About / Disclaimer

Snake Oil Review is primarily a research journal written by Paul Ballard (B.A (Hons), M.A), written to record initial thoughts and impressions on books and articles read for the purposes of a future Phd dissertation on science fiction and genre literature of the late 19th and 20th century.

To this end, most of the reviews will contain spoilers regarding plot. This is not to annoy potential readers, but merely to ensure that when I come to read my notes on the works my comments are supported by textual evidence, and to generally save myself time and bewilderment. If this means I have unwittingly spoiled a book for you, I apologize, but it is not my duty to protect you from spoilers.

That said, the blog also contains occasional reviews of newly published works that I deem interesting or worthy of note, and these will not contain spoilers of any sort.

Due it’s nature as a personal academic resource, the blog will mostly remain quite narrowly focussed on a small selection of big name science fiction authors, particularly Jules Verne, H.G. Wells, Arthur C Clarke, Robert Heinlein, Philip K Dick, and Isaac Asimov, as I attempt to read my way through their collected works to gain an overview of the major players in the field.

The work herein is licenced under a Creative Commons NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 unported license which basically means that you are free to use or modify this work in any way you see fit, unless it is for commercial purposes. You are free to use the ideas contained herein for personal or academic reasons, but please note that the work here presented is in no way peer-reviewed, so quoting it for your own academic work is highly unwise. You are free to do so if you wish, but please reference me properly as not doing so is plagiarism, which is also somewhat worse than using non-peer reviewed work for academic purposes. All said and done, if you are a student, I suggest you leave this website well alone and go do your research on J-store or in the library instead.

Thank-you for reading this page carefully, and for visiting Snake Oil Review. I hope you find my thoughts interesting and useful.