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347th out of 1,750 books
—
1,535 voters
Foop
by
Chris Genoa (Goodreads Author)
Meet Joe, the ill-fated tour guide at the center of a story that beings with the death of Abraham Lincoln, at Joe's hands. There are strange happenings going on at Dactyl, Inc., the world's first and only time travel tourism company. So strange that Joe, a tour guide, is promoted to the new position of Chief of Probes. His first probe: find out who's been traveling back in...more
Paperback, 322 pages
Published
March 24th 2005
by Eraserhead Press
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First novel from some nutjob who likes to wear bear suits in his author photos. It's from a small press, so there are some typos (but what book doesn't have typos these days?), but dear Lord is this guy funny. I think he may also be borderline insane, but he manages to keep it together just enough to write one hell of a funny book. Fans of Palahniuk, Hunter Thompson, Augusten Burroughs, and probably Douglas Adams (because of the comedic sci-fi'ish elements) should dig Foop!
Dec 29, 2011
Shayna L
rated it
1 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
no one but those who deserve to suffer
When this book begins, it's alright. Not stunning by a long shot, but ok. There's time travel, which is kinda neat. The plot has chances to become interesting. I'd have given it 3 stars just based on the start. Some things were less promising, though. Let's start with the characters.
Joe is our main character. He's boring and whiny and very lonely and, unfortunately, you have to hear the entire book from his sad POV. Joe spends a much too large piece of this book talking about how alone and despe...more
Joe is our main character. He's boring and whiny and very lonely and, unfortunately, you have to hear the entire book from his sad POV. Joe spends a much too large piece of this book talking about how alone and despe...more
This book is one of the slew that has been coming out of the west coast "avante-punk" movement that emphasizes the absurd and surreal. Foop! has it's moments where it almost becomes interesting--where the plot or ideas seemingly start to come together--but never does. It's a tale of a time-travelling tour guide who witnesses first-hand how his exploits begin to unravel the infamous but undefined "space-time continuum." In theory, this is a pretty fantastic idea but in execution, Chris Genoa gets...more
Jul 24, 2009
Alan
rated it
4 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
Gropers for the absurd
Recommended to Alan by:
The PCC library shelves
This is a crazy, loopy, surreal book. I ran across it quite by chance, perusing the shelves at a local community college library, and it was only after checking it out that I saw the cover blurb by a favorite writer of mine, Christopher Moore, that probably would have clinched the deal if I hadn't already been hooked.
Foop! was published by a local printing house, Eraserhead Press (though that site is now redirecting toward something called "Bizarro Central" that I'm not sure I like), and definit...more
Foop! was published by a local printing house, Eraserhead Press (though that site is now redirecting toward something called "Bizarro Central" that I'm not sure I like), and definit...more
Another book, that's probably more like a 3.5 than a 4. However, as a 1st novel from someone it's definitely entertaining and the imagery inside is much better than average.
Time travel highlights one of the major themes, with a similar feel to elements of "Cat's Cradle" by Vonnegut.
It's got a share of humor as well as sci-fi, and the underlying premise of the difficulties and desires of human connectivity.
Solid effort.
Time travel highlights one of the major themes, with a similar feel to elements of "Cat's Cradle" by Vonnegut.
It's got a share of humor as well as sci-fi, and the underlying premise of the difficulties and desires of human connectivity.
Solid effort.
Well, I expected a slightly bizarre, humorous read, and I will have to say that this delivered. Personally I would have rated the first half higher and the second half lower, but I am content averaging at four stars.
We start with the premise of a time travel agency that takes tour groups back in time to see interesting events, and eventually resolve to a strange multi-dimensional exploration of sorts. Of course, thinking this represents a hard sci-fi story is big mistake. We have blind, smoking...more
We start with the premise of a time travel agency that takes tour groups back in time to see interesting events, and eventually resolve to a strange multi-dimensional exploration of sorts. Of course, thinking this represents a hard sci-fi story is big mistake. We have blind, smoking...more
Joe is a lonely, ugly, frankly pathetic time travel tour guide. After shooting Lincoln, though, he gets his first promotion ever, to Chief of Probes. His duty is to find out who is torturing his extremely unlikeable boss Mr. Burk at various points in his timeline. Burk himself is no help, due to the Shaved Cat Principle. In addition to this, and his own overwhelming ineffectiveness, Joe must deal with a pair of freakish stalkers, cultists with flashlights, and the unraveling of time itself. The...more
Foop! starts off on a strong note, but it too convinced of its own wit to be anything more than a disappointment.
It should have been more entertaining and it’s trying so hard to be.
A Douglas Adams-like story about the absurdities surrounding time travel and its implication, Foop! never lives up to its early promise. The middle lags a lot and I figured out where the story was headed long before the main characters did. Whether it’s because I’ve read a bit of these type of stories in the past or i...more
It should have been more entertaining and it’s trying so hard to be.
A Douglas Adams-like story about the absurdities surrounding time travel and its implication, Foop! never lives up to its early promise. The middle lags a lot and I figured out where the story was headed long before the main characters did. Whether it’s because I’ve read a bit of these type of stories in the past or i...more
Hilarious... but I may have donated it to Amsterdam. Oops.
Jun 29, 2009
John
added it
0 stars - Don't bother.
One of my guilty pleasures is absurd humor novels like stuff written by Douglas Adams (hitchhikers guide to the galaxy), Tom Holt (Beowolf), Christopher Moore (Fluke). I ran on to Foop by Chris Genoa while searching for reviews on Amazon.com for Tom Holt books. Amazon has a section of "People who liked the book you're searching for also liked......" It sounded crazy and funny so I thought I'd give it a try. Dick has a 50 page rule before quitting, I tend to give an auther...more
One of my guilty pleasures is absurd humor novels like stuff written by Douglas Adams (hitchhikers guide to the galaxy), Tom Holt (Beowolf), Christopher Moore (Fluke). I ran on to Foop by Chris Genoa while searching for reviews on Amazon.com for Tom Holt books. Amazon has a section of "People who liked the book you're searching for also liked......" It sounded crazy and funny so I thought I'd give it a try. Dick has a 50 page rule before quitting, I tend to give an auther...more
a fun read
Aliens, robots, other planets, time travel, dystopias. All these archetypes of science fiction make their appearance in one fashion or another in
Foop!
, a first novel by Chris Genoa.[return][return]Foop! is a comedic and at times scatological look at where the Earth may be headed and why. Its hero is Joe, who, as the name implies, is just an average guy. Joe is a tour guide for the world's first time travel tourism company. He is assigned the task of discovering why persons unknown seem to be a...more
An Ok first effort. i thought there probably could have been about 100 pages less, because there was a lot of unnecessary filler content peppered through out this book. i also think this novel should have done away of the swearing and sex and just made this into a children's novel, i think it may have worked out better, could have made the story stronger and allowed the author to really explore the nether-regions of his creative sub-conscience. instead of going for a shock factor.
my major qualm...more
my major qualm...more
When I marked Foop! "to-read", and subsequently found it at the library staring me in the face, I was delighted. Based mostly on the title, and somewhat on Goodreads' description, I was hoping to be caught up in a wacky science fiction adventure in the tradition of Douglas Adams. The sound "foop", you see, is what the Krikkit Masters' robots' ship makes when it departs (presumably through a wormhole) in Life The Universe and Everything. Well, I got about 100 pages in, the latter 50 or so by forc...more
Sep 05, 2008
Rob
rated it
2 of 5 stars
Recommended to Rob by:
Amazon.com
Shelves:
2008,
science-fiction
In my mind, Chris Genoa is some experimental plant hybridized in an Army research lab -- a little Warren Ellis pollen sprinkled onto the pistil of the Christopher Moore blossom. The experiment yields fruit but they're not taking it out of the greenhouse lab quite yet; perhaps further cross-pollinating it with the rare Tom Robbins tree? Time will tell...
As for Foop!: time travel is one of science fiction's oldest and therefore toughest tropes. Choosing to accept this assignment (in a poetical sen...more
As for Foop!: time travel is one of science fiction's oldest and therefore toughest tropes. Choosing to accept this assignment (in a poetical sen...more
I really liked this.. I've read a fair number of Eraserhead Press books and have found them hit-or-miss, especially as of late. I think the bizarro genre as a whole is that way though, more so than most others. Foop! had what a lot of bizarro fic books lack: a solid plot. So often authors are pushing so hard to be "bizarre" that it just winds up being a jumbled mess of forced strangeness without the benefit of a decent storyline. Foop! having a good plot makes it less "bizarro" perhaps, but a mo...more
Foop! by Chris Genoa is an appealing science-fiction farce with healthy doses of amusing social commentary. I liked Foop! but wanted to like it more. All the ingredients were there, and it did taste good, but I couldn’t help but think that a dash more of this and a little less of that would have really made it a great read.
The story follows a rather overwhelmed and juvenile Joe, a time travel tour guide. We join Joe in crisis, having to step in for John Wilkes Booth and assassinate Abraham Linco...more
The story follows a rather overwhelmed and juvenile Joe, a time travel tour guide. We join Joe in crisis, having to step in for John Wilkes Booth and assassinate Abraham Linco...more
This is arguably the best book ever written. You should go read it now.
This is one of the few books I have read more than once and I have probably read it 5-6 times. I usually don't like the main character in books, but I love Joe. Even though I kind of don't like to admit it, I can very much relate to Joe. Sometimes when I am feeling down, I read this book to make me feel better about life. It is like therapy.
Here are a few things that make this book awesome:
- They travel in time.
- The shaved...more
This is one of the few books I have read more than once and I have probably read it 5-6 times. I usually don't like the main character in books, but I love Joe. Even though I kind of don't like to admit it, I can very much relate to Joe. Sometimes when I am feeling down, I read this book to make me feel better about life. It is like therapy.
Here are a few things that make this book awesome:
- They travel in time.
- The shaved...more
I have to say, this was probably one of the strangest books I've ever read. It is hard to say I actually liked it, but I couldn't stop reading. I had to find out where these disturbed, lunatic creations of the author were going to end up.
There were a few issues that could have been fixed in the novel with tighter editing, but for a first novel, published by a small press to boot, this was not a bad start to what may be a lucrative career for Chris Genoa.
There were a few issues that could have been fixed in the novel with tighter editing, but for a first novel, published by a small press to boot, this was not a bad start to what may be a lucrative career for Chris Genoa.
This being a first novel I was super impressed. It did have quite a few typos, but almost everything does nowadays it seems like. The only author that has even come close to equaling the hilarity of Douglas Adams. It was so refreshing to read a so called humorous book that actually made me laugh. Reminded me quite a bit of Rudy Rucker, especially his book, Master Of Space And Time.
Overall, I really enjoyed it and would love to read more from this author.
Overall, I really enjoyed it and would love to read more from this author.
I'm a sucker for time travel stories, so Foop! is right up my alley. And it's witty as hell, though somewhat digressive and even rambling at moments. But as silly and far-flung and downright weird as the plot gets, it's never boring, and Joe's voice rings true through it all: funny, observant, yet so jaded and lonely that even time travel is "just a job," and not a good one.
As you may be able to tell from the list of reviews, this is the type of book that you will either love or hate. There is not a lot of room in between. It is a bizarre time travel/alternate world story replete with disturbing, if somewhat pointless, imagery. Love it or hate it, it is a book that will stay with you.
This book was possibly on of the weirdest things I have ever read. For all the weird content it was very funny. The way the book ends was the opposite of what I thought would happen but I was actually kind of happy with the way it ended which was surprising, if you get the chance to read this give it a shot.
Most of this book is weirdly funny in a Tom Robbins kind of way. It has a palpable amateur feel to it, and there are quite a few typos in the text. Don't expect any life changing epiphanies while reading Foop!, but expect to be thoroughly entertained.
I was sad because I thought this book had a lot of promise from the description and the opening scene. Cute cover too. But it really wandered all over the place and didn't make much sense.
If you love Douglas Adams, you might like this book. Not nearly as good as Adams, but a pretty good read none the less. The first chapter is very, very funny.
Wow. ... I'm speechless... don't really know how I feel about the book. Funny and weird and crazy. OK, I've decided I like it... I think...
I got this book as an ARC and reviewed it for SFF World and here is the link. http://www.sffworld.com/brevoff/170.html
I thought this would be like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, which it kind of was, but not nearly as good.
I found myself skimming through a lot of this, never a good sign.
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Chris Genoa is the author of Foop! (2005, Eraserhead Press), Lick Your Neighbor (2010, Eraserhead Press), and The Monkey & the Barrel (2011).
More about Chris Genoa...
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Aug 30, 2008 07:46pm