Allan Cole

Allan Cole (1943-2019) was an American novelist and television writer. Before turning to fiction, he spent fourteen years as a Los Angeles newspaper editor and investigative reporter, and went on to sell more than one hundred television episodes for series including Quincy, M.E., The Rockford Files, Magnum, P.I., and Walker, Texas Ranger. In fiction he is best known for the Sten Chronicles, an eight-novel science fiction series co-written with Chris Bunch, which follows a working-class soldier rising through a corrupt interstellar empire and was conceived partly as a critique of the aristocratic power fantasies common in space opera. Cole and Bunch also collaborated on the fantasy Anteros/Far Kingdoms series and the historical Timura Trilogy. Cole, whose father worked for the CIA, spent much of his childhood abroad in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia.