Few of my lead characters are neurotypical. Johnson is a ship's captain and then commander of the Legion, some of her strength coming from her lifelong efforts to keep her depression in check. Seivers is a brilliant pilot and decurion whose ADHD has kept her driving herself to new challenges. All the comments I've had from readers about these characters have been very positive.
Then there is Harry. His autistic spectrum disorder gives him intense focus, great problem-solving abilities, and real integrity. Whilst most reader comments about him have also been positive, there have been some who see him as a useless person.
Perhaps the difference in acceptance of my characters' conditions is due to their gender. Certainly some of the negative comments were complaining that he didn't live up to male stereotypes. Or perhaps it is because ASD is still largely misunderstood. Either way, it was rather personal as Harry is very similar to myself.
As a physicist and computer scientist, I am exposed to a lot of companies who are well aware of the benefits that employing people with ASD can bring and are going out of their way to help bring them into the workplace. Sure, employers sometimes have to make adjustments, but they can reap the returns.
Next week is World Autism Awareness Week (WAAW). I will be running 7km cross-country to help raise awareness and funds for this cause. It would be great if you could sponsor me. All money donated goes straight to the National Autistic Society in the UK. One of their focuses this year is on helping employers to make it easier for people with ASD to contribute.
If you could see the time to putting up the poster below in your place of work, that would also be appreciated.

Sorry, I'll get down off my soapbox now and get on with listing some speculative fiction books you might like...

Humanity has fallen from its once majestic place amongst the stars. Desperate for resources to prop up an aging galactic dynasty, humans seize every planet they find, exterminating their alien inhabitants.
Across the empire, a group of dissidents come together through happenstance. As they learn more, however, they sense a strange force directing their lives. Can they discover the truth before the empire destroys them?
Dispatched to subdue an uprising, a government operative unearths an ancient relic. It somehow knows everything about him, even his darkest secrets. The strange device promises extraordinary power, but can he trust it?

Corporal David Cohen thought he’d left war behind.
He was wrong.
The Terran Coalition faces repeated and brutal attacks from the repressive League of Sol. To defend his home planet, David trades his dream of becoming a rabbi for a battlefront in the far reaches of space. When particle beams fly, his courage under fire brings quick promotion. But in the lulls between battles when he must confront his soul, David finds a different enemy: the ghosts of those killed under his command.
Yet in war, it’s kill or be killed—and the enemy shows no mercy.
David must square the tenets of his faith against his responsibility to crew and country. If he fails in his command, billions face enslavement by a ruthless regime. Now it’s an all-out fight for the galaxy’s freedom.

A failing starship. A killer on the loose. A woman without memory. Can she escape with her life - and answers?
Disoriented and alone, Sigma wakes from enforced sleep with questions that need to be answered. Who is she? Where is she? How did she end up in this place? With only a cryptic message from the ship’s AI to guide her, the determined survivor sets out on a race against time to uncover the desperate story of Starship Copernicus and its crew.

A daughter of Grand Contributors. The wife of a reformer. A woman caught between worlds.
They took everything from her. Now, they're going to see just how dangerous a woman with nothing left to lose can be.
Nikia Idan was raised in the glimmering spheres of society’s elite, but she traded it all for the love of a man who wants to change the Tribari empire. Her new reality is harsher than she ever imagined it could be.
When her husband’s push for reform is met with brutal violence, her worlds will collide with a force that will either break her – or the system that brought her to the point of breaking.

Born into service of the Regime, Commander Sela Tyron is about as subtle as a hammer. To hammers, any problem can look like a nail, but things aren't always that easy. When Sela is abandoned with her team on a planet full of insurrectionists, things get complicated. A daredevil rescue by her commanding officer reaps deadly consequences, forcing Sela to choose between the only life she’s ever known and the fate of the man she's duty-bound to protect.
Her whole life was a lie. And that's the good news. Shirking a life of privilege, Erelah Veradin dreamt of building spaceships and exploring the stars in the service of the Regime. When a monstrous truth about her true heritage is revealed, Erelah finds herself at the unwilling center of a scheming mastermind's bid for power.

Her secret frees trillions…Discovery risks them all.
Saree’s got a secret. A big one. She tunes space fold clocks—the only thing allowing safe travel between star systems. She’s the only human Clocker. The security of trillions relies on Saree’s freedom. And they can never know.
Despite her best efforts, rumors fly. With a bounty hunter on her heels, Saree jumps on Lightwave Fold Transport, the safest option. But she quickly regrets her snap decision. Lightwave’s crew are mercenaries she barely escaped as a child. Do they suspect who she’s become?
Can Saree keep her secret life safe? She’d rather die than blockade and blackmail systems for a crime lord or evil corporation. And there’s worse out there...

An industrial hell. The foulest and most decrepit slum on Parsephon. A nest of human misery, where hope is word long forgotten, and the dead are carted away every day. It is the worst pit in the Confederation’s great industrial machine known as the Iron Belt.
Among the millions born into misery, poverty, and despair under the dark and smoky haze that covers the planet, Andromeda Lafarge is unique. One lost soul among billions, she is tough, relentless, determined to get out, to escape, to blaze her own trail, and to make a name for herself across the stars.
Andi will break the chains binding her to a life of destitution, leave the Gut and Parsephon behind forever, and plunge into the dark and deadly worlds of the lost empire, prospecting for imperial artifacts, the bits and pieces of old tech that can make her rich. She will find new friends—and enemies—on the frontier, and she will blaze a trail from the filthy, polluted Iron Belt world of her birth to the dead and haunted imperial planets of the Badlands.
She will fight, endure hardships unimaginable, save comrades…and lose some, too. She will struggle to amass wealth, to do whatever is necessary to ensure she will never again be helpless, and she will bring back the technology of the ancients, scraps of mankind’s lost legacy, to do it.
She will create a name for herself among the rough and tumble adventurers who ply the rogue trade in ancient tech. For some, she will become one to emulate, to follow. To others, her name will become the foulest of curses. She will make her way, blade and pistol in hand, from one dead and ancient world to another.
She will become the scourge of the Badlands.

You don't become the best of the best by staying alive. In the Animus, you are closer to perfection with each death you suffer.
Kaiden Jericho would rather skip the death part, thank-you-very-much.
Join Kaiden as he learns about Nexus, the Animus, and the opportunities that one fight brought him. Never has helping someone benefitted him so much.
The future is looking bright, except for the pain.

My name is Alphonse Malloy, and I see everything.
From a simple glance, I know your hobbies, what you ate for breakfast, how well you slept, and whether or not your wife is secretly seeing the high school biology teacher when you're not around.
I can't explain how or why I get these feelings...only that I know they're true
All the little secrets you're too afraid to tell.
Sometimes, that means helping people. Other times, it means staring down the barrel of a loaded gun.
I wish I could tell you I was using this ability for good.
I wish I could tell you a lot of things.

Security Lieutenant Dave is looking forward to some simple cases and patching things up with his wife. His handling of a terrorist attack has gained him acclaim and some new friends in high places, but he is still closely involved with Arancha Station's mob boss.
When the space station manager is killed in a new and worrying way, Dave realises that he's got possibly the biggest case of his career. Unfortunately, as soon as his new boss arrives with reinforcements, he is relegated to monitoring data and assigned a rookie partner to babysit.
Dave needs to find something that will crack the case open before the killer can strike again.

While battles rage across the Transcend and the Inner Stars, Tangel's focus shifts to Orion space.

Kira Forrest is a survivor. She’s risen above the pain of her beginnings to become a war hero only to leave it all behind in the pursuit of a simple life. Now a salvager, she makes a living sifting through the wreckage of dead alien ships from a war that nearly brought humanity to its knees.
After her ship takes damage, she’s forced to re-route to a space station where her past and present collide with dangerous consequences.
Kira’s existence holds the key to a faltering peace treaty with the Tuann—a technologically advanced alien race who dislikes and distrusts all humans. Winning her freedom should be easy, but a powerful and relentless Tuann warrior stands in her way. Deceiving him seems impossible, especially when he strays dangerously close to secrets she struggles to hide.

Marooned on a desolate planet, joining forces with the enemy is their only hope.
Maya Pandita spent years preparing for an expedition to the Deadlands. But her dreams of unearthing ancient artifacts are shattered when her shuttle is buried by a violent sandstorm, and her team is abducted by the scaled inhabitants of the planet. Maya and her companions must try to outwit their blue captor and call for help before they die in the toxic atmosphere.
Sa Vittaran has a problem in his claws. Along with treasures from the ruins, he has retrieved three smooth-skinned foreigners. He cannot leave them to die in the desert. Yet the puny creatures have little value as workers, except perhaps for the impudent woman who claims to be their leader. Her knowledge of the ancient script will be an asset if she can survive the long trek to his house.
An attack by marauders forces Maya and the Blue leader into a wary alliance. They must work together to thwart the bandits and reunite their company. Can Maya convince Sa Vittaran to help her team? If she fails, they are doomed to a short unpleasant life on the desolate, war-torn planet.

There are problems. And then there are BIG problems.
Museums. Jewelry stores. Secure homes of the ultra elite. Shiro Oahu has broken into all of them. When he lands a job that requires him to go into a place that no thief would ever want to go—not in a million years—he quickly turns it down.
Because he doesn't have a death wish.
But then the reasons to take it begin to stack up. He’s out of money. Holly Drake is gone and so the gigs aren’t exactly beating down his door. And the most compelling reason? The beautiful and enigmatic Aimee Voss asks him to.
It’s a *knuckle-bite* moment.
There’s no way he can say no. With two experienced thieves like them, the job should be easy.
The BIG problem is, the object they’re after is square in the center of Gabe Bach’s police station. One false move and they’d have a hundred witnesses desperate to break their necks, and they’re not exactly merciful on criminals.

They tell me the country looked different back then.
They talk of open borders and flowing rivers.
They say the world was green.
But drought swept across the globe and the United States of the past disappeared under a burning sky.
Enora Byrnes lives in the aftermath, a barren world where water has become the global currency. In a life dominated by duty to family and community, Enora is offered a role within an entity that controls everything from water credits to borders. But it becomes clear that not all is as it seems. From the wasted confines of her small town to the bowels of a hidden city, Enora will uncover buried secrets that hide an unthinkable reality.
As truth reveals the brutal face of what she has become, she must ask herself: how far will she go to retain her humanity?