Michele Lang’s first novel for Dorchester Publishing, Netherwood, is a March release for the new Shomi imprint of action/speculative romances. Netherwood tells the story of Talia Fortune, an intergalactic sheriff on the offworld colony Fresh Havens, rife with danger, sabotage, deception, and destruction, where she falls into the clutches of her quarry, outlaw and cyber-lover Lt. Robert Kovner.
SFScope: Is Netherwood science fiction with some romance, or romance with science fiction elements?
Michele Lang: Netherwood crosses all kinds of lines, so I suppose the answer is a resounding “yes”! It is definitely a novel of ideas, where Talia (and the reader by proxy) explores the question of what, if anything, sets human beings apart from non-carbon-based sentient beings—that is, if the human soul can exist in a post-Singularity world. And it is an action thriller, which doesn’t let up until the very end.
Also, the relationship between Talia the sheriff and her outlaw cyber-lover drives home Talia’s internal conflict: she identifies heavily with her role as the face of the law, but her passion for a man who is hellbent on subverting the existing order makes her question her world and everything she thought she knew about herself.
SFScope: Is this your first novel? What can you tell us about you as a writer and as a person?
Michele Lang: This is my first novel for a New York publisher. My previous publisher released three other novels and a novella of mine, but it went under last year, and I’m now considering what to do with my previous books.
As a writer, and as a person, I am a multitude of contradictions. For instance, I am not a technophobe as much as a menace to technology—cell phones burn out, computers jam up, elevators get stuck more often when I am around. And yet, technology absolutely fascinates me. These products of the human imagination have transformed our physical world, our society, and will shape our future. I love to look at how people shape technology and in turn, how life adapts and transforms technology on an organic level, in ways the creators often don’t predict or expect.
SFScope: OK, then—does the inspiration for a book like Netherwood—where technology appears to be a force for evil—come out of your own experience?
Michele Lang: Oh, I’ve known a few evil computers in my time, haven’t you? The kind of infernal machine that consigns your senior thesis to cyber-oblivion four hours before it’s due, or the email program that shoots emails to the wrong people with a perverse, gremlin-like pleasure. Argh!
But, no, Netherwood doesn’t come from that frustrating emotional place. It was first inspired by Robin Hood. It’s really a story about Robin Hood set in a futuristic Sherwood, where the sheriff hunts and falls in love with the outlaw. But as I set about writing the story, the futuristic Sherwood became an important character in its own right, a country of the mind as much as the body.
I think that internet/cyberspace technology has the potential to connect us, or to isolate us. The choice is up to us, and in my book, the characters explore all of the possibilities, in both cyberspace and in the surface world.
SFScope: Who are your favorite authors, or who do you think has influenced your work?
Michele Lang: I am an omnivorous reader, and will devour anything I can get my hands on. Just to name a few: Ursula K. Le Guin, Stephen King, Suzanne Brockmann, Jennifer Cruisie, Neil Gaiman, Marjorie Liu, John Scalzi, Thomas Disch, Jim Butcher, Evelyn Vaughn, Cheyenne McCray, Holly Lisle, S.L. Viehl, and history books by the likes of Barbara Tuchman and David McCullough.
I was influenced as a younger writer by Robert Graves, Madeleine L’Engle, and especially Richard Adams—I must’ve read Watership Down half a dozen times in seventh grade, and wrote three volumes of fanfic with a friend in high school, by hand, in spiral notebooks—the first novel-length fiction I ever wrote.
I also like to read poetry when I can’t sleep, especially Yeats. Kovner quotes Yeats in Netherwood…
SFScope: What’s next? (Novel, short stories, essays, whatever).
Michele Lang: I’m working on another novel set in the Netherwood universe, with the tentative title, Nightwind. I am also working on a fantasy series.
SFScope: Anything else you’d like to say to all your potential viewers/readers?
Michele Lang: Hello, and thank you for reading this far! Please visit my website at michelelang.com, and say hello. I always enjoy connecting with readers. And thank you, SFScope.