Fifteen Hours

Collected into the Shield of the Emperor omnibus, Fifteen Hours is about an Imperial Guardsmen deployed to his first battle, where the life expectancy is, as the title suggests, is 15 hours. This is the first book in the omnibus, and is accompanies by the short story Knee Deep, set immediately after the novel. The novel open in medias res, we see our protagonist bleeding to death in no-mans land wondering how many hours he’s been there. After this quite engaging opening, we cut back to our protagonist, Larn, getting conscripted, going to training, getting deployed, and eventually making it back to the death we knew would come. The journey to this ending is a somewhat depressing, yet also occasionally darkly funny adventure. We get to see the incompetence of Imperial bureaucracy throughout the novel, and always see how it comes around to impacting Larn and his comrades. Some chapters start with a few paragraphs from the perspective of a character we’ve never seen before, like an administratum serf, or an artillery officer, and the rest of the chapter afterwards we see how their actions effect our characters. All of this goes around to create an engaging story about struggling to survive not only the enemy orks, but also the Imperium’s incompetence as well. And speaking of the orks, I was glad to see that they are actually shown as a threat that our characters do not want to face, that many believe will kill them all. Its just a nice thing to see, a threatening xenos force in a novel. This is all not mentioning much about Larn himself. Larn is a nice character to learn about the Imperial Guard from. He starts off as a conscript who doesn’t know much but is hopeful and encouraged by propaganda. However as the novel goes on, and we meet more experienced guardsmen, his world collapses around him. It isn’t the exciting adventure to serve the God Emperor he expected, it’s a miserable one, and he'll die for no good reason on a planet no one knows about. I can’t say that there is much negative I have to say about the novel. Some characters could have some more development, but also many aren’t around for all that long, so its not all that important. And while the orks may be rather portrayed threateningly, they are still handled a little easier than it could have been, but the way it was handled was good regardless. This novel was honestly a joy to read. Larn is a great protagonist, especially for anyone who is looking to learn about the Imperial Guard. The journey shows us the miserable, dark life for the average human in the universe, while also hitting us with small bits of humour throughout that really bring the story up. Fifteen Hours would be a great first read for prospective 40k readers.

As I mentioned at the start of this review, there is a follow up short story called Knee Deep, which is also read of course, and will mention briefly here. Knee Deep takes place immediately after Fifteen Hours, following some surviving characters in the sewers looking for orks. They find them, and they kill them. There isn’t really much to this story, not much is added to our characters, and the orks don’t feel like as much of a threat. Its an ok story, not a necessary read, but if you’ve got the omnibus, you may as well read it.