Close Encounters of the Ghostwritten Kind

Here I am sometime back in the late 1970s reading Steven Spielberg's novelization of his screenplay for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. A lot of folks assume that this novelization was actually written by one of the world's most famous SF ghostwriters, Alan Dean Foster, the man who really wrote the Star Wars novelization (credited to George Lucas), among others.

I honestly don't remember Close Encounters well enough to say if Foster wrote it, and I no longer own a copy of the book to check the style. I am certain, though, that Foster did not novelize Star Trek: The Motion Picture, attributed to Gene Roddenberry. That book is just too loopy to be Foster and just loopy enough to be genuine Roddenberry.

With my book, bowl of cereal and collection of Lego bricks close at hand, I imagine this must have been a happy moment. It appears as though one of the Lego trays contains some kind of silvery, robotic action figure as well as the bricks you'd expect. It's too bad the photo isn't quite sharp enough to identify the figure.