Afterword to “The Ungood Earth”:
Bill: We wrote this story in 1984, and characters refer to the year 2010 as being in the future. Now, with that year well behind us, many technological details in the story have obviously not been developed yet. Even so, the heart of the story remains true: Agribusiness is gradually overwhelming family farms.
For mysterious reasons known only to Rob, in 1984 he was interested in collaborating on a short story with me. In the spring of that year, we went to a con in Omaha, where we continued getting better acquainted. This often involved humor that left us both laughing and seemed to enhance the idea that we either responded to the same sort of humor or simply laughed at each other. Those are not, of course, mutually exclusive.
Around the same time, Rob m
