AIRHOME 2020: WELL, PERHAPS THE YEAR IN WHICH I SET THIS CONCEPT IS JUST A LITTLE OPTIMISTIC

Here's the dream... a high dive, ending with a plunge into an infinity pool, suspended in the air by a hidden set of near-silent anti-gravity coils. In reality of course, we don't even know exactly what gravity is, let alone make machines that can use gravity as a force or cancel its effects.

But it's nice to dream for sure, and the visual above was a desktop thought for such a residence. Drawn in August 1988 (and coloured in 2023 using the excellent Procreate app), I set the scene in a notional 2020 timeframe. But since that year has now been and gone, I reckon it's more realistic to place the scene much further ahead, let's say in the next century, year 2121.

In the republished Book of the Future, Kenneth Gatland and I were forced to be as realistic as possible. The books in the series were aimed at international education markets, so Ken and I couldn't be too off the wall in our predictions – sad to say!

However, if humans can finally leave near-Earth space and venture beyond our local zone into the Solar System proper, then access to zero- and low-gee environments could well become humanity's new normal. So, with or without anti-gravity machinery, many (perhaps eventually, most) humans may learn to regard being chained to high-gee planetary environments as belonging to the dark and distant past.