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''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: help us to escape. Otherwise the whole earth will be burned dry and eaten up... Answer us, fools!" After a demonstration of this apparatus so unnerves visitors to an Italian resort that they are unable to enjoy their noonday meal"Lunch", complains the narrator, "can one lunch on such a day as this... Suddenly it is much hotter"a frenzied search for plans to the 17th-century moon-ship ends in frustration, a short scrap of Wilkinsese being all that is found once the plans' hiding place is discovered. An anticlimax is reached when, just as the destruction of humanity seems inevitable, it is realized that these menacing messages had in fact been dispatched months earlieran obscure phenomenon had delayed their transitand that in the interim the moon's infuriated denizens had inadvertently killed themselves through misfire of the very weapon with which they had sought to take revenge on what they believed to be an uncaring, heedless Earth. Explains Professor Lancelot Downey, the story's scientific protagonist: "I conceive the Moonfolk to be in the position of a native who, having learnt to fire a gun without knowing much about it, puts in three times the normal charge to produce a particularly deadly effect, and blows himself to pieces." 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Menace from the Moon (1925 novel)」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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