Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven (1909)

Extract from Captain Stormfield's Visit to Heaven was published as a Christmas gift book in October 1909, six months before Twain's death. Combining science fiction with a satiric look at conventional views of the afterlife, Twain delivers an amusing and trenchant commentary on human vanity and pretensions. Much of the humor of the story rests on the sharp discrepancies between Stormfield's cocksure expectations of heaven and its reality. The Captain discovers, for instance, that the planet Earth, far from being the "crown of creation," is merely one of countless planets sending its departed inhabitants to the heavenly precincts. Indeed, we are so far from the center of things that it takes Stormfield 30 years of hurtling through space to get to heaven, only to find, when he arrives, that the head clerk cannot find our planet on his huge map. In his introduction, writer Frederik Pohl writes of this imaginative and thought-provoking story, "It's funny, it's colorful and it does the things that Twain intended it to do--one of them being to illustrate the silliness of the backwoods versions of Heaven and of religion in general."