains undone, and yet as he approaches the doing of it he will know fear, for perhaps it will bring him more pain than pleasure.”

In his novel Across a Billion Years, Robert Silverberg writes that the core human purpose is fighting entropy. His words are poetic, haunting, and unforgettable: “We are fighting that force in the universe that nudges everything toward chaos. I mean that we are at war with time..

"...we are enemies of entropy; we seek to snatch back those things that have been taken from us by the years—the childhood toys, the friends and relatives who are gone, the events of the past—everything, we struggle to recapture everything, back to the beginning of creation...

out of this need not to let anything slip away.” Another way to think about this: both Mother Nature and Father Time are looking to steal from us what matters to us. Entropy, decay, and time creep up on us. Creating art, memorializing what matters, is how we fight back.

Silverberg on the malleable nature of history: "History could be as arbitrary as poetry...what is history, other than a matter of choice, the picking and choosing of certain facts out of a multitude to elicit a meaningful pattern, which was not necessarily the true one?"

Silverberg is an absolute workhorse: "When I'm working, it's Monday to Friday, week in and week out, at my desk at 8:30 AM and finished at noon, never any deviation. I work flat out all that time, no phone calls, no distractions."

Silverberg on the moral aspect of fiction: "I have no intention of trying to remedy society's ills through writing science fiction. In most of my writing I'm simply trying to explore the narrative consequences of my own premises: if this, then that..."

Silverberg on his obsession with the Gilgamesh myth: "It's the oldest known story we have, and it deals with the most profound of issues -- the reality of death -- as well as the question of the responsibilities of kings. These are matters I've often wrestled with and the figure"