From captain Stormfield to captain Kirk : two twentieth-century representations of heaven

Abstract

This article examines two expressions of popular entertainment, nearly a century apart, that take the form of a traveller's yarn about a journey to the ultimate destination: heaven itself. One is a story by Mark Twain, the other one of the many Star Trek films. Although both share a broadly optimistic viewpoint, there are profound differences between them, the treatment of heaven within the two reflecting the kind of notion of heaven that audiences at respectively the beginning and end of the twentieth century were prepared to accept, or, more precisely, what the respective authors felt they could get away with.