In this short story, obviously mimicking the most-popular anthology of Middle Eastern folk tales, Poe approaches to the emerging science-fiction genre from a novel angle. After the original framing narrative is extended to incorporate the possibility of further stories, Scheherazade recounts the eight voyage of Sinbad. It's every bit as fantastical as the more famous tales. The only difference is that the reader will eventually realize that the discoveries and events depicted are all real.

Throughout the King comments on the absurdity of it all. I have to admit, initially I was very much with him. The colorful prose describes the events in terms reminiscent of the Islamic Golden Age. It was only when Sinbad came to talk about the mountain with its melted metal and thick ashen smoke that it dawned on me that he's talking about a volcano. What we were handed down from antiquity are cases of the truth being stranger than fiction, as Poe forthrightly puts it at the very beginning.

When Sinbad arrives in the country of his hosts – bizarre human-like creatures that travel on the back of a giant whose slaves they are – he finds the most capable magicians. Within the science-fiction community, there is the common doctrine tirelessly preached that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and this is what happens here. These include technologies as seemingly mundane as electricity (via the voltaic pile), photography (via the daguerréotype) or the electrical telegraph, but Sinbad also discovers what is essentially Babbage's calculating machine (an early predecessor of the digital computer) and the chess-playing "Mechanical Turk" makes an appearance (as it does in other stories of Poe's). Newton's most meticulous measurements are referenced and Sinbad is shown other experiments common in Natural Philosophy. They are so learned that they know that many of the heavenly bodies visible in the night sky are in fact extinguished for a very long time.

The author – I'm not sure if it was the fictional narrator or Poe himself – furnished the text with references to his sources and explains some occurrences in more details and in more scientific terms. It seems hardly necessary. In the present age, many wonders of even Poe's days have become so common that we hardly even notice them. To my mind, the story's main merit is that it reminds us of the wonders in the seemingly mundane.