Alfred Coppel

Alfred Coppel, Alfredo Jose de Arana-Marini Coppel (November 9, 1921 – May 30, 2004) was an American author. Born in Oakland, he served as a fighter pilot in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II. After his discharge, he started his career as a writer. He became one of the most prolific pulp magazine authors of the 1950s and 1960s, adopting the pseudonyms Robert Cham Gilman and A.C. Marin and writing for a variety of pulp magazines and later "slick" publishers. Though writing in a variety of genres, including action thrillers, he is known for his science fiction stories which comprise both short stories and novels.

Science fiction Coppel's first science fiction story was "Age of Unreason" (1947) in Amazing Stories. Other short stories include "The Dreamer" (1952) about a man called Denby, who wants to be the first to orbit the Moon, published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction and reprinted in the anthology Best Short Shorts (1958) edited by Eric Berger. His post-holocaust novel Dark December (1960) describes the aftermath of nuclear war.

As Robert Cham Gilman, he wrote the Rhada sequence of science fiction novels aimed at the young adult market. These space operas, set within a galactic empire, comprise The Rebel of Rhada (1968), The Navigator of Rhada (1969), The Starkahn of Rhada (1970) and a prequel called The Warlock of Rhada (1985).

Other books In 1967, he wrote The Gate of Hell, a love story about an American serving with the Israeli Paratroopers Brigade during the 1956 Suez Campaign; it was published by Pinnacle Books in 1972. In 1974, he had a bestseller with the suspense thriller Thirty-Four East about the Arab–Israeli conflict. Another political thriller was The Apocalypse Brigade, 1981, about the United States at war with global terrorism. And based on his own experiences as World War II fighter pilot, Order of Battle, a gritty account of a P-38 Lightning pilot.