Tongues of the Moon by Philip José Farmer

"Tell me, my son, why have you, a Soviet and an atheist, placed your life in jeopardy to save your enemy?"

"I do not believe in the Soviet ideology," Broward said.  "As for my so-called atheism, I am not so sure now about it.  I have seen some strange things recently."

Here's another paperback I bought on my recent trip to the Carolinas, Pyramid R-1055, Tongues of the Moon by Philip José Farmer, printed in 1964.  The fun dogfight-in-lunar-orbit cover is by Emsh--isfdb says "no visible signature" but my eagle eye has spotted the signature--just trace a line left from the lower class "a" in "a science fiction novel by" and you will find it hidden in the lunar mountains.       

The novel begins with a bang, a description of nuclear war on Earth as seen from a moon base.  The watchers assume all animal life on Earth has been exterminated!  Then we get a long action/espionage sequence of people running around the moon base shooting each other, setting traps and negotiating alliances on the fly--there are like five or six different factions on the base, some in disguise, back stabbing each other, and Farmer doesn't make it easy to sort it all out.  Like fifteen pages in we get the history lesson I was wishing had come first in stead of the in medias res opening.

The Soviet Union conquered Canada and the United States like a century ago with the help of Communist China; the Russians soon elbowed the Chinese out of the New World.  American refugees built in Argentina a powerful anti-Soviet authoritarian state, eventually allying with South Africa to form an anti-Soviet Axis; meanwhile, the masters of the Soviet world in Moscow were worried by the speed with which the North American province of their empire, so recently looted, rebuilt itself into an industrial powerhouse that might pose a challenge to their authority over the Communist world.  Russian fears were well founded, because within the elite of Soviet North America there grew rebellious factions--an element devoted to Marxism but striving for independence from Moscow (the Nationalists), and an element seeking to revive democracy (the Athenians.)  Prominent members of Soviet American society had implanted in their skulls "bone phones" which served as a means of communication but which also could be used to inflict pain on the recalcitrant or rebellious.  

The fighting in the early scenes of Tongues of the Moon (which has no chapters--its just a continuous 138 pages with no chapter headings) is between the Russian and American Soviets native to the base and the Argentinian and South African fascists of a visiting delegation who try to take over the base when the nuclear war breaks out; they are foiled.  In the confusion, a Soviet American military officer, Scone, leader of the secret Nationalist cell on the base, and two Soviet American scientists, male Broward and female Nashdoi, leaders of the secret Athenian underground, kill a bunch of Russians and vow to work together to achieve independence from the Russians.  What with all the fatalities, Scone is one of the senior officers at the base.

Once the situation at the main Soviet moon base has stabilized, Scone, Broward (the main character of the novel) and Nashdoi travel to another Soviet moon base, a research facility, where Scone takes command and arranges for all pro-Russians there to be killed, leaving only Marxist Nationalists and liberal Athenians.  

In Earth orbit is the human race's first interstellar space ship, the Zemlya.  (As depicted on the cover of my copy of The Tongues of the Moon, the Zemlya is described early in the novel as a big sphere painted to look like Earth.  I guess by mistake, at the end of the novel we are told the Zemlya is cigar shaped.  Was anybody doing any editing at Pyramid?)  Like Noah's ark, the Zemlya contains the specimens that will be needed to repopulate the Earth--these were originally meant to carry Earth's ecosystem to alien worlds.  Scone wants to capture the Zemlya; with it he can blackmail the Russians and the Chinese into accepting American independence.  The second action sequence of the novel is all about the fighting and skullduggery involved in seizing Zemlya and bringing it to the moon, where it is hidden in a huge chasm.  When the fighting is over there are only like 300 people left alive on Luna.

The next section of the novel follows Scone's efforts to ally the newly independent American base with the Russian and Chinese bases to form a Communist alliance, with the Americans in charge; such an alliance is needed to defeat the surviving Axis forces, who have a big base on Mars.  As suggested by the title of the novel, there is a lot of philosophical discussion over what language should be the official lingo of the new lunar society.  ("Tongues" is also what the main laser weapons of the space warships are called.)  Tongues of the Moon is full of Biblical allusions and I thought this business a nod to the Tower of Babel.    

It turns out that the leaderships of Argentina and South Africa jumped in their space fleets and left Earth before they started the nuclear war, and so there are like four times as many Axis as Communist combatants left.  So Scone sends Broward to the ruined Earth to retrieve the secret weapon that Broward has never even heard about that can give the commies the edge over the Spanish-speaking fascists.  Could it be that bolshy Scone is sending the leading liberal to his doom like King David sent that guy Uriah off to die so he could get his royal mitts on Bathsheba?  After all, both Scone and Broward have their eyes on Nashdoi!

There is a lot of talk about culture and ethnicity in Tongues of the Moon, and while it seems Farmer admires all the various people of Earth, and the whole point of the book is that we should all get along, some of his depictions might be considered uncomfortably stereotypical; for example, the only Jew on the moon is a wise-cracking womanizer who, between jokes, laments how hard it is to be Jewish.  This is the guy who pilots Broward's ship to Siberia to look for the super weapon, a planet-busting bomb.  It turns out that some people survived in the bunker where the bomb is, and yet another strong man is in charge of this little principality.  Broward and the Jewish wiseacre are captured.  Luckily, they find themselves in the custody of the last Jewish woman on Earth, and she is opposed to the new dictator of Siberia just like Broward is skeptical of Scone, the new dictator of the moon. She helps the loonies steal the bomb and escapes with them.  The last two Jews in the solar system, who under communism had to practice their religion in secret and have met each other through an amazing coincidence they attribute to the hand of God, strike off on their own, taking up residence in an underground facility near Israel.  Broward returns to the Moon with the bomb.

The Axis space fleet approaches and the Communists leave their surface bases to hide deep in some caverns.  The three different communist groups simply cannot get along; the Chinese launch a violent takeover attempt that is quashed, and afterwards a hotheaded Russian starts a riot, and many are killed in all this violence.  Scone has all the surviving Russians and Chinese put in suspended animation in the Zemyla's deep freeze facilities.  Broward wonders if Scone hasn't somehow engineered the violence in order to justify neutralizing all the Russians and Chinese.

Scone then sends Broward on another perilous mission--all alone, he is to fly to Mars and wipe out all life on that planet with the super bomb.  On the way there he encounters a crippled Argentinean ship--just like the Yankees, Ivans and <<add whatever slang word I am allowed to use to describe Chinese people here>>, the Argentineans and the South Africans have fallen out and there has been a space naval battle with many losses to both sides.  One man is left alive on the wrecked Axis ship; Broward makes friends with him.  In the same way that Broward is skeptical of Scone and would like to see him deposed, this Argentinean has had it with the fascist dictator and would like to see a change of government on Mars, and he is not alone.  Broward convinces this guy and other Argentineans to help him overthrow the Martian tyrant, a guy named Howards, in part by telling them the planet buster bomb is set to go off in 24 hours and he won't deactivate it until Howards is kaput!  Similarly to how the Jews in the Siberian portion of the book credited God with their good fortune, the anti-Howards Christians on Mars stress that their success is in the hands of God.  (As you can see, Farmer hits the same notes again and again in Tongues of the Moon.)  

On Mars, Broward and his new friends sneak around and kill members of the dictator's gestapo-style police and don their uniforms as a disguise, something we readers of genre fiction see with great regularity.  It turns out the Pope is on Mars, and Broward and crew enlist the pontiff's aid in their effort to overthrow Howards.  Once Howards has been killed, Broward returns to the moon with an ambassador from the Martians, who have set up a government that wants peace.  Fearing that Scone will not want the people of the moon to know there is a possibility of peace (Broward says that Scone is like Genghis Khan, Napoleon and Hitler, a ruler who derives his authority from war), Broward hatches a plan to circumvent government censorship.  He sends a message to Luna in Navajo, which Scone does not know but Nashdoi and a famous linguist on the moon are fluent in.  Scone will have to let one of those two hear the message, which instructs them to lie to Scone but tell the populace the truth.  When Broward gets to Luna, Scone and his followers are on the run, pursued by a posse led by that linguist.  Scone has a hostage--Nashdoi--and he trades her for the Zemlya.  While the liberals and Catholics stay in the Solar System and try to rebuild humanity there, Scone and the communists will search the galaxy for a place to start a new civilization.  Scone openly hopes his descendants will return to the Solar System for revenge, while Broward hopes the descendants of the communists will not take up the ideology and hatreds of their parents.  It is also hinted that Broward has come to believe in God, that all the coincidences and lucky breaks that have made it possible for him to break the power of the communists and fascists in the Solar System are evidence of a higher power guiding or helping mankind.       

I like the broad outlines of the plot of Tongues of the Moon, and its themes and ideas.  All the Biblical references and the theme of an atheist acquiring faith are a good change of pace from the references to Greek and Norse mythology and to Shakespeare, and the insistence that religion is a scam, that is the norm in the science fiction I generally read.

Unfortunately, Farmer's actual writing--his style and the way some individual scenes and sequences are constructed--is not very good.  The text is almost like that of an encyclopedia entry, dry and cold, exciting no emotions in the reader, offering no passion and no personality, just telling you what is happening, and not always with clarity.  While I was curious about what was going to happen next, and so the book kept my attention, the human relationships produced no feeling and the action scenes offered no thrills.

The long sequence on Mars is a case in point and the weakest part of the book.  Slow and tedious, there is a lot of superfluous back and forth and zig zag movements that seem to get the characters nowhere and are hard to follow.  I felt like Farmer included the long scene of putting on disguises and the similarly overly long scene of the Pope sacrificing himself because such scenes are expected in this type of story, not because they advanced the plot or added entertainment value--the disguises and the Pope's sacrifice didn't actually contribute to deposing the dictator, whom Broward kills by shooting at his house with artillery from an airborne spacecraft.  And the killing of the Martian tyrant doesn't work as a climax; his death doesn't provide any satisfying catharsis he isn't an onscreen character--Broward never met him!  I guess the defeat of Scone is the actual climax, as he has been the main villain all along, a man Broward has spoken to many times and the man whom Farmer has done the most work developing a personality for, but while the defeat of Howards is described in tedious detail in a long series of scenes, the defeat of Scone is mostly off screen and wrapped up brusquely. 

(Similarly, I thought the solution to the bone phone problem was inadequately explained.)  [UPDATE DECEMBER 3, 2022: This is an unfair criticism; I skimmed the first 25 or so pages of the text again and Farmer explains what is going on; on my first read I just forgot something printed on page 12 by the time the pay off arrived on page 28.  As the kids say, "My bad."]   

All this fertile material, handled by somebody with a distinctive style and an ability to move the reader, could have been the foundation of a powerful novel.  (The religious angle has me thinking Gene Wolfe, the espionage stuff Jack Vance.)  But as it stands, Tongues of the Moon is just OK.

In the September 1961 issue of Amazing, Farmer published a novelette titled "Tongues of the Moon;" I would like to compare the text there to that of my 1964 paperback, but I'm not having any luck finding a scan of that magazine.  [UPDATE DECEMBER 3, 2022: A helpful commenter below points me to a source for a scan of the Sept '61 ish of Amazing.  The novelet there seems to be almost the same as the first 25 or so pages of the novel, ending after the Americans have won independence and Broward has had a dream reminiscent of the Tower of Babel, but before Scone calls the meeting to organize an alliance and determine a single language for the lunar Marxist society.  One interesting change is that, for book publication, a sentence indicating that "South Africa" in the story refers to all of sub-Saharan Africa, not just the current nation of South Africa, and that the South Africans depicted are blacks who threw off white rule, was excised.  The text of the novel makes clear that some of the South African characters are black (one is identified as a Zulu) but as I read the novel I assumed some were Afrikaners or other European ethnicities.]  The novel must be counted a financial success, being reprinted numerous times in several languages.