Star Gate

Average interest, most remarkable for being one of the first explorations of alternate worlds. There doesn't seem to be a series, so everything is back-story, and it took me awhile to get on-board, but the story was fairly and clearly told despite that.

Wikipedia info: Star Gate is a science fantasy

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novel by American writer Andre Norton, published by Harcourt, Brace & Company in 1958. The story is a blend of science fiction with sword and sorcery, continuing the premise that Norton introduced in The Crossroads of Time, mingling technologically advanced aliens (from Earth) with the natives of the far-off world Gorth and a native culture that has achieved the development level of Medieval Europe.

In her prologue [not in my copy], Norton mentions the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics that Hugh Everett III had presented the year before Star Gate was published. On the assumption that every quantum interaction splits the universe into two copies that evolve along separate historical tracks, Norton postulated a mechanism that enables people to travel between alternate versions of the same world and even meet alternate versions of themselves.

[Norton has another cross-time series that uses the same idea but doesn't seem to connect with this story.]

Goodreads summary: When Kincar s'Rud, of mixed Gorthian and Star Lord blood, followed the Star Lords through the shimmering gate that led to alternate universes, he found himself on a Gorth entirely different from the world he had known.

At first the Gorthians appeared to be the same, but his former friends turned out to be his enemies. For they were the people his friends might have been, had they made different choices at crucial moments in their lives.

And soon Kincar and his real allies would have to confront their own evil, might-have-been selves.

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