The Alternate History that Created Our History

James P. Hogan's The Proteus Operation is one cleaver book. The plot is a standard alternate history of World War II, but with a twist. Time Travelers from the 21st Century have gone back to the 1920s to help Hitler dominate and win World War II. By the 1970s, with the United Kingdom's leaders living in Canada, Hitler and Japan have conquered everywhere outside of North America - including nuking Russia - and Canada and the United States are gearing up for the final conflict for world domination. The problem for the last hold outs of democracy are obvious to its leaders: no matter how valiantly they fight, they will fail.

But, they have a secret weapon: the time traveling technology has fallen into the hands of Kennedy's America and a small group of Special Operations forces and scientists will travel back to 1939 to change history and prevent the fall of the British Isles.

What a brilliant idea, especially so once the full extent of the plot and its twists reveal themselves in this entertaining story.

Once in 1939, the small group of time traveling interlopers must enlist the help of Churchill, Einstein, Roosevelt, and Fermi if they are to succeed. Hogan nicely weaves both the real character and historic events into the story in such a way that it meshes nicely with the history as we understand it.

The Proteus Operation is one of Hogan's best books. ( )

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 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. ( )

The story of time-travelers attempting to set the 'future' right. A very good ending that took me a while to see coming. ( )