Lynch, Bohun
Entry updated 14 July 2025. Tagged: Artist, Author.
(1884-1928) UK amateur boxer, caricaturist and author whose early nonfantastic novel, The Tender Conscience (1919), recounts the traumatic experiences of a young man returned from active service in World War One. His one novel of sf interest is Menace from the Moon (1925), a Scientific Romance which rather casually blends Alien Invasion and Lost-World tropes, as descendants of a Moon colony, established by the seventeenth-century European Inventors of Space Flight, mount a remote-control attack on Earth with heat-Rays, after their messages calling for help seem to have been ignored – in fact, twentieth-century technology is not yet up to receiving them until it is realized that that they are coded according to the hieroglyphic "universal shorthand" invented by Bishop John Wilkins, whose The Discovery of a World in the Moone (1638) is here seen to have supplied a rationale for the original journey. A copy of the novel was in the library of C S Lewis, whose Ransom trilogy may (if perhaps remotely) reflect a reading of the tale. The dust-jacket copy explicitly describes this tale as a "scientific romance".
Lynch's several books on boxing have no fantastic content; his anthology, A Muster of Ghosts (anth 1924; vt The Best Ghost Stories 1924), is competent. [JE/JC]
John Gilbert Bohun Lynch
born London: 21 May 1884
died London: 2 October 1928
works (selected)
- Menace from the Moon (London: Jarrolds, 1925) [hb/Bohun Lynch]
works as editor
- A Muster of Ghosts (London: Cecil Palmer, 1924) [anth: hb/Bohun Lynch]
- The Best Ghost Stories (Boston, Massachusetts: Smith, Maynard, 1924) [anth: vt of the above: hb/]
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