The thing you will have to remember throughout this report is that we are talking about 1982, an almost unimaginably long time ago in technological terms. For ordinary people in their private lives, there were no mobile phones, no internet, no world wide web, no email. Cameras were bulky and required feeding with film. Computers were huge things in air-conditioned rooms that messed up your bank statement, or tried to take over the world, or exploded when confronted with the “All Cretans are liars” paradox.

Personal computers were just beginning – IBM had not long produced the first ‘PC’, costing £5,000 – but I’ve seen door knobs with more processing power. If you needed to write in anything other than half-illegible handwriting you used a typewriter. If you produced a fanzine, you typed it, duplicated the pages and stapled it together. You sent it by post, or handed it over to people at conventions or whichever pub your local sf group met at.

Posting things across the Atlantic was either (a) expensive (air mail) or (b) very slow (by ship). Transatlantic phone calls were also expensive. So the fandoms knew about each other mainly through the medium of fanzines and letters.