Menace from the Moon (1925 novel)
Menace from the Moon is a 1925 science fiction novel by English writer Bohun Lynch, part of an "early twentieth-century flood of lunar fantasies" inaugurated by H.G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon (1901). Synopsis Inhabitants of the Moondescendants of "a Dutchman, an Englishman, and an Italian" who in 1654 "with their women rose to the moon by the help of an admirable machine"find themselves threatened with extinction. Having lost the secrets of "the engine which brought our forefathers hither", they issue distress signals in the form of optical projections, onto the mists of Dartmoor, of the universal "Real Character" expounded by 17th-century bishop and polymath John Wilkins in his An Essay towards a Real Character, and a Philosophical Language (1668). Unfortunately the earthlings, not having adopted the Wilkins plan themselves, have difficulty apprehending the import of these spectral presentments (mistaking them at first for "Siamese writing") and even once they do they lack the technology with which to respond. With time running out and their survival at stake, the impatient and irritable Moon-men determine to command the attention of their terrestrial cousins in a more compelling way, deploying a devastating heat-ray capable of boiling the oceans: "Hasten, hasten: