Purged Souls

Kagan Tumer attended seven schools 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. He's better (a little) with people and places now but is still steadily moving west: Virginia to Texas to California to Oregon. And yes, Portland is west of San Francisco by a hair. Along the way, Tumer has worked as a cafeteria food server, a registrar's office clerk, a print shop copier, a soccer referee, and a well logging engineer. He completed a PhD in computer engineering while in Austin and spent nine years at NASA working on autonomous robot coordination. When it finally dawned on him that NASA wasn't going to build and send hundreds of robots to Mars so he could play with them, he decided to create his own reality in science fiction. When not writing science fiction, he putters around robots, ponders AI ethics, teaches, and mentors a new generation of scientists as a professor of robotics and AI.