Like Heinlein and Hubbard, Van Vogt didn't merely reproduce Korzybski's ideas, but developed them in idiosyncratic ways. Van Vogt's novel suggests, like Stranger in a Strange Land , that one might be able to gain special mental powers — telepathy, telekinesis — through rigorous semantic training. Nonetheless, he wrote in the introduction to the edition of his book: "I'm making this defense of the book, and revising it, because General Semantics is a worthwhile subject, with meaningful implications, not only in A.