Suzette Haden Elgin, Star-Anchored, Star-Angered (1979)

[starlady]

This may well be the most 1970s novel I have ever read. I'm honestly surprised it was published in 1979 because it seems soooo peak 1970s. 

A brief list

1. Nudity is apparently the galactic norm in 31stC society. Everyone just walking around buck-ass naked or nearly naked! The colonists on the "Novice Planet" the protagonist, one Coyote Jones, integalactic spy, visits, wear clothes normally and this is regarded as quaintly backward. Jones wears a loincloth, which is conservative.
2. Lots of frankly TERF-reminiscent second wave feminist stuff about innate differences between men and women and women's lesser physical strength. Barf. The plot revolves around the emergence of history's only female messiah on the aforementioned quaint colony planet. The religion she preaches actually goes some interesting and affecting places by the end, but to get there we have to go through a lot of verbiage about women's greater capacity for transcendence.
3. Random disparagement of the concept of taxation
4. At one point a twelve year old girl tells the protagonist he's hot, while it's clear from context that greater society would not find it completely out of the ordinary if he had tried to have sex with her. Jones doesn't want to, per se, and it could have been much worse, but the whole interlude wasn't great. (There's also no need for this character to be 12. She could be 17 and her role in the narrative would have been unchanged.)
5. Lots of really unfortunate discussion of disability through the frame of being "handicapped" and "crippled" because Jones can't telepathically receive, only project. This apparently cuts him off from the human community! Ick.
6. Telepathy being completely normal and within the capability of all humans, which is the peak of the psychedelic movement if I've ever heard of it. There are more advanced human psionics who can walk on water, too. Jones at one point also goes on a trip that reads like psychedelia written down.
7. There's a lot of weird stuff going on with education which I can't even begin to reconstruct since it's so far removed from how things are today. Most people learn by rote from 'edcomputers' while a very rare minority are accepted as Students at the Multiversity where they can learn in person from Teachers. While they're all naked. (The university is also definitely not wheelchair accessible.)
8. Do I have to say explicitly that they're still using microfiche in the 31stC? Because they are, lol.
9. Elgin's biography brags about her having published short fiction in Playgirl.

Anyway, it was short, which was good, and I did like the ultimate conclusion, but most of how we got there was not the greatest! Apparently this is the fourth of five Coyote Jones books and I feel no desire whatsoever to seek any of the others out, but I can see the kinship with some of what Delany was doing at this time, for example, through a funhouse mirror, darkly. While I was washing dishes later I was also reminded of Nimitz the treecat becoming telepathically disabled in David Weber's Honor Harrington books, though of course there's no need for Coyote Jones to invent sign language when everyone still uses spoken language. I would also bet a dollar or two that Dan Simmons may have read this book--the whole thing with the female messiah, Drussa Silver, reminded me of Aenea in the Endymion books. Aenea is not celibate, though, proving that Dan Simmons knows which side his bread is buttered on.

The title is a banger, though after reading the book I have only the barest sliver of an idea how it relates to the actual book. At any rate, I have all three of Elgin's Native Tongue books, and her Ozark trilogy, on my shelf. The Ozark trilogy was personally recommended to me by a friend whose taste I trust a long time ago, so we'll see how it goes. The Native Tongue books…we'll see.