The Proteus Operation

I picked up this book because it seemed to have an interesting premise: a group from a Nazi-dominated alternate future comes back in time to try to stop Hitler. After finishing the book, I'm still intrigued by the set-up but was severely disappointed by the execution. The plot was made just a bit

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too complicated by the time-travel/quantum mechanics connections and I was bothered by occasional anachronisms in speech (Churchill saying "What's up?" for instance). Overall, I was disappointed because a really interesting idea simply was not served by this book.

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Financed by a rich oligarchy losing their power and influence in a prosperous and peaceful 21st century, Project Overlord decides to create a world more to its liking. A world in the past, a world where Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party are more than just obscure players in German political

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history.

They succeed, and the novel opens in 1974 with an America grimly preparing to fight the final battle against the Nazi menace which spans the globe. The Proteus team -- commandos, physicists, and politicians from that doomed world -- travels back to 1939. There they will attempt to reshape history with political manipulation and atomic weapons.

Hogan not only does a nice job of building an alternate timeline which diverges from ours in 1930's Germany, but he also details the history of Nazi aggression in our world and constructs, through the Proteus team's efforts, a secret history of our timeline. Or is it? Hogan, establishing the mutability of history, keeps the reader guessing as to the outcome of what seems to be our past.

Along the way, he not only gives us the expected historical figures of Churchill and Roosevelt, but also physicists Albert Einstein, Enrico Fermi, and Edward Teller. And there's an odd young writer named Isaac Asimov hanging about too.

I have one minor complaint with this novel. Hogan belabors the explanation of the quantam mechanics he uses to move the plot. However, his detailed explanation was probably necessary for those for whom this is their first exposure to the idea, presumably a fair number of the technothriller and alternate history crowd who should like this book as well as Hogan's usual science fiction reader.

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I like the premise. Basically, Hogan gives us three possible timelines. In the original timeline, a utopian future develops in the 21st century--one that never knew the horrors of the second World War and the cold war slowly melted into a "third way." But EVIL oligarchs unhappy losing power in 2025

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use a newly developed time travel device to try to swing things their way. They use the limit of their reach--a century in the past, and decide to use an obscure house painter to their ends--Adolf Hitler. This creates a new timeline, one where by 1975 America, along with Australia and New Zealand are the last free outposts in a Fascist world. Except an escaped scientist having let the Americans know how their future has been tampered with, they decide to go back into the year 1939 in a last ditch effort to save liberty and democracy--picking an obscure politician to change things around--Winston Churchill.

The premise reminds me a bit of Harry Turtledove's The Guns of the South, where time-traveling White Supremest Afrikaners try to change the outcome of the American Civil War. Except Turtledove is known as the master of alternate history for a reason. While Hogan spends a lot of time on the physics, the emphasis in Turtledove is on the characters, and his Robert E. Lee is much more memorable--and important to the narrative--than Hogan's Churchill. I am impressed by the research Hogan had to have done into political and scientific history to weave two alternate histories, and it's entertaining enough to read once if you like reading alternate history, but in the end this isn't a memorable, strong enough work I consider it a keeper.

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It's 1974. America is preparing for the inevitable war with Nazi Germany, which over the past three decades has slowly and methodically conquered or taken control of most of the world. The only hope lies in time travel. A mysterious breakthrough in technology will allow a team of agents to be sent

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back to 1939 and attempt to influence the leaders of the time to take Hitler and his ambitions seriously. It seems like an impossible task, as people and attitudes are not any more malleable in 1939 than they are at any other time. Of course, this being a story with Nazis, there is also intrigue, and gunfire, and blowing stuff up. The plot gets rather convoluted as the story progresses, but all in all it was an entertaining read.
--J.

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