EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: Dragon Award Winner Brian Niemeier Talks How Dante And His Catholic Faith Influences Him

Brian Niemeier is a Dragon Award winning and John W. Campbell finalist known for his Soul Cycle and Combat Frame XSeed series. Niemeier is not only an author and novelist, but also regularly comments on the happenings in pop culture and society on his Kairos Publications blog.

He spoke with Fandom Pulse about the 10th anniversary edition of Nethereal, the first book in his Soul Cycle series, which he recently launched a Kickstarter for, how his writing is influenced by his Catholic faith and Dante, as well as his thoughts on the current state of publishing.

Fandom Pulse (FP): What is Nethereal? Can you tell us about it?

Brian Niemeier: Nethereal is a space opera-horror novel that kicks off the Soul Cycle, my award-winning series of adventure books. It follows a space pirate and a runaway half-demon as they try to escape a powerful guild, only to find themselves caught between death cults in a conspiracy that spans multiple dimensions. If you had to pin it down, the story is about the price of forbidden knowledge, the limits of ambition, and what happens when you myopically chase freedom with no idea of what it's for. Think Berserk meets Dune with somewhat sounder theology than either.

FP: You’ve also described it as Dante’s Inferno in space. How much of Dante’s work influenced Nethereal?

Niemeier: There’s a reason I use that description. And it's not a surface-level comparison. Dante’s Divine Comedy forms the bones of the Soul Cycle. The idea that our choices echo beyond death was a cornerstone of the series from the beginning. Nethereal’s cosmology is explicitly modeled after the Scholastic view of the afterlife, as refracted through science fiction. But unlike a lot of contemporary SFF that cannibalizes Christian imagery for aesthetic flavor, Nethereal takes that framework seriously. It goes beyond dressing up a haunted house with stained glass windows.

FP: What’s your favorite scene in the book?

Niemeier: Ordinarily I'd give a spoiler warning, but your audience has had ten years to read it, so here's the scene: It's the exchange in the final act when the Shibboleth's crew ask Mephistophilis about his motive for using them as pawns, mangling a score of people's souls, and paving the way for a cataclysm that will immolate billions. And his reason for all of it is wanting to go through a door. He further admits that he has no idea what's on the other side--whether it's an alternate universe, an infinite multiverse, or pure nothingness, he doesn't care. And not only does he have no remorse for orchestrating all that pain and death for a shot in the dark, he'd do it again without a second thought. My aim there was to get across a certain type of diabolical evil, and I think that scene fits the bill.

FP: Did you have any specific goals or themes you wanted to explore with the book? Is there anything specific you want readers to take away from it?

Niemeier: Yes, I set out to reclaim wonder. Modern fiction has been systemically drained of the transcendent. Everything has to be grounded, explainable, rationalized—especially in science fiction, and doubly so in the superhero subgenre. But that’s not how we experience life. I wanted Nethereal to crack open the door to the numinous and show readers what happens when you treat the supernatural as real, not just symbolic (note that symbolism isn't ruled out, it's just not where human contact with the divine starts and stops).

If there’s one insight I hope readers take away, it’s that the cosmos is not a machine. It’s a drama, and we're all in it, whether some of us like it or not.

FP: How does your Catholic faith influence the book?