Hamiltonian adj.

1938: In a year which has seen the beginning of four new S.F. magazines, it would normally be hard to award the honour of the year’s most idiotic story. Claims have been put forward for stories as farapart as ‘Strip-teasers of Space’, ‘Outhout, the Big Spout’ and ‘The Flying Chinaman’, but as usual Eddy pips the rest at the post with his latest and greatest, ‘The Horror in the Horoscope’. For sheer, unparallelled lunacy, for Hamiltonian characters and Hamiltonian science, this is for crying out very loud, supreme!

He does his best and the result is a tale of interstellar intrigue, of high romance, of danger and deadly adventure that is well up to the Hamiltonian peak.

As of late, we seemed to have been going backwards. The general idea of a science fiction movie now is Star Wars; there is no other variety (notice how little noticed or publicized Quintet was as science fiction). And Star Wars is epitomally 1930s, Hamiltonian s/f. (That's Edmond, not Alexander.)

Sure enough, these are almost without exception pulp stories—sometimes very rare, hitherto unreprinted ones, at least one never before published Weird Tales reject which Lovecraft professed to admire—and they demonstrate the inability of pulp methods (which may work well in a Hamiltonian space opera) to cope with the supernatural horror story, which, as Lovecraft was well aware, consists almost entirely of atmosphere, texture, and stylistic fine-tuning.