Next!

Last Friday's Wall Street Journal contained a feature story on "the next Harry Potter."  Publishers are apparently desperate for the next fantasy phenomenon, throwing huge advances at new novelists with books that deal with magic and the supernatural.  Possible "next Harry Potters" listed in the article include dystopias, time-travel books, sixteenth-century witches, vampires and demons, an orphan struck by lightning, and a retelling of Cinderella featuring cyborgs.  The prime candidate to be "the next Harry Potter" is a book about dueling magicians in love in a magical circus whose supporting cast includes acrobatic kittens (really!).

There's a tiny slice of perspective in which this quest makes some sort of sense: The Harry Potter series created a new generation that has read for pleasure, and publishers want to sell them more books when they get done with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, before they slip back into TV and movies and (most likely) Harry Potter social media fansites and get out of the habit of buying books.  Most of these new (hopeful) properties -- many of which have already been optioned for films before even being published -- are for young adults, those who have grown up on Harry but are theoretically ready for less PG subject matter.

For the most part, however, these publishers are grasping at straws.  Do they not remember the absolute phenomenon that was Harry Potter -- a phenomenon precisely because there had been nothing like it before, at least since the dawn of Hollywood?  What was the previous Harry Potter?  Charles Dickens?  Are they willing to wait another 125 years at that rate?

I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that there will be no "next Harry Potter."  Whatever comes next will be  sui generis, its own creature.  It's like the quest for "the next Michael Jordan" that's been going on since the original retired.  From Kobe to LeBron, the question has always been "Is he the next Jordan?"  You know what?  No one's the next Jordan.  There is no "next Jordan."  Who was the previous Michael Jordan?  Wilt Chamberlain?  Then how come no one ever called Michael Jordan "the next Wilt?"