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.

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…

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….

What other types of perhaps more common evidence would one expect to find if these multiple universe theories were true?

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.

Thanks! And there you have it. Whatever “it” is…

Who is experiencing our other selves if this theory is correct?

We are?

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

In short, my growing thread on this is here:
http://catvincent.livejournal.com/432715.html

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

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.