Alfred Coppel, Alfredo Jose de Arana-Marini Coppel (November 9, 1921–May 30, 2004) was an American author. He was born in Oakland, California. He began his long career in 1947 and became one of the most prolific pulp writers of the 1950s and 1960s, writing for a variety of pulp magazines and later "slick" publishers. In 1974 he had a bestseller with the suspense thriller Thirty-Four East about the Arab-Israeli conflict. Using the pseudonym Robert Cham Gilman, he wrote a galactic empire story called The Rebel of Rhada. A similar story under his own name can be found in Brian Aldiss's collection Galactic Empires. The 1960 story "Dark December" describes the aftermath of nuclear war.