Alfred Coppel

Born in Oakland, he served as a fighter pilot in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II.

As Robert Cham Gilman, he wrote the Rhada sequence of science fiction novels aimed at the young adult market.

The Burning Mountain: A Novel of the Invasion of Japan (1983) is an alternate history depicting what could have happened if the United States and its allies had been forced to invade Japan in 1946, had the Trinity test of the Fat Man nuclear design on July 16, 1945, failed.

[3] 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.

Another political thriller was The Apocalypse Brigade, 1981, about the United States at war with global terrorism.

Coppel's "Warrior Maid of Mars" was the cover story in the Summer 1950 issue of Planet Stories
Coppel's "Defender of the Faith" was the cover story in the November 1952 issue of Science Fiction Quarterly