Gem X

by Nicky Singer

In a world where perfection rules, Maxo Strang is king. He is a GemX, a boy genetically manipulated to be flawless. But then Maxo discovers a wrinkle in his face. This can't happen to him. It happens only to the Dreggies - the wretched underclass of unenhanced 'naturals' who live outside the Polis.

Genres: Science Fiction, Dystopia, Teen, Young Adult, Futuristic, Adventure, Fiction

305 pages, Paperback

First published April 15, 2008

About the author

Nicky has written four novels for adults, two books of non-fiction but most of her recent work is for young people. Her first children’s novel Feather Boy won the Blue Peter ‘Book of the Year’ Award, was adapted for TV (winning a BAFTA for Best Children’s Drama) and then commissioned by the National Theatre as a musical with lyrics by Don Black and music by Debbie Wiseman. In 2010 Nicky was asked by Glyndebourne to adapt her novel Knight Crew (a re-telling of the King Arthur legend set in contemporary gangland) for an opera with music by Julian Philips. In 2012 her play Island (about ice-bears and the nature of reality) premiered at the National Theatre and toured 40 London schools. She also published The Flask that year. A story about songs and souls and things which live in bottles, The Guardian called The Flask ‘a nourishing and uplifting story, with big themes and a big heart’. Nicky has recently re-written Island as a novel with illustrations by Children’s Laureate, Chris Riddell.

Reviews

[Carrie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a terrible book. Seriously. Its one redeeming quality is, weirdly, how terrible it is. It's so bad that it's funny, and that's the only reason I kept reading it after the first 25 pages.

Maxo Strang: Maxo Strang is a "perfect" teenager who discovers a crack in his face - or at least that's how they lure you in. It's really a wrinkle, and he just didn't know what it was. So after that it gets kind of boring. People's skin cracking like porcelain is interesting. Genetically engineered teenagers developing wrinkles is not. Anyway. Maxo basically falls in love with a girl whose picture he saw once on TV. Then he stalks her and becomes obsessed with kissing her foot. Charming, huh?

Leaderene Euphony Clore: Her name is my favorite, because it's quite ridiculous.

Gala, Stretch, Daz, Pearl, and Finn Lorell: I never felt any conenction to them at all. I mean, I'm sorry the mom (Pearl) is dying of cancer, and the dad is an idiot who gambled himself into so much debt that it's apparently taking nine years of working at the casino to pay it off. Also, he would have won enough money to save Pearl's life, but he had to gamble it away. But seriously, why would Gala and Stretch still love their father? He didn't talk to them for two years and refuses to talk to them until about seven years in the future, because he gambled while he was drunk, and they run right into his arms like nothing happened? THAT IS, LIKE, SO REALISTIC!

Gala + Maxo: Ew. He only met her because he's an obsessed stalker creep. It was insta-love. Gala basically fell for him, for ABSOLUTELY NO REASON EXPLAINED TO THE READER.

World Building: Oh, God. Don't even get me started on how terrible the world building was. Everything was just one word capitalized, with another word capitalized next to it and no spaces.
*PoppaPill
*FullFlavorSpoon
*OpalMilk
*LongAgoStrawberry
*GemX (duh)
*SecuriScreen

DARN IT! I had so many weird words like that... I'll look at the book and find more later.

Moving on.. I also hated what the city was named. The Polis. Polis means city. Essentially, the city is named "The City".


Anyway, this is one of the worst books I have ever read. If not for being accidentally hilarious, it would be a one star book.
I would only recommend this to the type of person (like me) who occasionally enjoys reading books that are so badly written, it's funny. Or anyone who has a grudge against Nicky Singer and would enjoy making fun of her.

[Karin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Maxo Strang is one of the most perfect people in the Polis, an exclusive district where only genetically enhanced people can live. He is the GenOff (offspring) of the most important scientist in the Polis. Igo Strang, Maxo's father, is the lead scientist for the Polis. It is his job to continually improve the enhancements. He is always striving for perfections. With the model, GemX, he thinks he is as close to perfect as he can get. Maxo is a GemX.

Maxo enjoys a luxurious life in the Polis. He never gives much thought to the Dreggies that live outside the check points - until he sees Gala on the video screen. Maxo's life is turned upside down when a flaw in the GemX model is discovered. It seems "cracks," a.k.a. wrinkles, are appearing on many of their faces and it is up to Igo Strang to figure out what is causing the unexpected early aging in thousands of the most promising young people of the Polis. The problem is, the leaders don't want to give him the time it will take. Their solution is much more drastic.

Maxo is thrown into an unknown world when he attempts to save himself and others from the secrecy and lies of the Polis.

GEMX didn't live up to it's description. The speed at which Maxo and Gala become obsessed with each other is unbelievable and the story didn't move fast enough. I felt like I was forcing myself to get through it.

[Jamie · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ok, another clony kinda book, but the problem with this one is that there is so much language/world building given without context that it's hard to follow and consequently you don't really care. I couldn't even plot synopsize, as I lost track well before the halfway point.

[Maggie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dystopian future tale with a lot of made up language some of which can be a bit off-putting. Many of the names are ridiculous - I found it annoying to have humorous names in a book that wasn't supposed to be funny.

[Nick · Rating 2 out of 5]

This story starts out with a strong, interesting premise. In a future society, the upper class gets all of the benefits and perks, including genetic and physical modification, to achieve perfect beauty. If you’re rich enough, you can tailor your child’s genes to perfection. The title of the book refers to a particular “model” of these children, whose members are all in their mid-teens as the story begins.
One day Maxo, one of these perfect Gem X children discovers the unthinkable…at the age of 16, his face develops a “crack” in it. Projected to live to 135, he learns that he is suddenly aging rapidly. Luckily, his father is a premier biologist, who promises a quick solution…just as soon as he figures out the cause.
Oddly, the author took this complex and fascinating premise, and ran it into the ground. Too many things fail to make sense, or are never explained. I don’t like it when authors use science as the basis of a story, and then treat it like magic, of the “it does what I say it does” variety.
Gem X fails to live up to its promise, and is quite disappointing. The ending made me want to throw the book at the author, and say “Fix it!” It disturbs me that her original editor didn’t do the same thing.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

Maxo Strang is one of the most genetically perfect beings on the planet. He lives in the Polis, an exclusive city where only enhanced humans are allowed to live. His life is turned upside down when he finds a crack on his face one day. His lot is thrown in with Gala and Stretch-two 'natural' teenagers who are searching for their father-who disappeared years before.

[Ann · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought this was a pale variation on the Uglies/Pretties trilogy from Westerfeld, and many others. the book takes a great premise and doesn't DO anything with it that we haven't seen before.

[P.M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maxo Strang is devastated because a crack has appeared near his temple. He is a GEM X, genetically enhanced to be intellectually and physically superior. Something must be drastically wrong and he hopes his GenPap, a brilliant scientist and leading expert in genetics, will tell him what’s wrong. Meanwhile, Gala,and her brothers Stretch and Daz, want to find their missing father to honor a last request from their dying mother. Another anomaly is Clodrone 1640 who is beginning to think (he has been engineered only to follow orders) and have strange memories of someone called Finn. These three divergent paths come together after an Atrocity arranged by the Leaderene to cover up the emerging problem with the degradation of the GEM X line. This is another one of those dystopian novels which seems to be becoming more prevalent lately. I didn't like this books in the beginning because Maxo was so narcissistic but he began to be more sympathetic as he delved deeper into the secrets of his culture. My favorite character was the Clodrone 1640 and I felt so sad about the utter despair that led him to his final decision.

[aLly · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are a lot of good things happening in this book, but my love for it mostly comes from the little details, like writing style and word usage. For me, the writing style is very well done.The characters are mostly well written, and the setting is very vivid. There are an impressive number of storylines happening simultaneously, but I was never lost or confused as to who was speaking.

The basic plot involves the concept of perfection, and the problems with chasing it. For me, the overall feel of the book fell in the middle of science fiction and dystopia. The book roughly follows Maxo Evangele Strang, who is genetically "perfect", as he interacts and learns from those who are not genetically modified.

[Stephen · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a book written by Nicky Singer in 2006, four years before she wrote her award winning Feather Boy, and what a difference four years makes!

GemX is the story about a dystopian future in which the genetically modified form the new elite and the unmodified (called Dreggies) live in slum like conditions, often going without even running water for days on end, and denied access to medical care for "eradicated" diseases (those that the enhanced no longer get).

The basic premise has been reprised many times, of course, but as this book is 11 years old, it comes before many of the more recent versions, although 9 years after the movie Gattica, so it is neither greatly original nor hugely derivative.

Singer does work hard to make her world distinctive. She has a mountain of vocabulary, to the point of distraction. She has a dictator who is weird but not quite President-Snow-Evil. The enhanced live sterile lives without human contact, and eating pills instead of food. A lot of that just seems odd, unlikely, but clearly an important statement in the polemic of the book.

Mentioning the polemic of the book, it very much lacks subtlety. The inequality, and what is lost is very much pushed in your face. There is no mistaking the point the author wishes to make.

In any case things go wrong with this future society. Maxo, who is perhaps the protagonist (more on that in a moment) discovers a crack in his perfect best of the best GemX face. He quickly searches the net to discover that this is a wrinkle, which is unheard of because he is just 16. It soon emerges that this fault is occurring in all the GemXs, and so his father fights to find a fix, while darker forces move to have the whole generation eradicated in what will be blamed on the Dreggies as a terrorist attack.

The plot meandered along, and there are other plot lines and other characters. There is Gala, a Dreggie girl, and her siblings, and a clone bred to be a docile slave who is finding rebellious feelings. The problem is that the story is told from each of their perspectives, and it was not entirely clear who the protagonist was. Occasionally there was even mid chapter head popping, and this seems to be the major flaw of the book which also slowed the story down.

Ultimately the book was not that exciting and the end, whilst perhaps intelligently open, left me thinking "meh".

I bought this book second hand years ago, and it sat on my shelf ever since. Having forced my way through it, I was left thinking that maybe I should have not bought it in the first place.

Maybe that is too negative a comment to leave this review on, so I will say that Nicky Singer's strengths as a writer were definitely foreshadowed in the writing here, and she was clearly inventive too. I cannot recommend the book, but it is not the worst thing I have ever read.

[Becky · Rating 2 out of 5]

What kind of book is Gem X? According to the jacket, it is a "gripping futuristic thriller" about the consequences of genetic engineering. Gem X is the story of three teens primarily. Maxo Strang is an Enhanced human. He's got the wealth, the privilege, physically and materially he has everything going for him. Gala and Stretch are brother and sister. Both dreggies. Naturals. Their genes are still "clean." And their clean genes are really the only things they have going for them. For it is these genes which they can sale to the Enhanced scientists for money. The Dreggies--all of them--are poverty stricken, prone to disease, lacking in proper food and water and medical care. Their lives are dismal--at least on the surface. They live in broken down buildings and often lack water and electricity.

Why do the Enhanced need 'clean genes.' Well, their bodies and minds sometimes develop flaws. Clean genes are needed to fix certain problems. These scientists are far from perfect though they like to play god with the human body. Natural "meshing" is not allowed. Touching is not allowed. Everything is done 'virtually' when it comes to dating. And genetic matches must be approved by others (not sure if it's just the parents who get a vote or if the government/scientists must approve as well.) But the whole process is very cold and distant compared to what it should be.

Our story begins when Maxo discovers that he has a crack on his face. This combined with the revelation that all Gem X'ers are developing cracks (or wrinkles) on their faces. Something is wrong--desperately and dangerously wrong!

These stories connect--as you can imagine--and I suppose you could easily classify it as a thriller. It's always moving.

The premise of this one was interesting. I can't deny that. But at the same time, it failed, in a way, to work for me. While hypothetically interesting, I just didn't seem to connect with the characters. I didn't feel their angst, their pain, their confusion. Part of this could have been intentional. The Enhanced humans are supposedly free from being "bogged down" by emotional drama and whatnot. They're very cold and calculating. Very me-me-me oriented. Maxo's parents, especially his mother, is very cold, frigid, and just a horrible person. She has no heart and no depth. Maxo's father is slightly more human. He does seem to care, but for the most part he has been too blinded to really realize how much he is lacking in the fatherhood department. There are other human characters, human adult characters, that just seem odd and out of place in this text. I was never quite sure what to make of them.

Singer has created a world that is very chaotic. A world that is complex. A world that has its own organization, its own vocabulary, its own status quo. The readers never really get an orientation to its history, its politics, its society, its science. And because of that it is a world that could be a bit too confusing to readers. I can't and won't speak for everyone. But I know there were elements that confused me.

[Tenara · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this book was very interesting. The writer has a large number of characters to switch to so that before anything new happens, the reader knows what's going on with each character. After an event takes place, the author switches to all of our characters so we can see what has happened to them during this event.

GemX is obviously in the future of Earth. It's a little like the movie Gattaca, in that there's a different kind of bigotry; genetically enhanced and those that are natural. The Enhanced are all different Gem's (I don't know why it's not called Gen, like Generation, but whatever) and Maxo, our protagonist, is a GemX. There begins to be flaws in the GemX's perfect faces - wrinkles (or cracks) are beginning to form in places that not even Naturals or "Dreggies" have. The logical, thought processing, egotistical, and quick thinking brains are beginning to dregaid back to "Dreggie" emotions, like anger, fear, gratitude, humility, lust, love, ecstasy. Maxo meets Gala, a Natural, and her brother, Phylo "Stretch" Lorrell.

I liked it a lot, but I found that it was sometimes a little irritating when the author wrote for huge paragraphs at a time about things that had not a lot to do with the actual outcome of the story. What was never explained was how the human race actually became this divided, or what the story was behind the names of "The ChristianCult" or "The Global Warming Catastrophe" or the slang word of "celeb". But I did like it a lot.

[P.M. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maxo Strang is devastated because a crack has appeared near his temple. He is a GEM X, genetically enhanced to be intellectually and physically superior. Something must be drastically wrong and he hopes his GenPap, a brilliant scientist and leading expert in genetics, will tell him what’s wrong. Meanwhile, Gala,and her brothers Stretch and Daz, want to find their missing father to honor a last request from their dying mother. Another anomaly is Clodrone 1640 who is beginning to think (he has been engineered only to follow orders) and have strange memories of someone called Finn. These three divergent paths come together after an Atrocity arranged by the Leaderene to cover up the emerging problem with the degradation of the GEM X line. This is another one of those dystopian novels which seems to be becoming more prevalent lately. I didn't like this books in the beginning because Maxo was so narcissistic but he began to be more sympathetic as he delved deeper into the secrets of his culture. My favorite character was the Clodrone 1640 and I felt so sad about the utter despait that led him to his final decision.

[C · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a nice little utopic sci-fi YA novel that could make for a movie (or a sequel). Of course, you have "dreggies" sequestered into a certain section of town while genetically "Enhanced" individuals run around making nuisances of themselves while exploiting the naturals or dreggies. And, then, you've got the Leaderine who likes the taste of human breast milk (weird), probably because that is the only human contact she has. A quirky society to say the least. So who is going to save the Enhanced, make the dreggies realize their power, and recapture the essence of humanity? The "Throwback Intellectuals" and the artists! Only a British author could get away with this. Love it!!! And, like any good novel where the intellectuals save the day, nothing happens at the end because the society has to gather and TALK before any action can take place. So...there could be a sequel or we could just assume that the talk lead to eventual action. I really don't mean to sound cynical. I really liked this book. It's awesome!

[Corey · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I thought about a book to read for science, this book stood out because it proves that if humans made a "perfect" species of humans, then at some point it will break down, causing serious issues, which seemed interesting. The story is about a teenage boy named Maxo who is part of the Gem X germline, the newest and best line of perfect humans. He soon discovers a crack on his face, that symbolizes the beginning of the end for the Gem Xs. Maxo lives in the Trop, a community split into halves, one half being humans in a germline, (the richer half) and the other half filled with Natural humans. (the much poorer half)
As soon as Maxo's Dad, the chief scientist in the Trop, finds that there is a major problem among the Gem Xs that causes them to age at a very fast pace, he does all that he can to help, but it is of no use. Over 90% of all Gem Xs perished. Overall, this touching book will keep you guessing until the very end.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Singer sets out to probe beneath the surface assumptions that we all live by in a day to day fashion. The story is gains a lot of traction as it moves forward despite a great deal of it being the introspective musings that eventually challenge our assumptions on socio-economic class, beauty, values of families, and ultimately love. The direct style of writing never leaves you guessing at the what motivates the characters of Maxo, Stretch, Daz, Gala, or Poldrone 1640. The inventive flair of futuristic language reflects the popular trends and adds the gripping potential reality the story offers.

It is a great folluw up read to Westerfield's Uglies or Werlin's Double Helix, both of center on the same subject of genetic manipulation, with more tension and subtleties between the characters.

[Courtney · Rating 3 out of 5]

I know other people really didn't like this book, but I have to say that the premise and the characters grew on me. If I had to rate in the first half of the book, it would have been one or two stars, but it was a solid three stars by the end and I would absolutely pick up a sequel just to see if the development of the world could continue.

[Hannah Schafer · Rating 3 out of 5]

The world in this book that the author created was really cool, the GemXs were the perfect ones. What happens when he faces the unperfect? The dreggies...
Although there were some problems with this book. There were a lot words that they just said and you had to figure out, they never explained what they were.

[JudeH · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took me a while to read this book. I found the story line moved to slow. but the thought that we could start replicating ideal genes and wipe out major illnesses is interesting, but not the brain-washing part. The theme of 'Meshing' was weeeird!

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book starts with an excellent plot, then it gets uninterested. Most of the development leads the main character no where. I didn't see much character development, in general the book ended too soon and I was hoping for a second book to continue the unfinished story.

[Kelsey · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first 100 pages are hard to get through because of excessive detail and the rest of the story is very interesting. What I mean is, if you like futuristic books with inventive language, weird characters and the strangest endings with absolutely no resolution, then this is the book for you.

[Heather · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting sci-fi selection. It seemed a lot like Brave New World.

[Onyx · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow ! Surprised it didn't get better reviews! I thought it was a fun book!

[Denise · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good sci-fi. Maxo is one of the enhanced in a society built on perfection. When he falls for a "dreggie" nonenhanced girl his world turns upside-down.

[Jake Taylor]

I thought that the book was really boring, sorry, talk about falling asleep by the fire with a book, but i just couldnt keep it up i read about half of the book...... well there ya go...

[Jazmin]

not much went on in the storyline. it was dull and i was disappointed that theres a sequel to it. Im not planning on reading it.

[Stacey Lucky · Rating 1 out of 5]

The words ... They hurt...

[Simeon · Rating 2 out of 5]

A very interesting but boring book

[Sheri · Rating 1 out of 5]

Full of bad language, and they never wrap up the loose ends.