Books like The Proteus Operation

I went through a big Jim Hogan kick a few years back. I picked this one up recently in a second-hand bookshop, and I think I can now more clearly see both Hogan's strengths and his weaknesses. He's easy to get addicted to, easy to dislike when you're not addicted.The premise: the Allies lost the second world war; Britain was conquered, Germany and Japan control the world, and by the 1970s the US is under threat of extinction. So the US forms a crack team of soldiers and scientists, comprised of refugees from all over the planet, and sends them through a time machine to 1938 to change the course of history.It's WWII fanfic, essentially. There's a fair amount of detail about important political meetings, and battles won or lost, though these are mostly stated rather than shown. Various historical figures get walk-on parts, with almost no attempt at characterization (a real shame in the case of Churchill) other than having Einstein speak English with a tortured Yoda-like grammar. All content and no form.The science fiction is good, with a nice paradox-free time travel mechanism based on parallel histories. To his credit, Hogan does an excellent job of explaining how the key points differ in each timeline without ever having to explicitly say and this is how it happened in real life!—all the timelines feel about equally plausible. Once you get over the lack of surface sheen, the plot rattles along pretty well, culminating (like almost all his books) in a storming-the-base sequence towards the end. And Hogan storms a good base! Everything is more fun when it involves Nazis getting punched out.There's a bit of a libertarian, jingoistic edge that gets a little wearing, though not to an excessive degree. I don't disagree that freedom and democracy are awesome, but it seems inaccurate to claim that Nazi Germany was completely intellectually stunted. Okay, they didn't invent the Bomb, but where did all the brains behind the US rocket programme come from?Overall, the different elements don't quite gel, so the result is a fun potboiler but not a whole lot more. The time travel elements are a bit too neat and tidy: no paradoxes, no weirdness, no ragged holes left for your imagination to fill in.