Gateway Essentials: Keith Laumer

Keith Laumer was born in Syracuse, New York. Prior to his career as a writer, Laumer was a United States Air Force officer and a diplomat. After war service, he spent a year at the University of Stockholm, and then took two bachelor’s degrees in science and architecture at the University of Illinois. His first story, ‘Greylorn’, was published in 1959, but he returned to the Air Force the following year, only becoming a full-time writer in 1965. Laumer was extremely prolific, producing work in  a number of series, along with many independent novels. After 1973, however, illness meant that he published more sparingly, and he eventually died in 1993.

For those looking to explore the many worlds of Keith Laumer we recommend the opening volumes of his three major series: Worlds of the Imperium, which opens his ‘Imperium’ series; Retief: Envoy to New Worlds, the first of his popular ‘Retief’ sequence; and Bolo, the first of his books about a miltary unit of sentient super-tanks. All three are available as individual eBooks and are collected in print in the Three By Laumer omnibus, which will publish in July.

You can find more of Keith Laumer’s work via his Author page on the SF Gateway website and read about him in his entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.

Enjoy!