Keith Laumer (1925 - 1993) was an American science fiction writer. He is particularly known for the Nebula Award-nominated novel A Plague of Demons, and for two series: * Bolo. The bolos are automated battle-tanks, originally developed to reduce the number of human crew required; later models are able to perform programmed tasks without any crew at all, and still later models are self-aware artificial intelligences in armor-plated bodies equipped with enough firepower to conquer an entire planet single-handed. The series is a set of mostly self-contained stories sampling events across the history of bolo development; in the later stages, the sometimes-tense relationship between the bolos and the humans they serve is inevitably a feature. This has become a Shared Universe, with authors li