The Proteus Operation

In an alternative version of the twentieth century, Nazi Germany has won the Second World War, largely because it received assistance from people in the future who apparently looked at history’s available outcomes and deliberately selected the worst one. By 1975, the surviving free nations face defeat, and their remaining hope lies in sending a team back through time to prevent the victorious Reich from ever acquiring its technological advantage.

James P. Hogan’s The Proteus Operation is a large, intricate time-travel thriller combining alternate history, espionage, wartime adventure and enough interference with causality to make an ordinary administrative error seem reassuringly straightforward. The mission sends agents back to the 1930s, where they must identify the source of Germany’s advantage, influence events without destroying their own reason for being there, and persuade suspicious people that they have arrived from a future everyone would strongly prefer not to experience.

The operation brings them into contact with scientists, intelligence officers and major historical figures, while the plot steadily expands into a struggle fought across both continents and timelines. Winston Churchill, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Albert Einstein and other familiar names appear, although they are denied the comfortable historical certainty enjoyed by the reader. History here is not a finished account in a book but a complicated machine being repaired while it is running, under enemy fire, by people whose own existence depends upon obtaining precisely the correct result.

Hogan approaches the paradoxes of time travel with his characteristic enthusiasm for explanation, argument and enormous conceptual machinery. The novel asks whether history can be altered, whether competing futures can coexist and what happens when more than one group begins revising the past for political purposes. It turns out that unrestricted access to time is much like unrestricted access to any powerful technology: before long, somebody uses it to help the Nazis.

Originally published in 1985, The Proteus Operation is ideal for readers who like alternate-history novels to contain both action and a substantial quantity of intellectual scaffolding. It offers secret missions, political manoeuvring, speculative physics and the unusually high-pressure task of saving a world that technically has not happened yet. This is not tourism in the past. Nobody packs a camera, buys a souvenir or avoids changing history by declining to tread on a butterfly.

This Bantam edition dates from 1991 and is in Good condition. It has evidently passed through time in the conventional direction at the standard rate and shows the reasonable effects of doing so, but remains sound, readable and ready for another expedition into the 1930s.

Sold by Crappy Old Books, where we rigorously preserve the established timeline. If the book arrives before you order it, however, please keep the matter confidential.

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