Science-fiction fans still suffer the reputation of being nerdy tech-heads with limited social skills, even though the genre is flourishing in the mainstream entertainment industry. TV shows such as The X-Files and Dark Angel have vast followings, as should the expected blockbusters Men in Black II, starring Will Smith, and Minority Report, with Tom Cruise.

Granted, those who don Trekkie uniforms and attend conventions might be a little off-putting, but most sci-fi enthusiasts are regular Joes and Janes.

Catherine Asaro, a Columbia science fiction writer, says her fans run the gamut. "I get e-mails from all kinds of people - men and women," she said, "with all kinds of backgrounds."

Asaro just won a Nebula Award from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America for her 2001 novel, The Quantum Rose, which she describes as a modern-day telling of "Beauty and the Beast" with a quantum-physics framework. To read an excerpt, go to www.sff.net/ people/asaro.

(Suzanne Feldman of Frederick, who uses the pen name Severna Park, won the best-short-story Nebula for "The Cure for Everything," which can be viewed online at www.scifi.com/scifiction/originals/originals_ archive/s_park.)

Asaro, a former ballerina with a master's degree in physics and a doctorate in chemical physics (both from Harvard) who is also married to a National Aeronautics and Space Administration rocket scientist, said her interest in science fiction goes way back.

"I've always loved it. When I was little, I started making up stories about a girl who was a few years older than I. She'd go around the universe saving it and bring along her cat," she said. "When I got older, enough so that I started noticing boys, the cat got replaced by a handsome young space captain."

Asaro taught physics at Kenyon College in Ohio in the late 1980s and left it to start a consulting business in 1990. But the call of storytelling was great, and today she is a full-time writer with seven published novels (and one on the way) and numerous short stories.

Asaro on writing and science-fiction:

Your books are classified as romance and science fiction. Are they more one than the other?

It's hard to say. I've always loved a good love story, and science fiction has that in it. In the past, science fiction has been boy meets girl, boy wins girl, boy loses girl, boy goes out and saves the galaxy, and boy gets girl. In my books, it's girl meets boy, girl wins boy ... [and so on]. I also think [romance] is used as a code word in science fiction to mean it has intimate scenes. I get a little bit risque.

Do you need to be a scientist to write science fiction?

I think it makes me a lot better science-fiction writer, but it's a hugely varied, diverse field. Some, like myself, are Ph.D.s, some are physicists, mathematicians, astronomers, astrophysicists, but we're probably in the minority. Others are people that very much like science and do a lot of research and do it well. And in some science fiction, the intent is to use the genre to ask interesting social or anthropological or political questions. The science become less important than the proposal of something different.

Science fiction has a traditional reputation as being a man's domain. Is that still true?

It's gotten much more diverse. There's a huge range of science fiction now from very traditional, male-oriented stories to very radical feminist discussions of utopia and everything in between. Even in the old days, science fiction had a tradition of putting women in nontraditional roles. Take Star Trek, even though to present-day viewers it seems kind of sexist, at the time it was really quite unusual. It had a woman fourth in command. So it's always had the seeds, they're just flowering now.

Do you think romance and science fiction novels are underrated?

Yes, definitely. Both of the genres are often judged by the worst examples instead of the best. Instead of looking at Jane Austen as a good romance novelist, people go find one with a lot of purple prose and overdone sex scenes. It's the same with science fiction, and it's funny to me - funny in an odd way - because the whole point of the genre is to ask challenging questions ... about what happens to humans when they're tried by unusual circumstances. It's really about people, not about the science and technology. If there's any genre about the meaning of humanity, it's science fiction. Yet somehow it has this rep as something much less than that.