ABSTRACT
Throughout the story, Poe deliberately estranges real-life marvels of nature and triumphs of technology into fairy tale miracles. To amplify the effect, instead of a straightforward and unambiguous narration, he carefully selects facts and artifacts with singular properties, and employs a number of rhetorical tropes to increase the impression of futuristic novelty. Typically it has been assumed that fictional 'world's'- that is heuristic projections of the semantic space in which stories unfold-map onto possible worlds, those coherently complete and completely coherent projections of states as understood in possible-worlds semantics. The problem of figuring out the implicit story content is known in analytic philosophy as the problem of fictional truth. The whole point of 'Scheherazade' is that the natural and scientific wonders described by Poe really exist. But it is equally the case that we cannot employ the Reality Principle to interpret what happens elsewhere in the story.
