Some Desperate Glory
This 2024 Hugo Award novel is less ambitious than The Incandescent, but it works. Val Kyr opens the book on the verge of graduating from an asteroid-base military training academy, the last refuge of humanity after the destruction of earth. She is the ultimate soldier, an expert platoon leader honed by years of combat simulations. This sets up a critique of and response to Ender’s Game, which is worth doing. But there was one thing they had forgotten, and we end up exploring alternate time lines.
What works here is that this is a novel about abused children. Everyone is abused; Tesh’s world building ensures that everyone lives either with the guilt of genocide or the threat of conquest. Even within that small space, Tesh finds plenty of room for nuance.