Customer Reviews

Go Tell the Spartans : A Novel of Falkenberg's Legion

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When I say not to buy this book, it's not because there's anything inherently wrong with it. Go Tell the Spartans is actually a great book. It's just that its content has been collected in a more complete edition. The first two books in Pournelle's novels of John Christian Falkenberg were The Mercenary, followed by West of Honor. Those two books were eventually stitched together into Falkenberg's Legion, which is now considered the first book in the series. There were three later books, Prince of Mercenaries, Go Tell the Spartans, and Prince of Spartans. The last two books were co-written with S.M. Stirling; all four were eventually collected as The Prince. Thus my advice, if you want to read Pournelle/Stirling's tales of John Christian Falkenberg - and you should, they're some of the best military SF ever written - pass on the individual books and buy The Prince instead, to have the complete series in one volume.

I've been reading Pournelle's books since I was 12 (I'm 39 now). His stuff is hard hitting and realistic, as a soldier I always appreciated his view of soldiers....He does not paint them romantically but realistically. He graphically illustrates the dirtiness of war especially LIC. With the addition of SM Stirling to the team it has only gotten better!

Pournelle does a great job of projecting LIC (Low Intensity Conflict) into a future history. His portrayal of small unit tactics and the political manuvering in LIC is excellent. Any one with interest in OOTW (Operations Other Than War) should read this and the sequel Prince Of Sparta.

A good story, it suitably continues the saga of Falkenberg's Legion and the ending, while a little weak is still satisfying.

Just to correct a previous reviewer, the title actually comes from a memorial to the Spartan dead at the battle of Thermopylae, when the Spartan king Leonidas & his three hundred men faced an army over eight hundred thousand Persians under King Xerxes. They held for six days before falling, and bought the time for the armies of Greece to mobilise. Actually thinking about it, that is a common theme in this series, as Falkenberg and Lermentov both state that armies can never achieve anything, they can only buy time to achieve it in.
The memorial reads - "go tell the spartans, stranger passing by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie."

Read "Gates Of Fire" by Steven Pressfield if you want to learn more, if you liked this one, you'll probably like that one too.

This book, "Go Tell the Spartans", has the best ending I've read since Louis L'Amour's "Last of the Breed". The plot is extremely compelling and leads up to an ending that hits you like a ton of bricks.

If you want to see what Low Intensity Conflict (LIC) looks like, READ THIS BOOK! It, and its sequal, Prince of Sparta, present an outstanding saga of war at its grittiest, and politics at its dirtiest. These books should be required reading for anyone interested in modern warfare. There is not much 'sci-fi', per-se, just good, hard, storytelling.

An excellent Read! Realistic, compelling, You will have to look a long time to find beeter sf.

Any fan of Falkenberg's Legion is likely to appreciate this book. Still, it is not up to the standards of Pournelle. Its predecessor "Prince_of_mercenaries", although somewhat disjointed, as if put together from odds and ends, had a lot more power.

The impression I get is that the Falkenberg universe and characters have been turned over to a new writer, a writer who took his courses in creative writing and who well knows the US military manuals. Pournelle's work was compelling reading and could be regarded as SF (some thinking went into its writing). This "Go_tell_the_Spartans" reads like current US military doctrine overlaid with a Falkenberg veneer.

Since this is fairly competently done with only minor violations of the Falkenberg characters a fan of the 42nd can still like this book. The exceptionally poor ending is understandable: it was necessary to leave plenty of openings for its sequel.

"Go Tell the Spartans" is the title of a very good Vietnam war flick starring Burt Lancaster. You can find it on Amazon in VHS video format.

As a book, it was published by Jove under the same title about the time the movie was released. You can find it on Amazon under the title of "Incident at Muc Wa" by Daniel Ford.

-- Matt