Alfred Coppel was born in Oakland in 1921 as Alfredo Jose de Arana-Marini Coppel. He served as a fighter pilot in the US Army Air Force in World War II. He was a Pulp writer, a Science Fiction writer and in the paperback era, a best-seller thriller writer. Hugely prolific, he published dozens of stories and novels in his lifetime. He died in 2004. Now he is mostly forgotten.

From the point of view of pulp fans, Alfred Coppel is an interesting writer. He made a transition, first from the pulps to the SF digests, then to bestsellerdom. It’s an article of faith that pulp writers had the best stories. Coppel not only had the best stories but was a magnificently gifted writer.

And just maybe this article is a little bit of a penance. When I was nineteen I was offered a number of Coppel’s novels in hardback, second-hand, near mint, for free. But they were Coppel’s thrillers so I turned them down. I was an SF/Fantasy zealot back then and read nothing else. I did not even know that Coppel was an SF writer. As a mature book collector I wince at the memory.

Coppel’s first published SF story was “Age of Unreason” in Astounding December 1947. He quickly became popular with Pulp fans and in 1949 he got his first credit on the cover of the Summer Issue of Planet Stories for “Starbusters”, alongside Leigh Bracket’s “Queen of the Martian Catacombs”. “Starbusters” is the purest pulp. A Space navy ship, a love affair between the warship’s captain and a beautiful scientist, invading tentacle monsters from Eridiani. Also, Anti-Matter. But the writing absolutely sings. The story is tight, moves along breathlessly. It does so without cheating the reader of necessary detail and exposition. The plot logic is honest and true. The characters are defined by their actions and way more real than many similar pulp characters.

Characters who were more than just hero-sketches became Coppel’s trademark. That and a flair for adventure writing, full of colour and action.

In 1950 Coppel really hit his stride. He had two Planet Stories covers. The first, in the Summer issue, was for “Warrior-Maid of Mars”. A novella set on a Leigh Brackett Mars, it was all thrilling action. A dying planet, a failing race with hidden secrets of super-science, a noble warrior class. The story centres around a heroic Martian warrior determined to kill a team of scientists from Earth. The Earthers are trying to establish friendly relations with the Martians and have a secret weapon. This story has it all, grav-sleds, stun-guns, sword fights, cannibal savages in the deep Martian desert. And the warrior-maid of the title provided the romance.

Then in the Fall 1950 issue of Planet Stories, Coppel knocked it out of the park. “The Rebel of Valkyr” is one of the finest Sword and Planet novellas ever written. It got the cover and rightly so. The Emperor of the Second Galactic Empire has died unexpectedly, and Kieron, Space Viking and the Emperor’s most loyal young general, is caught up in deadly palace intrigues that he does not know how to fight. “Rebel” has adult themes and masculine virtues that echo back to some of the harder, more realistic stories of the early pulps. Well plotted, fast paced with clever story twists, the conclusion is at least in part, not what the reader is expecting.

Alfred Coppel revisited Valkyr many years later in 1968 with a novel, The Rebel of Rhada. This became a trilogy with The Navigator of Rhada (1969) and The Star Khan of Rhada (1970). Much later, in 1985, he wrote another novel in this neo-barbarian universe The Warlock of Rhada. He wrote these novels under a pseudonym, Robert Cham Gilman.

Coppel contined to write SF stories through the fifties and early sixties. A theme he often revisited was the hard-bitten, cynical Space Pilot, who, despite his wariness, somehow ends up in a “situation”. These stories have a touch of Jack London’s “Stories of the South Seas” about them, where the tough guy frequently sacrifices his loot or himself for the communal good.

But from the mid-fifties on, Coppel was writing mainstream short stories, thrillers and novels of contemporary American life. He rapidly became a best-seller author. Like many of the best SF writers he moved to the digests in the mid-fifties, paperbacks in the sixties. His most successful best-seller came in 1977 with Dragon, a political thriller about a Chinese nuclear weapon.

Coppel returned to SF in 1993 with Glory. Glory is a novel which married the grand visions of the pulps with realistic characters and motivations, in a way no other SF writer has done before or since. Glory is a Goldenwing, a gigantic interstellar spaceship that travels between galaxies. She has a vast array of one-molecule thick sails, stretched on thousands of kilometres of AI-controlled rigging. The sails glow under the impact of cosmic radiation, shining like vast sheets of gold in the blackness of space.

Goldenwings, built at the height of the human interstellar empire, carried cargos and passengers to human colonies in other galaxies. But now, three thousand years later, the empire has decayed. Many human colonies are failing, interstellar trade is dying. Goldenwings, built to last forever, a pinnacle of human achievement, are slowly being lost. They pass from syndicate to syndicate, costly to maintain, difficult to make a profit from. Their value diminished, fewer and fewer sail the stars. From the very beginning Glory has an elegiac tone, a bitter-sweet reflection on the magnificence humanity had achieved. But this tone is in sharp contrast to the scenes of Glory’s small crew. They live, literally, in glory. In one of Earth’s greatest triumphs, a Goldenwing.

Coppel uses Einsteinian Space-Time-Dilation to further cast Glory’s crew as gods. On Glory, travelling at speeds faster than light, time passes more slowly than on planets. Human colonies are confused by this. Centuries pass on the colony worlds but the same Goldenwing crews return on their voyages. Though Goldenwing crews have the same lifespan as planet dwellers, ground-folk start to see Spacers as somehow god-like. This mystique/mistake becomes the mainspring of the adventure, as colonists project their hopes and yearnings onto Glory’s crew.

I have dwelt at length on Glory because it is a unique achievement. It takes the classic pulp theme of technically advanced humans as gods, and integrates it into an adventure story with realistic characters and very real dangers. Yet it never loses the colour and grandeur of pulp stories.

Glory came with glowing testimonials from luminaries such as Roger Zelazny and, more significantly, Poul Anderson, who truly understood pulp stories. Two further novels followed, Glory’s War and Glory’s People in which Glory becomes the kernel of a human renaissance.

Glory’s People (1996) was Coppel’s last SF novel. Incredibly prolific, he continued to write until his death in 2004. His writing stands the test of time. His ability to write compelling characters with believable motivations, the tight plotting and concise storytelling, all make him an enjoyable read.

There is a certain irony in one of the most talented of pulp writers arriving just as the pulps were dying. However Mr. Coppel clearly had a passion to write great fiction, and his transition to digests and paperbacks is worth celebrating.

There is no definitive bibliography of Alfred Coppel’s work. The most comprehensive listing I found included twenty-two novels. Just by poking around second-hand book sites, I have found three more, not on the list. Besides SF and Thrillers, there is a historical novel, an alt-history novel, a Hemingway-esque novel (very well received in its day) and novels of contemporary life. As for the stories, well, you would need a very painstaking researcher to gather them all up. There are multitudes and the task would be complicated by the fact that Mr. Coppel had several pen-names.

Alfred Coppel is an author who deserves to be remembered. If you decide to read him, at the very least you will be rewarded with colourful stories of pulp adventure. Both “Warrior Maid of Mars” and “Rebel of Valkyr” are freely available from Project Gutenberg. I recommend both as some of his best work. Enjoy.