Alfredo Jose de Arana-Marini Coppel was an American author. 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 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.
A buccaneering adventure in space, it examines how Legends are made and how they only represent a 2-dimensional hero, one who inspires us, but who's 3rd dimension, the dark side if you will, is kept hidden.
Written during the cold war it explores the idea of a long standing conspiracy theory of a well-known, and once secret, project called "Project blue beam". ((Google this for more info.)) Supposedly this project, in a nutshell, worked on the idea that to unite the future mankind only an invader from space could accomplish this by providing a common enemy. Although in this story there is no alien invader, there are certainly "social outsiders" who accomplish just that.