From Aditi Tahiti:
okay, something really weird has happened in my household. we all distinctly remember ursula k le guin dying. it was headline yahoo news, cnn, death date on wikipedia, many myspace bulletins of people lamenting, on many forums around
the internet, etc. now…she is not dead. there are three of us in the household who remember this, one who doesn’t.do you remember hearing about her death? this would’ve been a month or two ago.
i am asking you because of your jack palance thread, so you know what this is all about. just a little bit freaked out over here…
If you don’t know the reference, Jack Palance allegedly died late last year and yet many of us remember distinctly otherwise. Speculations abound as to these defects in consensus reality being caused by the simple fact that we do not all live in the same universe - quite literally. I have likened it to Wikipedia articles which are merged and the lesser article is deleted.
Anyone with hard data “proving” that Ursula K. LeGuin died already may be eligible for cash prizes. Unfortunately, that cash may not be usable in our universe.
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26 Comments
Hi Tim,
After linking to this, a LJ friend suggested this could have been a mistake of identity, hearing of a similarly named writer. A quick scan (of the SF newsletter Ansible, which lists notable SF/Fantasy deaths monthly among othet things) suggested this:
Is it possible your correspondent was thinking of the death of Madeleine L’Engle, author of ‘A Wrinkle In Time’ and other works? Similar names and the date is about right.
Another possibility - LeGuin was recently interviewed in Death Ray magazine, which a quick glance may have been misinterpreted. Interview on .pdf here, thanks to LK Wildchylde:
http://www.ursulakleguin.com/Deathray-dr05_interview_leguin.pdf
First rule always applies to these and IMPO most occult flaps - look for the simplest and mundane explanations first, leaving room for the Forteana later. Not so much Occam’s Razor, more Cat’s Filter
Or it could have been Octavia Butler.
In short, my growing thread on this is here:
http://catvincent.livejournal.com/432715.html
No, we went through this with the Jack Palance thread and with others. It’s *not* a case of mistaken identity, though that is of course the simplest possible explanation. At the time, I distinctly remembered Jack Palance and not somebody else as having explicitly died and been memorialized in the media - and I found at least fifty other people online who shared my memory. In any case, I don’t ‘remember’ her dying, so I’m not the one to ask here…
Then I look forward to hearing more on this. I’ll forward anything evidential if it crosses my path.
Wonderful - thanks! That’s the power of the Universal Free Realms™!
This freaked me out until Cat Vincent mentioned Madeleine L’Engle. Once I realized it was L’Engle and not Ursula K. LeGuin, I understood the error.
The human brain is screwy.
At a coroner’s inquest, I was about to describe a knife I removed from the victim. Before I got a chance to do so, the ADA presented the knife. I knew for certain it was the knife I removed from the patient — but it was not the knife I would have described.
That one still weirds me out.
I’ve seen this happen before. If one of the first reports of a celebrity’s death has factual errors it get replicated until someone says “Hey. LeGuin didn’t write ‘A Wrinkle in Time’, L’Engle did.”. But, Jack Palance was declared dead twice and he’s not the only one that’s happened to.
Everyone seems to be conveniently ignoring what Aditi actually said - and you’ll have to take her at her word:
I saw this story and thought to myself- yes, I saw all those reports, and in fact I remember writing a blog entry about it. Searching my blog I can’t find LeGuin anywhere, so I go to the ‘obit’ tag, and there is the post I distinctly remember, only it was Madeleine L’Engle, not LeGuin. You had me convinced for a moment, there…
so my friend and i both posted bulletins on myspace asking people if they remembered (i have 2k friends, she has over 4k). the result was that many people had no idea what we were talking about or were like “who is ursula k le guin?” or “i love ursula k le guin, i am going to read some of her books now” but TWO PEOPLE responded to my friend stating “yes, i do remember URSULA K LE GUIN DYING.” one stated that they heard it broadcast on npr, and they dug through the npr archives for hours searching without finding anything about her death.
the other said:
I remember her death coming up, but very few specifics… Ok, No specifics. Maybe it was a hoax (but WHY???), maybe it was not THE Ursula K. LeGuin [but how many could there be?], maybe somebody just screwed up. But yes - I remember hearing of her death.
now, i understand where you guys may be coming from with the madeleine l’engle bit, because they’re two of the most prominent women in sci-fi. but i have been an avid reader since i was 5 and an on and off book scout for the past 6 years (one of the specialties being sci-fi), so it would be just odd if i as an anal virgo book scout had somehow interposed both them in my head for the past several months to the point of it coming to this! no, i and others distinctly remember ursula k le guin dying. i wish i hadn’t, as morbid as it all is, but that is where my memories lie.
Yeah, it sounds like LeGuin died in some universes but not in others.
Oh lord - LeGuin is one of my favorite authors and I’d be seriously bummed if she died. But no, I do not remember hearing anything about it. My first thought jibes with that of the first commenter above - maybe people were thinking of Madeleine L’Engle?
But I believe what Aditi Tahiti says, ’specially since I remember the Jack Palance double-death thing, too.
How exciting this is! Like working on a collaborative mystery sci-fi story.
My personsl experience over the last few years has suggested multiverses as one possible explanation (one that is most easily comprehended by me). So why is our consciousness, or this particular consciousness the one that is Here? Who is experiencing our other selves if this theory is correct?
Still nothing evidential from here yet - and thanks to aditi tahiti for clearing up the details. Sorry for the doubt - it’s a reflex as a pro paranormalist to eliminate the mundane explanation first!
I vaguely remember the Pallance story too. The one I had for a while was about whether Hawkwind founder Robert Calvert was alive in the early 1990s. Though his death was reported in ‘88, I recall posters for him being on tour around ‘92-93…
I have no problem with multiversal models and have had a few odd experiences with them myself. At the same time (being also multi-model by reflex) I wonder if there are any other plausible models to fit the data.
For example, in the Calvert case I could have mistook an old poster, or it could have been a tribute band, etc etc. These don’t apply here of course, but I’m wary of leaving it down to either misreporting or collapse-of-parallel-ficton-state-vector!
We are?
I believe it was when Michael Hutchence killed himself that I read an article written by a man who, while looking at pictures of Hutchence’s last days saw pictures of himself in the background. I would have forgotten about this but a few days ago my Mom saw herself in the crowd of a church listening to a sermon by some TV preacher. I told her about the man who was in the photos with Michael Hutchence and she got a shocked look on her face. She didn’t want to talk about that but she knew it was herself she had seen. ?!? I don’t know what it means either.
Uh, having never read any of her work, I flipped through some of her earthsea books a few months back after reading threads about her death absolutely everywhere. It seems that these days the text of reality is not merely fuzzy around the edges, it’s beginning to fold itself like origami.
I don’t remember hearing anything about Le Guin’s death. Le Guin is one of my favorite authours and I tend to pay attention to news, so hearing something about her death would have caught my attention. What reality do I live in?
Thanks! And there you have it. Whatever “it” is…
So um I don’t have any problems with the idea that on occasion Universes A and B intersect or get fuzzy at the edges. Guess my big question is: why are dead celebrities the only evidence we can come up with that this is happening? If this is something that’s really happening, shouldn’t there be better evidence than Jack Palance and Ursula Le Guin?
Celebrities, to me, seem to represent fixed reference points that many people hold in common. Deaths are events which notably reconfigure the landscape of fixed commonly-held reference points.
What other types of perhaps more common evidence would one expect to find if these multiple universe theories were true?
Well for one thing, I’d imagine that a lot of the ‘evidence’ would be stuff that we already consider ‘paranormal’ or ‘metaphysical.’ UFOs and the like.
But what about other common reference points? Likely stuff that would have been shared by millions: Television Shows? Movies? Books? Historical events? Does anyone very distinctly remember something that may have changed?
I havea weird one: when I was a kid in the American south, I very distinctly remember being taught about how horrible the *Klu* Klux Klan was. About Middle School I remember being extremely surprised to find out it was actually the *Ku* Klux Klan.
Then again, given the ‘infinite alternative universes’ theory, the evidence could be as minor as (say) the number of grains of sand along a two meter stretch of beach on Tristan de Cunha. We could theoretically enter a different universe every time we wake up in the morning and we’d never know b/c the differences wouldn’t be substantial.
Do you still have your Conspiracy Fiction stuff archived? We had a bunch of good stuff on there about alternative universes….
No, it was folded over into another universe…
Any specific example of ‘everywhere? Like newspapers, websites, anything you can name so we can get some solid evidence on this? That’d help immensely.
Well, if we did in fact move between universes, I doubt you’ll ever find hard evidence by browsing he internet.
I first saw it on the BBC news RSS feed in Firefox, then Metafilter where there was a long thread of dots and lamentations. After that I saw the news on quite a few personal blogs I stumbled across. The only specific I remember is that she died in Portland, OR and the news led me to check if I had any of her books in electronic format hidden on my hard drive somewhere.