Rebel Winter (Warhammer 40,000 Novels)

Collected into the Shield of the Emperor omnibus, Rebel Winter is about Sebastev, a Vostroyan First Born Captain and his struggle to keep his men alive while fighting both human rebels, and hordes of Orks. This is the third and final book in the omnibus and is accompanied by the short story The Citadel. Similar to Fifteen Hours, Rebel Winter begins in medius res, but instead of being our protagonists death, it is him about to go on trial for something, which we assume we will learn of through the story. We also have a few other characters to meet, such as the non-Vostroyan commissar and his companion who is secretly not firstborn, Rits, who is Sebastevs companion, and Sebastev’s commander, Kabanov. There are other characters who are named in the novel, but these are the main ones, but I cant really say anything about them. The commissar, Karif, is really just a commissar, and his companion, Stavin, took the place of his disabled firstborn brother in secret, but that’s all he has too. I cant really say anything about the others either, which is a shame, especially when the plot happening around these characters, I think, is quite a good one. As mentioned before, this book has our characters fighting Orks, and rebels on the same planet. And these aren’t chaos rebels either, their planet fell into an ice age, and when the Imperium didn’t send help, they declared independence. Then before the Imperium responded, Orks attacked too, so once they arrived there were two enemies to face. And in this story, the Orks feel like a major threat, even more so than in Fifteen Hours, which I already praised for its threatening Orks. Throughout the novel, our characters constantly need to run away due to the overwhelming number of them. I really like this. And speaking again of those rebels, that justification is actually really relieving, while they aren’t perfect, they do have their own commissars, it’s a nice thing to see non-imperial humans who aren’t chaos cultists. Our characters are even disgusted by a rebel commissar, even with one of our characters being a commissar himself, its just a nice bit of imperial hypocrisy which I love. Now a reader, such as myself, might imagine that this hypocrisy shown, and the relatively justified rebellion might be what causes our protagonist Sebastev to go on trial. Maybe he sympathises with them too much, or even outright joins them. Now this is spoilers, but that’s not what happens. He’s on trial because he cared too much about his soldiers. This could have been worked instead, but it isn’t ever really shown. I never felt like he was overly careful with his men, but rather just a regular careful, and amount that higher ups in the command structure probably would be fine with. He is also meant to be a stubborn character, multiple people say so throughout the novel, but this never really came across either, the closest being him getting annoyed about a nickname he doesn’t like. This, alongside the lack of character depth is what really stops this book from being great. But there are other small weird bits I want to mention. For some reason its never really indicated when we are reading a character’s thoughts. They aren’t italicized or anything, we’ll just go down a paragraph and be met half way through with a “he thought”. And while of course the story ends with the trial of our protagonist, it doesn’t actually, it ends with a transcription of an interrogation of a prisoner our characters pick up. I have no idea where this comes from, of course he would be interrogated, and maybe it could be interesting to see what information he gives up, but instead its just a weird plot twist that doesn’t really make sense as to why it happened. That’s all of the criticisms I had, but I lastly I just had to say that according to this book, squigs can be green and Orks can be brown. It doesn’t impact the story or anything, its just a weird thing I had to point out was in here. So yet again, the book is fine. It was a little better than Deathworld, but not nearly as good as Fifteen Hours. The book has an engaging opening, and good overall plot beats, but the characters we follow are just not interesting, and our endings don’t get the build-up they should have had. I might try reading it again, but I’ve got plenty of other things to read that I’d likely enjoy more.

Once more, there is a short story, The Citadel, I’ll mention it briefly here. The Citadel is kind of a prequel to the novel. It follows one of the other commanders reminiscing about when he first met one of the other commanders who died. I feel like this is a weird thing to be writing about with how the novel ended. There was setup for the story to continue, but this is what we get instead. On the whole its fine, if you’ve got it you may as well read it, but you can just skip it.