Cosmic Encounter

New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc.. Near Fine in Very Good- dust jacket. 1980. 1st Edition; 1st Printing. Hardcover. 0385112777 . This book is in Near Fine condition and has a Very Good- dust jacket. The book and its contents are in clean, bright condition. There is some very beginning rubbing to the bottom spine end of the book cover. The text pages are clean and bright. The dust jacket is in mostly clean and bright, but has two very shallow chips: one to the top front, the other to the top spine end. "Van Vogt systematized his writing method, using scenes of 800 words or so where a new complication was added or something resolved. Several of his stories hinge on temporal conundra, a favorite theme. He stated that he acquired many of his writing techniques from three books: Narrative Technique by Thomas Uzzell, The Only Two Ways to Write a Story by John Gallishaw, and Twenty Problems of the Fiction Writer by Gallishaw. He also claimed many of his ideas came from dreams; throughout his writing life he arranged to be awakened every 90 minutes during his sleep period so he could write down his dreams. Van Vogt was also always interested in the idea of all-encompassing systems of knowledge (akin to modern meta-systems) —the characters in his very first story used a system called "Nexialism" to analyze the alien's behavior. Around this time, he became particularly interested in the general semantics of Alfred Korzybski. " (from Wikipedia) .