God hates Kansas...

It's a cliche... or at least it was until the early 70s, that "God hates Kansas."

What's that all about?

Isaac Asimov wrote about it in one of his essays for the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, "The Real Finds Waiting."

There are iron meteorites and stony meteorites.

For a long time it was considered that stony meteorites were rather unusual and that it was the iron meteorite that was typical. Of the stony meteorites that were discovered, a disproportionately large number were discovered, in the 1930s, in Kansas.

I can well remember John Campbell, the late editor of Astounding Science Fiction, telling me of this very unusual fact and that scientists couldn't explain it. I even seem to remember he wrote an editorial on the subject and that a novella was written called The Gods Hate Kansas...(November, 1941 Startling Stories).

...

There just isn't any pure iron occurring naturally in the earth's crust, you see, thanks to the high oxygen atmosphere, all crustal iron is in the form of oxides and silicates. Any iron you find on Earth's surface now is either man-made or meteoric, and in the days before the Iron Age, any iron you found was meteoric. Iron meteorites were therefore east to recognize if found, for if an object were iron, it was automatically a meteorite.

Not so stony meteorites. Earth's land surface is richer in stones, generally speaking, than in anything else. Whether a stone has fallen from the sky or has been there all along as part of the planet cannot be told at first glnce.

...

On the other hand, in an area such as Kansas, where the soil is deep and where surface rocks are virtually non-existent, the presence of any rock is unusual enough to call attention to itself, and stony meteorites are much more easily located...

The gods don't hate Kansas; they hate all places equally. It's just more noticeable in Kansas.