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Kagan Tumer
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Kagan Tumer

Bios of Varying Length

The byline version (50 words):

Kagan Tumer is a science fiction author, SFWA member, and robotics/AI professor. He attended seven schools in four countries and worked as a math tutor, soccer referee, and well logging analyst before spending nine years at NASA. When not writing, he studies AI ethics, teaches AI and robotics, consults for TV/movie AI projects, and mentors future scientists.


The short version (100 words):

Kagan Tumer is a science fiction author and professor of Robotics and AI. He attended seven schools in five cities in four countries, all before reaching high school, and is steadily moving west, from Virginia to Texas to California to Oregon. Along the way, Kagan worked as a food server, registrar’s office clerk, print shop copier, soccer referee, math tutor, and well logging analyist. He is a member of SFWA, has a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering, and spent nine years at NASA working on multi-robot coordination.  When not writing, he studies AI ethics, teaches AI and robotics, consults for TV/movie AI projects, and mentors future scientists.


The TL;DR version (200 words):

Kagan Tumer is a science fiction author, SFWA member, and professor of Robotics and AI. He attended seven schools and lived in five cities in four countries, all before reaching high school. The constant upheaval taught him two things: observe the world and the people in it because you need to understand them, and don’t get too attached to any place or anyone because neither will be there next year.

Turns out, that’s pretty good training for a writer.

Along the way, Kagan worked as a cafeteria food server, registrar’s office clerk, print shop copier, soccer referee, math tutor, and well logging analyst. He also worked for NASA, designing autonomous robot coordination algorithms for future missions. When it finally dawned on him that NASA wasn’t going to build and send hundreds of robots to Mars so he can play with them, he decided to create his own reality in Science Fiction.

After a decade in the San Francisco Bay Area, he now lives in the Pacific Northwest. His debut novel, Purged Souls, was a Foreword INDIES Book of the Year finalist. When not writing, he studies AI ethics, teaches AI and robotics, and mentors future scientists.

Awards

Foreword Indies Book of the Year

Purged Souls is  a  Foreword Indies finalist  for Science Fiction Book of the Year.

Media Mentions

(More events, podcasts, interviews, lectures, and articles are at https://kagantumer.com/events/)

What Comes After: 5 Post-Pandemic Reads

 

Purged Souls mentioned in Post-Pandemic Fiction, alongside Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven and Mike Chen’s A Beginning at the End.

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10 Apocalyptic Reads to Make 2020 Seem Less of a Dumpster Fire by Paul Goat Allen

 

If immersing yourself in a future much starker than our current reality appeals to your literary escapist tendencies, here is a list of some stellar end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it novels. 2020 seems like a walk in the park compared to some of these dark visions of the future!

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