Review: Is Twain Still Wearing his Wings?
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 11 1, 2013
According to Twain, Heaven is years from earth, even when you are transported at .1 speed of light. It is huge, containing souls from multiple worlds, creatures only imagined by later SciFy authors. Multiple gates, minimal entry conditions. There is a caste system, and receptions for those who never received reward during life.I wish that wings were more than decoration, but according to Sandy, an elderly resident, you travel by WISHING yourself around to greet new arrivals, or return to earth with divine messages. Most inhabitants only dress up for formal occasions- halo, harp and wings being a sort of uniform.Sandy tells Stormfield: Heaven is a libertarian place- plenty of room, do as you please, appear any age- but it is not paradise as imagined on earth. Idleness does get old, and please do not irritate the patriarchs. Sandy is a keen observer of people in Heaven.The rest of the tale is similarly imaginative. Twain enlivens things by speaking in the argot of a 19th century sailing master, sprinkling dialogue with phrases like:' An ordinary comet don't make more than about 200,000 miles a minute.  Of course when I came across one of that sort--like Encke's and Halley's comets, for instance--it warn't anything but just a flash and a vanish, you see.  You couldn't rightly call it a race.  It was as if the comet was a gravel-train and I was a telegraph despatch.  But after I got outside of our astronomical system, I used to flush a comet occasionally that was something like.  We haven't got any such comets--ours don't begin.  One night I was swinging along at a good round gait, everything taut and trim, and the wind in my favor--I judged I was going about a million miles a minute--it might have been more, it couldn't have been less--when I flushed a most uncommonly big one about three points off my starboard bow. 'Now, this was published 1907, and an early manuscript exists from 1868!