Harry Potter was a smash hit about a boy discovering he’s a wizard and going to school in a magical world full of wonder and adventure. Twilight didn’t hit quite that high a note, but the story of a teenage girl who learns her classmate is a vampire and falls in love with him did quite well. The Hunger Games popularized the dystopian genre with a bow wielding teenager stepping up to survive death games, have angsty romances, and fight the power.
As far as I can tell, nothing has quite hit that same kind of high since and it may be awhile until the next truly big wave. But if it were up to you, what would the next big thing be about?
Something like The Dispossessed that shows an actual society that rather than just having entire civilisations be dependent on a single ruler. Even in le Guin’s society supposedly run according to a single person’s ideas, you still see that it only exists because of everyone’s willingness to uphold those ideas, and that that’s what maintains the status quo long after that person is gone.
I could never enjoy the “and then the good guys won and everything was perfect cause now the right people are running the dictatorship” or “and then everything was fixed cause the bad guy was killed/defeated” ending, even as a kid, cause they never actually dealt with the real issues, it was always just assigning all the blame of the world’s troubles on a singular person or small group and ignoring how much that kind of power depends on the common person’s cooperation with it.
Tbh just re-release The Dispossessed as a YA novel and call it a day.