Robert Silverberg was born in New York City, and educated at Columbia University, graduating in the Class of 1956. He has been a resident of the San Francisco Bay Area for many years. His first book, Revolt on Alpha C, was pub-lished in 1955.He has won four Hugo awards (1956, 1969, 1987, 1990) and five Nebulas (1970, 1972, 1972 again, 1975, 1986) as well as most of the other significant science fiction honors. He was the President of the Science Fiction Writers of America from 1967 to 1968, and the Guest of Honor, World Science Fiction Convention in Heidelberg, Germany, in 1970.He is the author of over a hundred books and an un-counted number of short stories and articles, which have appeared in such magazines as Omni, American Heritage, Harper's, Playboy, and Penthouse, and have been widely anthologized and chosen for best-of-the-year honors. He edited the New Dimensions series of anthologies from 1971 to 1980, the first volume of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and Robert Silverberg's Worlds of Wonder, an anthology of great science fiction that is also a collection of his essays on the art of writing science fiction. With his wife, Karen Haber, he has edited Universe, an anthology of original science fic-tion.

His books include Dying Inside, The Book of Skulls, Nightwings, Thorns, Up the Line, Tower of Glass, Gilgamesh the King, Lord Valentine's Castle, Tom O'Bedlam, The Man in the Maze, Downward to the Earth, The World Inside, Shadrach in the Furnace, At Winter's End, Born with the Dead, Nightfall, (with Isaac Asimov), The Face of the Wa-ters, The Ugly Little Boy (with Isaac Asimov), Kingdoms of the Wall, The Positronic Man (with Isaac Asimov), Hot Sky at Midnight, and Sorcerers of Majipoor.